warren d’azevedo: by dead reckoning

Warren d’Azevedo: By Dead Reckoning

Interviewee: Warren d’Azevedo

Interviewed: 1997-1998, 2005

Published: 2005

Interviewer: Penny Rucks

UNOHP Catalog #203

Description

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Basin Anthropological Conference in Reno, Brian Wallace,

Chairman of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, proclaimed October 15, 2005 officially “Warren d’Azevedo

Day” in recognition of this anthropologist’s steadfast and compassionate commitment to the Washoe people over

some fifty years, as well as his extraordinary contributions to the profession of anthropology. Professor emeritus

and founder of the Anthropology Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, Warren d’Azevedo’s life history

is presented here through a series of interviews with Penny Rucks, a friend and former student. Detailed in his oral

history is his involvement with family, longshoremen on the Oakland waterfront, fellow seamen onboard merchant

ships in the Atlantic and Pacific, students and mentors at University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern

University, colleagues at University of Nevada, Reno, and the many Washoe and Gola people whom he got to know

over the years. Readers who have been privileged to know this man will instantly recognize his “voice,” a voice

filled with the wonder of learning, a voice of eloquence, a poet and a writer, a brilliant lecturer and synthesizer.

This oral history is full of value and meaning for the anthropological community, the university, and d’Azevedo’s

many friends and colleagues. He left his papers on Great Basin research to the Washoe people and to all students

with an interest in Washoe studies. The Warren d’Azevedo Washoe Research Archives in the Special Collections

Department of the library of the University of Nevada, Reno, holds many materials that provide additional insight

into his many contributions to the field.

WARREN D’AZEVEDO

WARREN D’AZEVEDO

BY DEAD RECKONING

From oral history interviewsconducted by Penny Rucks

Edited by Penny Rucksand Mary A. Larson

University of NevadaOral History Program

Copyright 2005

University of Nevada Oral History Program

Mail Stop 0324

Reno, Nevada 89557

[email protected]

http://www.unr.edu/oralhistory

All rights reserved. Published 2005.

Printed in the United States of America

All photographs in this volume are courtesy of Warren d’Azevedo.

Publication Staff:

Director: R. T. King

Assistant Director: Mary A. Larson

Production Manager: Kathleen M. Coles

Production Assistants: Beth Opperman, Linda Sommer,

Allison Tracy, Elisabeth Williams, Kathryn Wright-Ross

University of Nevada Oral History Program Use Policy

All UNOHP interviews are copyrighted materials. They may be downloaded and/or

printed for personal reference and educational use, but not republished or sold. Under

“fair use” standards, excerpts of up to 1000 words may be quoted for publication without

UNOHP permission as long as the use is non-commercial and materials are properly

cited. The citation should include the title of the work, the name of the person or

people interviewed, the date of publication or production, and the fact that the work

was published or produced by the University of Nevada Oral History Program (and

collaborating institutions, when applicable). Requests for permission to quote for other

publication, or to use any photos found within the transcripts, should be addressed

to the UNOHP, Mail Stop 0324, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV 89557-0324.

Original recordings of most UNOHP interviews are available for research purposes

upon request.

Dee, it’s hard enough to be a Swede among Scowegians, like on this ship. But you’re a damnedsquarehead Portugoose, some kind of halfbreed wop—like putting ice in dago red, like Africaand Scandihoovia squeezed together on a map. You’ve got two ports of departure and at leasttwo possible destinations. How are you going to find your way home? You better read up goodon dead reckoning.

-Bob Nelson (Warren’s good friend and shipmate, ayoung Swede from Minnesota), at sea, 1944

Positions by dead reckoning differ from those determined by bearings of terrestrial objects or byobservations of celestial bodies, in being less exact, as the correctness of dead reckoning dependsupon the accuracy of the estimate of the run, and this is always liable to be at fault to a greateror less extent. The course made good by a ship may differ from that which is believed beingmade good, by reason of imperfect steering, improper allowance for compass error, the leeway(caused by the wind), and also the effects of unknown currents . . . . Notwithstanding itsrecognized defects as compared with the more exact methods, the dead reckoning is an invaluableaid to the navigator . . . . Before losing sight of land, and preferably while objects remain ingood view, it is the duty of the navigator to take a departure; this consists of fixing the positionof the ship by the best means available, and using this position as the origin for dead reckoning.

-Nathaniel Bowditch, American Practical Navigator

CONTENTS

Preface xiIntroduction xiii

PART ONE

1 Family History 3 2 Early Childhood 19 3 Family Dynamics 29 4 Moving Around 39 5 High School 45 6 Emerging Spirituality 55 7 Early Explorations 63 8 Life in Modesto 71 9 Yosemite and Tahoe 7710 In an Ideal World . . . . 8311 Junior College 8912 Cal, Part I 9713 Amalia and Opera 10714 Social Life at Berkeley 11115 The Mexico Trip 12116 Fresno State 13317 Political Rumblings 143

viii CONTENTS

PART TWO

18 Remember Pearl Harbor 15319 The Merchant Marine 15920 On the Bret Harte 16521 Politics on the High Seas 17722 King Neptune and the Albatross 18723 Heading to Australia 19124 Latin America 20125 Subs and Other Terrors 20726 After the Cadet Corps 21527 Back to Sea 22528 To Hawaii on the Mahi Mahi 23729 On Shore Again 24930 The Seaman’s Mindset 25731 A Period of Yeasting 26332 The John B. Floyd 26933 Polynesia at Last 28134 Shipboard Hierarchy 28935 Bob, Trot, and Carlson 29936 The Alaska Run 30937 Marriage 32138 Becoming Ship’s Delegate 32539 Men at Sea 33740 Reading, Writing, and Thinking 34741 Back to Alaska 35542 Anya 36543 A Literary Life 37544 A Family Man 38145 The SS Castle Pinkney 38946 A Curaçao Jail 39947 Harry Lundeberg and the SUP 40748 Unionism and Marxism 41149 On the Day Star 42150 The End of the War 42951 Yokohama 43752 Leaving Japan 44753 Class Warfare 45354 Fishing for Answers 463

ixCONTENTS

55 Trouble with the SUP 47356 Joining the NMU 48557 The Communist Party 49758 The Published Author 50759 Moves Against Labor 51160 Left-Wing Literature 51761 Organizing 52362 Optimism 53563 Strike 54364 Leaflets and Ideology 55365 Convention Delegate 56166 Educating Union Members 57767 After the Convention 58568 The Third Party 59169 Flying Squads 59770 Working for Wallace 61171 Ideologies 61772 Religion and Class Struggle 62573 The American Communist Party 63374 One Last Trip 641

PART THREE

75 Return to Reality 65776 Cakes, Notions, and Wine 66577 Back to Anthropology 67178 Picket Lines 67979 A Growing Fire Storm 68780 Making the Grade 70181 Introspection 70982 George 71783 Heading Up Toward the Washoe 72784 Talking 73785 Into the Mystic 74986 Doing Ethnography 76587 Of Ships and Slaves 77788 Family Losses 78389 Emerging Interests 80390 Taking Stock 817

x CONTENTS

91 Leaving Home Port 839 92 The Herskovitsian Milieu 853 93 Preparing for the Field 865 94 Christmas Break and Spring 879 95 Back to the Washoe 889 96 Washoe Factions 913 97 The Woodfords Sessions 925 98 The Washoe Land Claims Case 935 99 The Peyotist Movement 953100 The Conference 963101 Getting Grants and Passports 975102 A Great Adventure 995103 Monrovia 1011104 To the Gola 1029105 Beginning to Teach 1055106 Being Courted 1067107 Coming to Nevada 1085108 Assembling a Department 1095109 NSF Field Schools 1113110 Great Basin Research 1131111 Campus Activism 1151112 Continuing Work With the Washoe 1163113 Unrest 1169114 Anya and Erik 1179115 Governor’s Day and the BSU 1185116 Politics and Projects 1191Index 1195

PREFACE

OUNDED IN 1964, the University ofNevada Oral History Program(UNOHP) records and collects

and topical organization not always found inthe raw transcript. Dr. d’Azevedo reviewedthe work and affirms that it is an accurateinterpretation. Readers who desire access tothe unaltered oral history are invited to visitthe offices of the UNOHP, where the tapesof the interviews may be heard byappointment.

To add context to written represen-tations of the spoken word, the UNOHP usescertain editorial conventions. Laughter isrepresented with [laughter] at the end of asentence in which it occurs; and ellipses areused, not to indicate that material has beendeleted, but to indicate that a statement hasbeen interrupted or is incomplete . . . or thereis a pause for dramatic effect.

As with all of our oral histories, while wecan vouch for the authenticity of Warrend’Azevedo: By Dead Reckoning, we advise thereader to keep in mind that it is a personalaccount of a remembered past, and we do notclaim that it is entirely free of error.Intelligent readers will approach it with the

Finterviews that address significant topics inNevada’s remembered past. The program’schroniclers are primary sources: people whoparticipated in or directly witnessed theevents and phenomena that are the subjectsof the interviews. Following precedentestablished by Allan Nevins at ColumbiaUniversity in 1948, and perpetuated since byacademic programs such as ours, theserecorded interviews and their transcripts arecalled oral histories.

This research volume is crafted from theverbatim transcript of interviews conductedby Penny Rucks with Warren d’Azevedo. Therecording sessions took place in thed’Azevedos’ Reno home between September1997 and June 1998. Remaining faithful tothe transcript’s content, and adhering asclosely as possible to Warren d’Azevedo’sspoken words, the manuscript was edited forclarity. The editors also gave it chronological

xii PREFACE

same anticipation of discovery, tempered withcaution, that they would bring to governmentreports, diaries, newspaper stories, and otherinterpretations of historical information.

UNOHPNovember 2005

INTRODUCTION

N THE OCCASION of the fiftiethanniversary of the Great BasinAnthropological Conference, in

profession of anthropology, as practicedlocally as well as nationally.

Both tributes were thoroughly deserved,as a reading of Warren’s d’Azevedo’s lifehistory—presented here through a series ofinterviews by Penny Rucks, a friend andformer student—will well attest. The datathat make up his life story are extraordinarilyrich, full of his passion for living and forinvolvement in his own life and those ofothers, be they immediate family and otherrelatives, longshoremen on the waterfront inOakland, fellow seamen onboard merchantships in the Atlantic and Pacific, fellowstudents and mentors at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley and NorthwesternUniversity, members of the Black StudentsUnion and countless other students andcolleagues at the University of Nevada, Reno,or the many Washoe and Gola people whomhe got to know over the course of many years.Warren’s gift is to make all peopleimmediately feel the interest and respecthe has for them, from their firstacquaintance to renewed contacts many

OReno, and at the conclusion of a session titled,“In Honor and Respect: Papers in Great BasinEthnology for Warren d’Azevedo,” BrianWallace, Chairman of the Washoe Tribe ofNevada and California, read a large scrollinscribed with a lengthy tribal resolutionproclaiming that day, October 15, 2005,officially “Warren d’Azevedo Day.” This wasin recognition of Warren’s manycontributions to the tribe in its land struggles,its attempts to protect sacred sites, its effortsto document its history and culture, and, mostof all, in recognition of his steadfast andcompassionate commitment to the Washoepeople over some fifty years.

Chairman Wallace then wrapped Warrenin the Washoe Tribe’s flag, which he alsopresented to him as a gift. The many peoplein attendance rose in a standing ovation tothank the honoree for his equallycompassionate and steadfast commitment tohis many friends, colleagues, and the

xiv INTRODUCTION

years later. He is, above all, a humanist in all ofits facets.

Warren once characterized the initialprocess of becoming an anthropologist as oneof being “reforg[ed] . . . into a self-correctinginstrument of observation—a reflectivestranger”.1 Through these interviews we geta very real sense of this process in his life,through the many experiences that taughthim to be more than an observer and arecorder of human behavior, but rather anactive and caring participant in real peoples’lives. He also remarked that doinganthropology involved one in an almostcontinual, and continuing, reciprocity,wherein commitment and engagement withone’s fellow human beings should be not onlythe norm but a virtual requirement.2 Withoutengagement and a willingness to do morethan observe and record, there is no truelearning from and with others, and there isno true benefit to the human situation. Thisis the measure that moved ChairmanWallace, as well as the others assembled thatday, to recognize Warren’s contributions andto honor him in this way.

Those who have been privileged to knowthis man in any of the capacities covered herewill instantly recognize his “voice” as theyread through this volume. It is a voice filledwith the wonder of learning and living andbeing, loving and being loved, questioningthe world and getting answers, and thenasking yet more and deeper ones. It is a voiceof eloquence, a poet and a writer, a brilliantlecturer and synthesizer, a prober of thingswell beyond the obvious. His mind works likeno other that I know, always following leadsand directions that others may not see.

As a student in his introductoryanthropology class in the 1960s at theUniversity of Utah, I found his lectures filled

with the passion and compassion of a persondeeply moved by his recent field experiencesin West Africa. In additional classes in otheryears, I came to realize that his passion wasthe measure of his involvement with allpeople. And as a colleague of his at theUniversity of Nevada, Reno, in thedepartment he founded, I never stoppedbeing his student and learning from him whatwas required to be an anthropologist andwhat it meant to be fully engaged in theenterprise. That association continues to thepresent, with a feeling that both Don Fowlerand I have of the deepest respect andadmiration for a life that is both full andrewarding and continues to inspire.

Warren’s life story would not be completewithout his wife Kathy and son Erik anddaughter Anya. Kathy is a participant in anumber of the interviews contained here (herresponses being designated by a “Kd:”), and,as readers will see, she shares with Warrenthe same passion and commitment to people.Her willingness to share his life, includinghis fieldwork in places often remote and morethan difficult when you are caring for smallchildren, is a measure of her character as well.She was also a full participant in hisanthropology, a person with instant empathyand understanding of others. With adistinguished career in her own right, she hasbeen a major contributor to their jointenterprise.

Penny Rucks and the University ofNevada Oral History Program have produceda document full of meaning for many, andone that will serve the anthropologicalcommunity, the university, and Warren’smany friends and colleagues well. Incharacteristic fashion, Warren left his paperson his Great Basin research to the Washoepeople and to the many students and

xvINTRODUCTION

colleagues with an interest in Washoe studiesto follow. The Warren d’Azevedo WashoeResearch Archives in the Special CollectionsDepartment of the library of the Universityof Nevada, Reno, holds many materials thatprovide additional insight into his manycontributions to the field.

CATHERINE S. FOWLER

University of Nevada, Reno

Notes

1. Warren d’Azevedo, “Afterword,” in OthersKnowing Others: Perspectives on EthnographicCareers, eds. Don D Fowler and Donald L.Hardesty (Washington, D.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1994), p. 223.

2. Ibid., p. 224.

PART ONE

1FAMILY HISTORY

ENNY RUCKS: The plan is to providea rough chronology of your life so thatwe can begin to identify some themes that

I have come to think of two mythic tra-ditions as part of my identity. One is theSwedish strain on my mother’s side, especiallymy grandmother who was a peasant. And, asI once wrote, I would like to remember herin a memoir to my children as my Swedishpeasant grandmother who spoke in tongues.And the other tradition comes down throughJoaquim Leal d’Azevedo, my paternal great-grandfather who was an Azorean farmer andwhaler from the island of Pico. He came tothe United States, to Boston, in the early1850s and then went around the Horn andjumped ship in San Francisco during theCalifornia Gold Rush. He ended up miningand farming in Sacramento and opening awinery with his cousin.

The reason I think of these as mytholo-gies is that one creates one’s own life in termsof certain key figures that stand out as a kindof family lore. Certainly my maternal grand-mother, Hanna, was part of a lore, and mypaternal great-grandfather, Joaquim Leal, wasvery much a part of the lore on that side ofthe family. I was four years old when he died,

Pwe can explore later. First I’d like to ask youabout your childhood, starting with when andwhere you were born and your immediate family.

WARREN D’AZEVEDO: I was born inOakland, California, on August 19, 1920. It’shard for me even to imagine that it’s beenthat long ago, but it has. I was born in a hos-pital near Lake Merritt in Oakland called theJackson Lake Hospital. It was run by a Dr.Enos, a Portuguese doctor rather well knownat that point in local history. My parents bothhad grown up in Oakland. My mother hadgrown up on Seventh Street in something ofa working-class neighborhood near what’snow the freeway. The house has been torndown, but it was rather important to the fam-ily for many years. My father grew up onEighth Street just a few blocks away in asomewhat upper middle-class neighborhood.His father was a physician and surgeon. Infact, he was one of the first Portuguese doc-tors in Oakland.

4 WARREN D’AZEVEDO

On my mother’s side, my maternal grand-mother, whom we always called “Mama,” andher husband, whom we used to call “Papa,”because our parents called them that, and wecalled our parents by their first names. Onthe Portuguese side, just as on the Swedishside, there was this great drive to becomeAmerican. All that early group spoke Portu-guese, but my father’s generation, though theyspoke fluent Portuguese, did not do so to theirchildren. I’ve always resented and regrettedthat. Many years later, when Melville J.Herskovits brought me to Northwestern ona fellowship, he was deeply disappointed. Be-cause of my name he had planned to sendme to a Portuguese-speaking area.

On my mother’s side, the same sort ofthing took place. The size of the extendedfamily on my father’s side was such that Por-tuguese continued to be a tradition amongthem: because they were living in a largePortuguese community, both in Hayward andin Sacramento. My maternal grandparents,however, came over as depressed immigrants.In the early 1890s Simon Erik IsaacksonFinne came over, and then sent for his futurewife, Hanna, whom I called Mama, HannaFogde. They married and were very poorfarmers when they first came over. Later, inOakland they lived in an immigrant neigh-borhood with Chinese and Jews and Polesand Irish. The Irish at that time were the low-est rung of the ladder but had most of thejobs. So my grandfather Simon changed hisname from Finne to Finley in order to getjobs in the lumber camps. These are little sto-ries that I used to hear when I was young anddeveloped this part of the myth.

My grandmother was a kind of matriarchin a strange way. She had six children in thefirst eight years she was in this country, andonly one died. Her children all were able togo to school. They found a way. My grand-

but he had already become a kind of mytho-logical figure in that family.

I remember my paternal grandmotherreferring to him as a pirate. “He was just apirate,” she said, “until he came toCalifornia.” He lived in Sacramento, wherea great many of the Portuguese extended fam-ily lived. Hayward and Sacramento were thetwo areas where they settled. His digs werein Sacramento—he and his cousin, Mañuel,who had jumped ship with him. He even triedgold digging and farming but ended up buy-ing a site for a winery, the Eagle Winery inSacramento. So he was something of a con-troversial figure in this large Catholicextended family, and he was obviously a veryrough and tough kind of a guy.

I have photographs of him and his beau-tiful Azorean wife, Rosalia, when he wentback and brought her to California. And healso brought some relatives who became theextended family that began to grow. They saidhe spoke a very crude and rough kind of Por-tuguese lingo, and some people, like myfather’s mother, were a little askance. Sheconsidered herself a fine lady, and he was,from her point of view, just a pirate, but whenI was a little kid, I remember his story stuckwith me.

He was a wonderful, heroic figure to me,the guy who left the Azores during a periodof deep depression (I think there had been avolcanic eruption as well) and went to seaand whaled and finally came to this countryto seek his fortune. He developed a large ex-tended family, and as far as I’m concerned,there was an unforgettable aura of mysteryand adventure. I’m sure that in my own mindI’ve elaborated that considerably, at leastwhen I was young. I saw him taking part inall sorts of marvelous feats at sea, and mygrandmother fed this view. Yet none of thisexactly happened, I’m sure.

5FAMILY HISTORY

father, somehow or other, with all his oddjobs managed to send their children to school,and keep them scrubbed. All these thingswere family heroic stories about what theywere able to do despite how poor they wereand how uneducated she was. These are thethings that you are told when you’re veryyoung.

My grandmother was a very hard worker,and obviously enormously determined tobring up her children well and strong, butshe never learned to speak English properly.She forgot Swedish, so by the time I got toknow her, she was speaking a kind of patois,which the whole family used with her, butno Swedes would understand. She could writea little Swedish, and sometimes wrote to herrelatives. My grandfather, Simon, however,had gone to school in Stockholm and was, I

guess, fairly well educated for a young Swedeat that time.

Vassa was a Swedish colony in Finlandwhere my grandmother and her family alsolived. My grandfather’s people had a largefarm. They seemed to be well-to-do peasantfarmers. My grandfather had gone there as aconscript in the Czar’s army when theRussians controlled that area. He deeply re-sented and hated it. (He was a fisherman fora while when he was a little younger.) But inthat experience he met Hanna’s father andsaw her older sister and thought she was avery fine looking woman: strong and able.That was the one he wanted. Then he leftFinland and came to this country as an immi-grant, came all the way out to Californiaacross country. Had a little bit of money withhim—he was waiting for his inheritance,

“My grandmother was a kind of matriarch in a strange way.” The Finley family c. 1912. Left to right,standing: Helen (Warren’s mother), Genevieve, Arthur, Edith, and Raymond. Left to right, seated: SimonErik Isaackson Finne Finley and Hanna Isaksdotter Fogde Finley (Warren’s grandparents).


which he never got, but he had a little bit ofmoney—and he bought a piece of land inMorgan Hill, California. Then, of course, hehad to make a living, so he changed his nameto Finley and went up to the lumber campsamong the Irish workers.

All the time, he was writing to the fatherof my grandmother, saying that as soon as hehad a little money he was going to send forthis other daughter, who in the meantime hadgotten married. And so he wrote, “Whatabout your other daughter?”

And the father, whom he hardly knew,answered, “Well, she’s available.” She wasonly, I think, sixteen, seventeen. And thispoor young woman came. She had very littleeducation. In fact, some people thought shewas retarded. That was one of the stories inthe family when they got mad at her: Mamawas dumb. But she wasn’t dumb at all, she

must have had culture shock. She came tothis country through Ellis Island with her fewlittle trunks. She had left all of her belong-ings at home, because my grandfather toldher people didn’t use that kind of thing inthis country—all of her carefully crocheteddresses and table cloths. And she left all this,her hope chest . . . she left all that in Finlandand just had her few belongings with her.Came to Ellis Island. Didn’t know anybody,anything. Some man helped her. Now, wealways joked about this man who helped herfind the train across country, her helper, with-out whom she probably wouldn’t have gottenall the way.

In those days, can you imagine? Eighteennineties. All the way across country on someof the first railroads to Morgan Hill,California. My grandfather didn’t meet her.She didn’t know what to do. She was stand-

The Finley family farm in Morgan Hill, c. 1905.

7FAMILY HISTORY

ing by the train station. My grandfather, notknowing what day she was coming, was stillworking in a lumber camp up north. So someneighbor came and said, “Are you Hanna?”

“Yes.”Took her to the little farmhouse that my

grandfather had and set her up there. And ina few days he returned. They married andsubsequently had six children. She ran thefarm. She did all of the slaughtering, thebutchering of the calf or two that they hadand the chickens, because my grandfatherwould faint if he did it. He was a very sensi-tive man. [laughter] She did all of the heavywork and brought up the children.

These stories were to me among thethings I can recall of my childhood—thisfamily lore on both sides that I think meantmore to me than the people who told themto me. We moved so much and had so littlecontinuous connection with neighborhoodsor people that I wanted very much to pickup the threads of who I was and where I camefrom, and I would listen to these stories andput them together in the most fantastic waysin my own mind.

There’s one which my brother Don, whois very much a positivist and a good one butalso very opinionated in his thinking [laugh-ter], denies that he ever heard anythingabout. Of course, he considers himself the guywith the great memory, and if he doesn’t re-member it, it didn’t happen. But I know thatI heard this from the family: that somewherearound the turn of the century, when mygrandparents, Mama and Papa . . . .

By the way, we called them Mama andPapa because that generation, their six chil-dren, were calling them Mama and Papa. Sowe kids also called them Mama and Papa.And because my parents were of the “mod-ern age” in the 1920s (they thought they wereavant-garde in some ways and Americans),

they had us call them by their first names,Helen and Joe. So they were Helen and Joe,and my grandparents were Mama and Papaall through our youth.)

So, Mama and Papa at the turn of thecentury, the story goes . . . . (I think my AuntEdith told me this. Aunt Edith was the re-markable, wonderful, really mad woman thatI loved dearly who was almost a surrogatemother to me.) So at the turn of the century,somewhere in there, there was an evangelistwho came through Morgan Hill. (By the way,Mama and Papa came over as Lutheran Pen-tecost.) This evangelist just swept throughMorgan Hill, and hundreds of people wereswayed by his prophecy of the millennium ata certain date: the world was coming to anend, the second coming of Christ, that wholething, that whole schmo. Mama and Papagathered their children together and went tothe top of Morgan Hill, left all their furnish-ings and their farm with neighbors and tooktheir children and a few possessions and stoodon the top of Morgan Hill with hundreds ofothers waiting for the second coming. AuntEdith told me, “Well, we believed our par-ents. We believed Mama and Papa.”

But it didn’t happen, and then thepreacher said he just got the date wrong. “It’sgoing to come soon.” So they all traipsed backto the farm and went about their business.

To me that’s a wonderful story, because itsets the scene for my relationship with mygrandmother, Mama. I really had a tremen-dously warm, affectionate feeling toward her.Though I couldn’t communicate very wellwith her, there was something about her thatI found extremely maternal. I knew her whenshe was an older woman, really, when I was alittle kid. I suppose she was in her forties orfifties—a very large woman; very placid; veryresponsive. She could giggle a lot, laughed alot if you made jokes. You had to make very


strange and crude jokes for her to laugh. Shecouldn’t understand English very well, andshe spoke in this kind of patois that we woulduse to some extent. She would call me“Poika” or “Varren,” and so would my grand-father in this sort of mixed Swedish andEnglish. I remember being extremely takenwith her. She was always around. As I grewup, five, six, seven years old, they left andsold that house on Seventh Street in Oak-land and began living with their children.My grandfather went on doing day labor andodd jobs, and my grandmother lived with thefamily.

Their daughters gave them such an aw-ful time, constantly criticizing Mama. Shedidn’t speak properly; she didn’t dress prop-erly. They’d sometimes dress her up until shewould look like some kind of decrepit Queenof England and have her picture taken justso they could show their friends this was theirmother. I guess they were ashamed of her, andyet they had a tremendous sense of loyaltyand devotion to her for all that she had been.But they were trying to be upgrade Ameri-cans.

All of them had gotten a little education,and they all married in a way that theythought was well. Two married Englishmen,and that was considered great. Here are theseSwedes from Seventh Street, from peasantstock, who had managed to marry into En-glish families. You know, the whole idea ofthe British upper classes . . . but these guysweren’t. They were just ordinary guys, buttheir parents were English and had Englishchina around. I mean, the saddest kind ofthings. And being an American—being withit, going to school—my mother going toOakland Technical High School, where shemet my father. And so they married “well,”you see.

Would that include your father, too?

My father married “down.” That was avery sticky wicket we’ll get to. My own par-ents had quite a different experience. Butnevertheless, the feeling was they were mov-ing forward. And here they had these twopeasants who were . . . .

We had a house in Alameda while myfather was doing his internship in San Fran-cisco, a very small house. We had mygrandparents there sometimes, and I used tohave to sleep with them. We had not enoughrooms or beds, so sometimes my brother andI would sleep with Grandmother and Grand-father in the same bed when we were littlekids, and they’d get up in the middle of thenight to go into the closet and pray at thetop of their voice. They would pray, call uponthe Lord for forgiveness, and mainly this wastheir way of communicating to their familieswhat was wrong with them: “Oh, Lord, pleasekeep Jenny safe. Don’t let her do this or that.”And, “Oh, don’t let Helen (my mother) saysuch mean things to us. They don’t respecttheir parents.” On and on at the top of theirvoices. Sometimes the neighbors would com-plain, and of course this horrified theirchildren, who were trying to be nice neigh-bors and good upstanding American people.

But I admired them enormously. Ithought there was something kind of won-derful about my grandparents, mainly becausethey were helping me to work out some senseof a rebellion that I had: “These people canget away with it. They can annoy everybody!”[laughter] And all under the guise of godli-ness, you see. So, they were a wonderful pair.

My grandfather would get me up in themorning and send me to school when theywere living there, and he’d put some kind ofhorrible Swedish soured-milk clabber (which

9FAMILY HISTORY

breast on his beating heart. And then shetook it out, and Jesus had let her feel his heart.

And I said “Mama, you were there on thecouch sleeping.”

She looked at me. She said, “Varren, thedevil make you say that.” [laughter]

I never forgot that wonderful moment inwhich I was stating what I saw to be reality.In fact, when I’m doing fieldwork, whenpeople are telling me what some might thinkto be outrageous things, incredible things, Iwill remember my grandmother. She was justasleep; she was just having a dream, and yetshe got very incensed if I said that she wassleeping. So I always remember: be polite. Youdon’t tell somebody that they were sleeping.You just say, “Oh, that’s very interesting.What else did you see?” But I was determinedthat she was going to face the fact that she’dbeen sleeping. And so she eventually just saidthat the devil was in me and telling me to dothat.

Those are the things that I remember aspowerful myths on both sides of my family.These are things that had some kind of deepsignificance to me that remind me of whatSimon Ottenberg said, that anthropologists(and, I suppose, a lot of other people) arewhat they are because they’re in search of oryearning for a lost ethnicity. In a way thosetwo strands are to me my connection withan identity. I suppose we could use the oldtired term “roots”—the search for “roots,”who you are. My immediate family moved somuch from the time I was a little kid that mybrother and I really didn’t have that sense ofconnection with a place. We did with afamily.

My mother was the youngest daughter inmy maternal grandparents’ family. When shewas about seventeen or eighteen, she met myfather. She was a very successful, ravishinglybeautiful, young Swedish girl. Made her own

“I admired them enormously.” Warren’s maternalgrandparents, the Finleys.

I didn’t like at all) on my cornflakes and tellme to eat it, and then he’d spit on his handsand push my hair back and get me lookinggood for school and send me off. I rememberthat he prayed. He’d stand in the door andin a loud voice call upon God to see me safelyto school.

My grandmother would have long ses-sions where she’d cry and shout when she waspraying. She was always weeping when shewas praying; when she really prayed seriously,she wept. I remember when I was about fouror five years old, she was lying on a couchhaving a nap, and I was sitting opposite her.She woke up very quickly and said, “Oh,Varren, I have been with Jesus.” And she toldme how she’d been on the lap of Jesus, andhe’d taken her hand and put it inside of his


and fabulously modern building in those days.They considered it a wonderful high school.

So, he came from this devout Catholicfamily and had been to a Catholic seminary.They met, and he obviously became verysmitten with her. She had many admirers, andthat bothered him because he was a veryserious and somber young man. Because ofwhat he went through as a kid, he couldn’tstand the idea that he had competition. Sheknew him, but she wasn’t really that inter-ested in him, and he used to come to her. Inmodern terms, he was almost, I would sup-pose, a stalker. He’d come hang around herhouse, wouldn’t leave her alone. [laughter]She was always complaining, and her sistersand brothers used to tell him to go home andleave her alone, but she finally began to gowith him.

My father was a son of Jose d’Azevedo,who was the son of Joaquim, who lived inSacramento. Jose was sent to Cooper Medi-cal College in San Francisco, which was anew minimal medical school in those days[acquired by Stanford University in 1902].He got his degree in 1901 and started a prac-tice in Oakland, California. Was a verysuccessful doctor, mainly to a Portuguese cli-entele. A great many Portuguese had movedinto the area, and he was one of the majordoctors. Also, he was very advanced in a way,regardless of what his training may have been.(My father always wondered whether or notmy grandfather had had any real training.)The doctors in those days were strangely pre-pared, but they knew what they weresupposed to do.

My grandfather had very nice offices, firston Eighth Street in Oakland and then outon Lake Merritt in a large white house I’llalways remember. It looked like kind of asouthern mansion. That’s now torn down, but

Warren’s mother Helen. “She was a very success-ful, ravishingly beautiful, young Swedish girl.”

clothes. Always went out looking very spiffyand slick. She was a beauty queen for the highschool at one point. When the war started,World War I, she was elected queen of thewar bond parades that took place in Oakland.There were pictures of her in the newspa-pers, and she was very proud of this. Sheaspired to be a dancer or an actress. Shewanted to get away; her two sisters didn’t.But she was the one who wanted to get out.She wanted to go around the country. Somewoman she had met was a dancer and had atroupe and was going to take her to New York,but my grandmother wouldn’t allow it, saidshe was too young. She always said how ter-rible that was, because she wanted to do it.

My mother met my father while in highschool. He had been at St. Mary’s, an earlyCatholic high school, and she went to pub-lic school—the Oakland Technical HighSchool. It’s still there. It was a monumental

11FAMILY HISTORY

it overlooked the lake. And upstairs, abovethe family quarters, was this rather elaborate,early twentieth-century doctor’s office. Mybrother and I used to sneak up there and lookaround. In those days they had these lightboxes with hundreds of light bulbs inside anda rheostat that could turn up the heat, andyou’d sit in there and sweat with your headsticking out. We always wondered whetheror not somebody would get stuck in theresometime and get cooked beautifully, baked.

In my grandfather’s office there was alsothe first roentgen X-ray tube in the Bay Area.He always wanted to get the new thing. Infact, he could have been a wonderful charla-tan these days, because he always wanted thelatest electrical equipment. Of course, thatattracted a clientele. They didn’t know howto use the X-ray. My father was the assistantwhen he was just a kid, fifteen, sixteen yearsold, operating the X-ray machine. Theydidn’t have proper shields, and that may bewhy he became totally bald and probably alittle bit out of his mind when he was in hisseventies. [laughter] He would run the ma-chine and make X-ray plates of peoplewho . . . lord knows what happened to them!All of them were zapped by this very strongroentgen tube. Later, when I was in my teens,I got it after it had been discarded. I put it ona stand, and it was always on my desk when Iwas a kid, a recollection of my grandfather’soffice. The physicians in the family, includ-ing my father, never treated their own family.I almost died of appendicitis one time, andhe just told me to go to bed . . . gave me anaspirin. [laughter] No, that wasn’t the way.

My great-grandfather had a winery. Inthose days that probably made him a verywell-to-do man for a while. Later he lost thewinery, and things went bad. But neverthe-less, while all that was going on, he hadaccumulated some money, which in those

days might have been just a few thousanddollars, but it was enough for him to send hischildren to college. Later, my grandfather andhis brothers became physicians. They endedup in Sacramento or in Hayward, and mygrandfather in Oakland. Then my father alsowent to Stanford. When my father went,Stanford Medical School was quite a differ-ent place from what it had been when it wasCooper’s College and my grandfather wasattending. Cooper’s College had hardly beena real medical school, but they issued diplo-mas, so people’d go out and practice. Myfather always clucked-clucked about what hisfather knew, but Grandfather was a nice oldman.

My father really became his father’s fa-ther; he really ran the family, his two sistersand two brothers. (My grandfather was sortof an easygoing guy who didn’t really getthings done and later became a problem be-cause he lost a lot of his money. His wife, mygrandmother Amalia, spent it like water be-cause she was a grand lady.) During the periodwhen my father was in his teens, he was incharge of the family. That was about the pointwhen he met my mother. He was eighteen ornineteen. He hung around her house a lot.He was smitten, and they joked about him asthe guy they couldn’t get rid of. He was al-ways there, standing out on the street waitingfor my mother and all that sort of thing. Shefinally began to go with him, and thereby liesa tale:

My father apparently became very amo-rous one night when they were together inthe house alone and seduced my mother insome way or another. How true these thingsare, one never knows, but this is a story whichcame down. Then all hell broke loose be-tween these two families. Here was this poorSwedish family on the one hand—these twoold peasants with a daughter who was preg-


nant—and on the other hand, there was thiswell-to-do physician’s family. This was nevertalked about within my family. I only learnedabout it by little asides and things that weresaid inadvertently. Of course, kids wonderabout these things; when they hear some-thing, they wonder about it. Finally, whenmy mother was dying, she thought she wasconfessing to me. I was a grown person at thattime, and I remember saying to her, “Helen,for gosh sakes. That’s a wonderful story. Idon’t mind at all. I always suspected some-thing like this had happened, and it happensall the time. So what? I feel fine, you know.”But I’m sure that in her very religious life,and the struggle that she had, she saw this asa very sinful part of her life—that she hadallowed this to happen. And, in a way, sheresented my father for having helped createit. There was this tension. They got alongfairly well, but there were times whenyou . . . .

When my mother told her mother thatshe was pregnant, or it became obvious (shewas two or three months along, I suppose), itcreated a furor. My grandmother suddenlybecame a very forthright Swedish peasantwoman and Lutheran Pentecost. She wentto visit my father’s mother, Amalia, this finelady with her laces and fine house, and said,“Look what your son has done to my daugh-ter!” It was a real serious problem. Of course,this fine Catholic family, though they werehorrified, thought they had to do somethingabout it. So they invited my mother to livewith them, partly (my grandmother on myfather’s side was great at this) to hide it, coverit all up and make it nice with a proper mar-riage.

My mother had a miserable year or twowith my father’s people, because his oldestsister was very jealous of her and wouldn’tlet her forget this and looked down upon her.

My father had three sisters. Two of them werepractically my age. When I was fourteen andfifteen, my Aunt Marie and Aunt Alice weresixteen and seventeen. Then there was Molly,the oldest one, who my mother had to copewith during that period. And there was thisunspoken, but constant, feeling of, “We’redoing something for you. We’re trying to betolerant of you and help you,” and all that.

So I was born under those conditions, andmy mother had a nervous breakdown. Oh,all these wonderful, marvelous, terrible thingsthat happen in families! She never, ever for-gave that family. I was born in that house.Well, Dr. Enos’s around the corner, I think—Dr. Enos’s hospital. They took care of her.They did things for her, but she was abso-lutely miserable because of the atmospherein that house.

Now one of the side issues is that almostthe same kind of thing had happened earlier.Amalia, my father’s grand dame mother(whom I liked very much, but I don’t think Icould have ever lived around her) made lifemiserable for her children, particularly herson. She was constantly complaining abouther health. She lived longer than any of theothers, but she was “just going to die any day.”Her heart . . . . Her husband died before her.

When my father was trying to develop apractice of his own in Modesto, she wouldcall every day and complain. But she was alsovery, very status oriented. She was the womanfrom Candeleria and Pico who had lived in afine house, and she knew Bishop Nunes. Hebecame known as archbishop of the Indiesin Macao, China, and in India. And she knewall these grand people there. Pico’s an islandin the Azores. It’s one of the biggest islandsacross from Orta, the city on Faial, which isanother island just a little across the bay.

So she came to this country with the ideashe was going to live well, and her husband

13FAMILY HISTORY

was a physician now. She used to have fam-ily dinners with twenty-five, thirty people,with three wine glasses and fine plates andlace tablecloths. One thing that I rememberabout her, she wore corsets like in the 1900s.They were very tight corsets, and she had abig bustle and a very large bosom. She wouldwalk through the room telling her servantswhat to do. She had one or two servants anda cook then; she ran a grand house.

A few years before my troubled birth,Grandmother Amalia had dealt with thescandal of her very favorite brother,Guilherme Silveira da Gloria, who was a poetand a priest, well known in Portugal and inthe Bay Area. He had written a number ofbooks of poems and was highly admired.Well, he was in the church, but he had amistress that he had lived with for years, andthe mistress finally became pregnant. Whenher pregnancy became obvious, my grand-

mother went a bit mad. She loved this man;she loved her brother Guilherme. She wasjust beside herself, so she forced this womanto come into their house, and she put her ina room and locked the door and kept herthere . . . fed her and all that, but she couldn’tleave until she had the baby. [laughter] Bythat time, she was able to make explanations.But, of course, he was defrocked.

That is one of the stories that I keep hear-ing from Portuguese colleagues that I run intowho know something about California: “Oh,yes, I know. He was defrocked. He was adefrocked priest, wasn’t he?” My grandmotherhad locked up his mistress so that the neigh-bors wouldn’t know, and she did the same tomy mother. It happened, I think, before myparents were married. I’m not sure. I nevermet Guilherme but I have pictures of him,and I know something about him. It’s anotherone of those stories that became part of the

Warren’s parents, Helen and Joe d’Azevedo (front row, center) with Joe’s parents Jose (back left) andAmalia (second from right). They are surrounded by Joe’s siblings.


myth. I didn’t know this when I was veryyoung, but it became later part of themythology.

My mother, in a sense, was treated in thesame way—that she was a fallen woman andthe family had to be protected from any sto-ries about it. So they arranged a very elaboratewedding for my parents. My mother was,when they got married, about four or fivemonths pregnant, so I was born two or threemonths too early, something like that. I al-ways knew this. Very early, my brother and Ipuzzled over the fact that my birth date andtheir marriage date didn’t jibe, you see. Mybrother, who always wanted to fix up historyand make it right, said: “Well, they just madea mistake some place. I mean, you know.We’ll have to check on that.” Well, when Ifinally told him what I had learned to be thefacts, he was absolutely stunned, because thatdoesn’t happen. It just wasn’t the way itshould be for parents in those days. So thatwas a profoundly important juncture betweenthose two families, and my brother and I livedwith it most of our lives.

While my parents were living, this un-dercurrent of tension between the twofamilies remained. And I, in order to get somekind of resolution of the thing, saw the fami-lies as two wonderful stories, two wonderfultraditions that I was a part of that came to-gether with this marvelous moment of anillicit love affair. [laughter] You know? ThatI was a love child. Later in my teens I beganto put this together in a way. I made up thetale that turned out to be true.

But those kinds of stories, with all of thoseelaborations, are part of personal myths.When one asks what causes one to eventu-ally take a certain direction in life, I thinkthese things affect what you decide to do. Ialways had this image first of the hard-work-

ing peasants, deeply religious or at least deeplyfeeling people, who sacrificed a lot to bringtheir families up, on the one hand, and wholived kind of fabulously eccentric lives fromour point of view. And on the other hand,the family of the people with a degree ofwealth and a sense of themselves as havingimportance in the world. Their importancewas that they were the cream of local Portu-guese society; yet, I can remember as a kidbeing called a dirty wop on the street or a“blond Portugee,” a blond wop and things likethat in the neighborhoods that we were in,and fighting. Though I didn’t look like a for-eigner, I was treated as one because of myname.

One of the statements that you made earlier aboutyour maternal grandparents was, I thought, apretty telling statement about religion as sort ofan outlet for emotion.

I just meant that they were highly emo-tive. They were highly emotive people, andtheir religion was their expression of that.They had visions. They had states of mindand euphorias and waiting for God to comeat any moment, or they would see Jesus Christon the cross. They believed that at any mo-ment they would be whisked off to heavento visit with the eternals. You know, therewas that emotive excitement in their lives. Itwas partly shared by their children, but theirchildren were withdrawing from it. Theirchildren were really more secular—intenselyreligious, but in the American, the pallidProtestant way.

Were you raised as a Catholic or as a Lutheran?

I was part of the warfare. I was a pawn.The d’Azevedos wanted me to be baptized as

15FAMILY HISTORY

a Catholic and to be brought up as a Catholic.And my maternal grandparents were abso-lutely, lividly anti-papist, anti-Catholic:“Those dirty Catholics.” They would havenone of that. Finally, I was christened bothin a Lutheran church and in the Catholicchurch in Oakland. So I had two consecra-tions. I had again figured in the family feud.I think neither side knew what the other did.Nobody said anything about it. As long as Igot baptized Catholic, I was OK by thed’Azevedos. As long as I was christened,saved, in the Protestant church, I was OK bythe Finleys. So there again, the two tradi-tions, you know.

You spoke about the dream that your grandmotherhad.

I remember being impressed by it, deeplyimpressed. And there was a period in my earlyadolescence in which I became very religiousin a mystical sort of way—not in either ofthose traditions, but a series of mystical ex-periences and things. Going back to that . . .the speaking in tongues. My grandmotherand grandfather, when my parents didn’tknow it, would take me to their holy-roller,charismatic church in Oakland. I couldn’thave been more than four, five years old. Iremember clearly my grandmother rolling inthe aisle and talking in this marvelously flu-ent gibberish. And later on I would think,“She was so fluent in that language; whycouldn’t she be in either English or Swedish?”The people were terribly impressed by her.And she had her moment in the sun, hermoment of fame in her church.

My grandfather had great respect for that.He sang and had a great voice. He thoughtof himself as somebody who could have beena great singer, and he used to sing hymns in aloud voice, not only in the church, but at

home in the closet. And wake up the neigh-bors.

Isaac Karnley was my interpreter and as-sociate in Liberia. On our first field trip, hewas a member of a little Christian group inthe village, and he would sing the same songsthat my grandfather used to sing. It was déjàvu all over again—way back in the 1950s.Those things have their continuities.

To me my grandparents had dramaticlives. I guess they weren’t very dramatic fromthe inside, from the point of view of theirsons and daughters, who looked upon themas just creating horrible scenes for them, anddifficult. They were Americanizing fervidly.But I always looked upon these two oldpeople as a source of great excitement andfeeling. They made things happen; thingshappened around them.

Well, there were other parts of the lore.When I was six or seven, my father was go-ing to school in Palo Alto, and we were verypoor. It was during the Depression, of course,and that affected people like his parents.Certainly, we had very little. My father hadfinally decided to go to medical school; it wasa late decision on his part. I was born beforehe decided to go back to medical school, sohe was a late starter like myself. I always madethat connection. I was ten years behind mycolleagues in age and ten ahead of them inexperience, and so was my father, who wentback as a married man with children. Thatwas very difficult. He got a little help fromhis father, but mostly he worked in the labsand cleaned up the monkey and rat cages andpaid part of his tuition that way. We wouldn’thave enough money to stay in the places wewere in. He had to move to something else.So there was a constant moving around.

My grandparents were with us, mymother’s people, in this four-room house . . .little shingled house in Palo Alto. There was


“This four-room house . . . little shingled house in Palo Alto.” Warren in front of the family home in theearly 1920s.

only one little potbellied stove that heatedthe whole house. In the wintertime it got verycold, and we’d all get up in the morning andstand around the potbellied stove. Well, therewas one day when the stove smoked: itwouldn’t work. My father couldn’t start it,and it turned out that all the metal pipes wereclogged. So he had to pull it apart, and hewas cussing. He had to get over to the uni-versity, and he was in a terrible sweat, andwe were all standing around shivering. Thesoot was coming out of the pipe, and mymother laid newspapers around, and the sootwas piling up. Then he was trying to put thepipes back together. He couldn’t make themfit, and my grandmother was standing theresaying, “Joe, you must pray. Pray to God. Prayto God.”

He was furious, “Oh, shut up Mama!”Everyone would say, “Be quiet, Mama.”So she started praying in her loud voice,

“Oh, Lord, come and help this poor man, this

poor son.” And while she was praying, it fit.[laughter]

My mother, of course, was always verymuch impressed by these things, but shedidn’t say anything. My father was just deeplyfurious—nullified, not mollified. That is howmy grandmother and grandfather pulled theirweight. They did their thing. I didn’t believeshe had caused it; on the other hand, I had agreat admiration and respect for that mo-ment.

We used to tell that story at family gath-erings. Sometimes in family get-togetherspeople would start reminiscing and tellingstories about the family, but nobody was re-ally interested in a sense of the history of thefamily. I didn’t know of any of my close rela-tives who would tell me much about familygenealogy other than little bits and snatches.They never all got together. Not both sidesof the family. The Swedish side of the familyhad its own set, and the Portuguese side had

17FAMILY HISTORY

its own. Very seldom do I remember them evereven partly getting together, and it was un-comfortable when it happened.

I got most of my information about thePortuguese side through my grandmotherAmalia. During my first couple of years atCal, I had this great urge to visit her inOakland and talk to her about the past. Oh,she was a grand lady! She would crank upher old Victrola and her old vinyl records andplay operas for me. Sit there as the granddame. And when I’d ask her about the past,she loved to expand on it. She wrote me someletters about family history, was one of thefew who talked about it. My father, now andthen, in rare moments, would mention some-thing about his family. But he didn’t like to

talk about them. He really felt estranged fromthem.

My great-grandfather died when I wasabout four. I may have met him. My brother,who knows everything, [laughter] says thatwe used to go to Sacramento and visit thedistant members of the family. He was tooyoung to remember, but he says he was surethat we had done that. So at the age of four,or maybe five, I might have done that. Ivaguely recall meeting some of those people.Later on, I met the others. Whether I sawJoaquim or not, I don’t know, but I have avivid recollection of what he looked like,because I have this photograph which I al-ways used to think I resembled. He was aweird-looking character.

2EARLY CHILDHOOD

ELL, ONE of the earliest thingsthat I remember when I was veryyoung, maybe three, four years

from his family, as happens to a lot of youngpeople. He’d become somebody on his own;and somebody quite different than they hadexpected. I gathered he rather liked that life,even though it was very difficult for him. Hehad been a big shot in his own family, andhere he was a little guy. I think that experi-ence of being among a lot of other kinds ofAmericans was very important to him. Hewas the Portugee, you know, and they wouldjoke and kid around. [laughter] Yet he waswell educated and handled himself well.

So, he had some friends. And then ofcourse, the real problem with my mother andher pregnancy and my birth and their mar-riage came right after that. So, here was aguy who had just begun as an adolescent toget a view of himself—and she, too. And thetwo of them found themselves in the clutchesof a particular time: they were suddenly a fam-ily. Coming from the kind of backgroundsthey had, they took that seriously. My motherhad what was called a nervous breakdownand slowly recovered from that.

I would hear about the war during myyouth really in terms of my father’s involve-

Wold, is seeing my father now and then put onhis World War I army clothes, his breechesand boots, and his hat, and take my brotherand me out to the shooting range. And hewould target shoot with his pistol. And, Iremember my brother and I being very boredby this, because he was so . . . what wouldyou call it? He was mesmerized by some vi-sion of himself as a soldier with his gun andshooting. And he would sit sort of lookingdown at the ground with his gun, while thetwo of us sat next to him. And then he wouldget up and take a few shots. We never reallyunderstood what he was doing; however, helooked kind of grand in that outfit.

And then, through my mother andothers, we learned that he had been recruitedinto the army and had been on the UC cam-pus in the barracks they had there during thewar. He was all ready to go abroad, to go toEurope. Then the war ended. It wasn’t a dis-appointment, but it certainly interrupted aperiod in his life in which he’d gotten away


ment in the army and the very strong anti-war feeling that was developing after WorldWar I—the League of Nations and the risingconscientious objector movement. That hada very powerful effect on me. I just took thatfor granted. I took for granted that war wasbad, and that I would never be in one. Thatwas just a given. It would never happen again.That was the last World War, and we’dlearned how terrible it was. It would neverhappen again.

I remember later when my father wasgoing to medical school, part of his trainingat Stanford, was to go out to the hospital fordisabled veterans on the edge of Palo Alto.Now and then I would go with him, and herewere all these guys with limbs gone. Andsome of them, you know, pretty mixed upmentally. Part of his job was to come out thereand administer to them as a medical assis-

tant. And I remember feeling very bad, butalso I remember he never talked about it. Welived in a family where my mother was thebig talker; she talked all the time. Drove usall mad at times. She had a lot of ideas, andshe was very powerful and intelligent, beau-tiful woman, but she just talked incessantlyand had a lot to say. My father had almostnothing to say. [laughter] Even when he gotmad.

So I watched and learned to learn. I sawhis concern and his care of these old men,all of them. And I remember feeling how ter-rible it was that that had happened to them,and so glad my father had escaped it. Howwonderful it was that it didn’t happen to him.But he never talked about that. I just knew. Iremember one time when I was driving withhim in our old Model T Ford from Palo Altoto see his parents in Oakland, and there wasa guy walking along the road near DumbartonBridge in the dark. The lights shone on him.The man stopped and stared. An awful look-ing person with a disfigured face. And myfather stopped and knew him by name andasked, “Where are you going? Get in and we’llgo back home.” And the guy got in, and weturned around and drove back to the veter-ans hospital; this guy had been an inmate andhad gotten loose. That impressed me deeply,that my father talked to him like a real per-son, you know, talked to him with respect,and helped him. So, little things like that.

As for the war, that’s what I knew andthought about it. It wasn’t until I was in myteens that I made the connection betweenthe development of fascism in Germany andthe obvious imminent development of thesecond World War. Then I began to reflectupon the first World War and how my motherhad sold war bonds and all that during thewar. There had been a lot of patriotic feel-ing. Flags—everybody had flags—but that

Clockwise from top: Joe, Helen, Donald, andWarren d’Azevedo, mid-1920s.

21EARLY CHILDHOOD

diminished over time. They were too busydoing other things. Their lives were involvedwith getting by, getting jobs, my father get-ting through school. That was a hard time.The Depression hit us, too. My grandparentswould have starved to death had it not beenfor their children who took care of them andkept them in the family, because my grand-father had no work anymore. He was an olderman, and my grandmother had illnesses thatrequired operations and all that. And so, theirkids were taking care of them. They weredependents, which was very hard on themand hard on the rest of the family, becausethere was a real gap, a cultural gap betweenthe two generations. That was a period inwhich people had had great expectations.There was this great sense that the UnitedStates, America, was moving on and improv-ing. I remember my Uncle Raymond, a youngguy that I liked very much, and an UncleArthur. All were people who were sure thatnext year was going to be better, and theywere going to improve themselves. Some-thing you don’t see today really; a tremendoussense of security about the future.

Well, there must have been a lot of investmentin talk in the value of education.

Oh, yes. You had to go to school. You hadto get an education. Oh, absolutely essential.And if you didn’t, you’d just go downhill. Forexample, I was supposed to go into medicinelike my father, but I had a rocky relationshipwith him. Sometimes, deep antagonism. I wasthe oldest son, and I was expected to maybefollow along. Later, my brother filled thatexpectation, but he had a tough time of it. Itook a lot of pre-med work in high schooland junior college, and I was preparing forthat, but I slowly realized it wasn’t for me. Ididn’t want it. I admired it and all that, and

in a way, I felt for a long time that I shouldhave. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t my world.

Well, I get the idea from your memories aboutchildhood that it was a very diverse environment.

Yes, it was a crucible of ethnic and reli-gious diversity and personalities of vastlydifferent types. All impinging on one an-other, even within each side of the family.On the Swedish side, it was a wild and woolybunch with three very powerful daughters,matriarchs really, always struggling to maketheir mother into an American. [laughter]Never, never, in a million years could theyhave ever molded her into anything morethan what she was. And yet, they alwaystried. And they themselves presenting them-selves always as some upwardly mobilepeople, and always bickering. Deep, familystruggles going on all the time, deep jealou-sies, resentments about what was said. And,when the telephone began to be a part oftheir lives, the argument was going on dayand night between the daughters to and fromOakland, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Alameda,then later Modesto. Then on the other side,there were problems I would say were gothic.It was a highly charged, Portuguese, Catho-lic extended family with all the melodramathat can mean. They were each loud andemotive in their own ways. There was a lotof weeping and wailing and constant mourn-ing, mourning over something.

My grandmother, Amalia, would weepabout music. She would sit and play theserecords for me, as I remember, opera. Thenshe would weep, and then she would tell methe story of the opera. Then she would readfrom her relative, Guilherme da Gloria’s,poetry in Portuguese and then translate forme and weep some more. But she wept withgreat style. I mean, she always had a lace


handkerchief. [laughter] You know, to catchthe tears. And she would control herself, veryobviously controlling herself, because herfeelings were so great that she didn’t wantthem to bother me. But she wanted to botherme. And then she would weep when she wastalking about the family, about poor Alice,poor this person, poor that person. And whenshe would talk about my father, you know,“Poor Jose, he works so hard.” And then she’dweep some more. But, her weeping was grace-ful and well planned. It was part of herpersona.

Were you a good student as a little guy?

Oh, off and on. When I was good, I wasvery very good; and when I was bad, I wasvery very bad. [laughter] Depending on whatschool I was going to. In Palo Alto, when myfather was going to school, we started schoolon the same day. We have a picture of myfather dressed with a coat and tie ready to goto his first day in pre-med at Stanford, and Iwas standing by him with clean shirt andshorts. The title of the picture was First Dayof School.

And what about your brother?

My brother was too young. That was oneof his problems. Donald was always in thebackground, but he was there watching. Heremembers more than I do, in great detail.He had to remember. That was a life-savingdevice on his part. But, I went off to school.I did all right, excepting that I was in troubleall the time. I would get in fights.

Well, is this where you got called the blond wop?

Let’s see. I was six years old I guess in PaloAlto. But that’s when I was four or five. We

were living in Oakland, out in the RockRidge area, when my father was working at abank, before he decided to go back to medi-cal school. He put in a couple years atbanking. He didn’t want to go into medicineat that point, and he got more and more up-set with what he was doing. My motherhelped him decide to go back to medicalschool. So, it was while we were living in arather nice neighborhood, as I remember,with a yard and all that sort of thing. I thinkI know why I was called a dirty wop. Ourname, of course, but also because my Swedishgrandfather, Poppa, would send me out in thestreet with a dust pan and a shovel to pick upthe horse manure, because in those days theyhad horse-drawn carriages. You know, thegarbage men and others. And I had to pickup the horse manure to bring back for hisvegetable garden.

And people would see that and make funof us. And I’d say: “Poppa, I don’t want to dothat.”

But he’d say: “Now, boy, you must do it.We have to have this.” I’d get a lecture andhave to go do it. So, I was the dirty wop, orwhatever. That was only for a short time, butI remember it very clearly, though I didn’tunderstand what was being said. I was justthinking someone was making fun of me ordidn’t like me. I don’t remember that beingan issue later until I got to high school.

But now I’ll get back to Palo Alto. I wasn’ta good student there. As I remember I washaving fun and feeling rambunctious. I wouldget into fights. I’m trying to think what Ifought about, and I’m not sure. There wasthis teacher, I would be put under her desk alot. I was disrupting class for some reason. Idon’t know what I was doing. The teacherwould put kids who disrupted under her desk,and you had to stay there. It was like beingin the corner, you know. And then I used to

23EARLY CHILDHOOD

reach up in the back of her desk and stealthe things out of drawers that she had takenaway from kids, including some that she hadtaken away from me. I don’t know what theywere—marbles and things of that kind—andI would put them in my pocket, and I’d givethem back when I was out in the yard. I feltlike Robin Hood. [laughter]

And then I was in trouble, because onthe way home from school, I would go downto the brook. There was a brook through thearea where my school was. It’s still there.There’s a lot of housing on it now, but it wasa kind of wild area going through town—maybe Palo Alto Creek or something—andI loved it. There were polliwogs and minnows,and all kinds of strange people were campingthere. It was the beginning of the Depres-sion. Later on in Modesto, the same thingwas going on in a place called Beard Brook. Iwas fascinated. I would go and sit and watchthese people cooking with their families. Iwanted to get to know the kids that they had,but I was afraid because they were so shy. AndI didn’t know them. But I would always godown there on my way home from school. Iwould wander down this creek in Palo Alto,sometimes with my brother or with someother kid from school. Each time they caughtme doing it, I’d get a whipping from myfather. Probably for a good reason, becausethere were stories of trouble, you know, inthe area. These were called “tramps,” yetsome were whole families living there.

I must have talked my brother into go-ing, and we found some floating logs, and wetied them together and made a raft. And wefloated down this stream. My brother, ofcourse, all during his early life, was a tattletale. He told my folks, and of course, I gotthe whipping. I was the oldest one. I hadbrought him down there. Why did I go? Well,I was fascinated by people who lived in strange

ways. I remember thinking about it all thetime. I watched them. I was fascinated by thefact that they were so different.

Were you old enough? I mean, was the Depres-sion something that people talked about, or wasit just a fact of life?

Let’s see. I remember Herbert Hoover. Weused to laugh about a chicken in every potand a car in every garage. It was his slogan.We had jokes about this sort of thing. Therewere tramps coming to our house all the time,looking for food, literally hungry. And I re-member my mother always there, not onlyin Palo Alto, but even when we had verylittle she always gave something. Sometimesshe would complain when they left. But inthe tradition of her family, like her motherand father, she never ever turned anybodyaway from the door. And at their church, theyeven brought indigent people home from thechurch to live in their house and fed them.So that tradition stuck with her. She alwayshad to give to them. It was only later in herlife that she became cynical about hand outsand things of that kind.

But I remember that very clearly. Therewere lots, sometimes two or three a day, com-ing to the door willing to work. “Is theresomething we can do?” Do it for anything—for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, anything,anything. So, yes. There was a lot of talkabout the Depression. The folks didn’t fol-low the news. We didn’t even have a radio asI remember, but the word was that everythingwas very bad. And my father was desperatelyoff many times, paying the rent. They wouldpay twenty-five dollars a month for thishouse. Well, we didn’t have that half thetime. I remember one thing that we wantedmore than anything—my brother and I—wasroast chicken from the roadhouse outside of


Palo Alto. We had gone by there once andhad smelled and seen those roast chickenson the spits. And one time, my father, whenhe had passed an exam at school, felt verygood, and he went out with a buck and a halfor something and brought home one of thosechickens. To us, we were living in splendor.

When my grandfather was there, we atewell. He’d go down to the railroad tracks. Hewould scavenge with a sack and with my littlewagon, you know. I’d go down with him andsometimes Donald. We’d go down to thetracks, where the produce was being unloadedor loaded, and stuff would fall on the ground.He’d come back with fruit and vegetables. Hedid the same thing when we were down inthe Bay Area. He’d go down to the docks andget fish. He’d come home with sacks of her-ring. I remember eating herring for days. So,the Depression was survived. It was very com-mon. We didn’t think of it as anythingstrange, because so many people we knewwere doing the same thing. Everybody wasfrugal and careful.

But the people along the brook were dif-ferent in the sense that they were living therein little lean-to’s, and they were living in amuch worse way than us. They were also fromelsewhere. A lot of them might have beenpart of the early movement of people out ofthe Midwest. These were migrant laborers.

KATHLEEN D’AZEVEDO [Kd]: Theywere called Okies and Arkies.

Yes. It was in the 1930s. Later in Modestothat’s where there were thousands of themcoming through. But I never remember see-ing a black person when I was a kid. I don’trecall ever seeing a black person or even hav-ing it talked about very much.

Kd: There weren’t any.

I doubt that there were, and if there were,people didn’t pay any attention to them.

Kd: There was one black family inAlameda. That was all.

Yes, and there was one in my school inModesto.

So, when did you become a good student? When’sthe first time?

Oh, not in that school in Palo Alto! Ihad a heck of a time there. I was always car-rying notes home to family. My mother hadto go up a couple of times to talk me out oftrouble. I broke some kid’s glasses, I remem-ber, and she was terribly worried that we’dhave to pay for them, because we didn’t havethe money. I managed to claim that he hadstarted it. [laughter] I don’t know who started,but I doubt I started it. I didn’t really pickfights, but when things got to a point, I al-ways fought. That was partly my folks doing,because they used to tell us: “Don’t ever letanybody put anything over on you.”

I remember them watching me one timewhen a neighborhood kid in Palo Alto hadtried to fight with me out in the lot next tothe house. I sort of fended him off and cameback to the house. But they sent me back outto fight. I was ready to fight if I had to. So, Igot in a lot of trouble that way. I don’t re-member what my grades were. They musthave been abysmal. I didn’t really have anyinterests of any kind at that school. I just re-member I liked being able to give out thestuff that I stole from the teacher back to thekids, and being a big shot. I liked that.

And I liked that creek. I loved that creek.That was another world to me—polliwogsand strange people and all that. But then wewent to Alameda. I guess that was after Joe,

25EARLY CHILDHOOD

my father, got through school, and he washelping his father for that couple of yearswhile we were in Alameda. I was about sevenor eight. And I went to Mastick school. Muchlater I learned that Kathleen had been goingto a school nearby. Alameda was our con-nection. I liked that school. I liked theteachers, and I became a star student. I puton plays. I made sets for little shows that we’dhave at the school. My grades were excel-lent. I was looked upon as a genius, because Ihad done well in some kind of IQ test. I wassomebody.

I remember a teacher who used to give usfire drills and make us hold hands. None ofus liked that. We had to hold hands with girls,protect the girls. And, there was one girl therewho I wanted to hold hands with, but shewas always with somebody else. Everybodyfelt that way. All the boys would complain.They didn’t want to hold a girl’s hand. Andthen the teacher made us dance. She was aweird teacher. She had a little Scottish dancethat we had to do for exercise. And then we’dclimb up the fire escapes and go back to class.

There was another teacher who had theart class. I loved it. She had a section of herclass where we drew. We had to bring thingsto draw every day. Leaves. I was wonderful atdrawing leaves. I could draw the most mag-nificent branch of leaves. I would pick themon the way to school. I loved that class. Oh,and poetry, she had us write poetry. But, shewas the one that I had a real fight with. Sheaccused me of plagiarism, that this poemcouldn’t be mine. I had a poem called“Kiting” or something like that. I had gottenthe idea of the rhyme from that guy who usedto write popular poems. Oh, Eugene Fields, awell-known name at the time. Doggerel stuff.I liked the rhyme, and I wrote my own poemin the same style. I was very angry at her,because I liked her. And I said, “You show

me where any poem like this has been writ-ten before.”

She said: “Well, maybe you did do it.”And after that, I felt very proud of myself,because I did do it.

And also, you stood up for yourself.

Well, I did in those days, but not always.There were times when I got beaten up andfelt like a loser and all that. But, no, gener-ally no.

Do you think the poetic style of this old relative,Guilherme influenced you?

No, because I don’t think at that time Iknew much about him. It was later that Iknew about him. But my mother and myuncle Raymond, they admired that sort ofthing. And of course, Amalia, my father’smother, poetry was a part of her bloodstream.Bad poetry as well as good poetry. Oh, andEdith, my Aunt Edith. She used to writesongs.

Kd: I think that was a rather commonthing. There was much more home entertain-ment. There was no television. There was noteven radio.

And Edith would write songs. She evenhad one semi-published. She’d write lovesongs, and she would sing them and just driveeverybody mad at family gatherings and playthe piano in her off-key way. So, there was aplace for it. But that teacher exposed us tomany things, and I remember liking that.

So, that was Alameda. That’s where I metthe Mollers and Clyde, a friend of mine nextdoor. He and I and Donald used to do allkinds of wild things together. His father wasan old seaman, a sea captain, and later I


worked on his little yacht. They were Danish,German and Danish. But I was still a wop, attimes.

The wops, I thought, were Italians.

Many people didn’t distinguish betweena Portuguese, an Italian, or a Spaniard. Theywere all just wops. Later on there was morevernacular distinction between them.Portugee or Portugoose! I was even a Portugeein Africa.

Well, let’s see, we’re now in Alameda, andthere were the Mollers. That friendship wenton for a few years. We used to see Clyde. Hewould come to visit us in Modesto, later.Then when I was going to Cal, the Mollershad a little boat, a yacht, a small one—thirtyor forty footer. And they asked me to helpthem, and I’d work on the yacht. We’d go tothe local regattas on San Francisco Bay andsometimes out to the Farallons. It was great.But Carl Moller was a very hard-bitten, Ger-manic, authoritarian type. I was a little afraidof him, because he was terribly severe. Hetried to whip me into shape on his ship. AndIda Moller, she used to make wonderfulDanish or German sandwiches. I was alwayshungry in those days. She used to make fiveor six of them for me, and I just stuffed my-self with those sandwiches. I enjoyed that,and I learned something about sailing.

My father was helping my grandfather atthat point. My grandfather was failing, andmy father was trying to help him carry on hispractice. At the same time, he was continu-ing his work as a student. Anyway, he had amicroscope. My brother and I lived in a porchat the end of this little tiny house, a very oldhouse. And there was a room on this side ofit, and my father had his study there. A smalllittle room with a table and his microscope.When he was gone, my brother and I spent

hours upon hours there. We’d learned tomake slides. I was absolutely enthralled. Icould spend hours with that microscope. Anddrops of water. I used to categorize them, dif-ferent kinds of water from different places,and leaves and bugs and wings of insects andon and on and on. I recall that being one ofmy most pleasant times. And now and then,my father would actually deign to tell ussomething about it.

Don and I would do that together prettymuch. We also stamp collected. We weregreat stamp collectors, especially Don. Wescavenged stamps from various people andplaces. My brother still has it. He gave it tohis daughter. We had a rather extensive stampcollection.

You know, we really didn’t have manyfriends. We were always in new neighbor-hoods. Well, there was our friend ClydeMoller in Alameda. He used to come in, andwe would show him the wonders of the mi-croscope. We used to enjoy lording it overhim, saying, “Look what we have here. Now,look into here Clyde, and you will see . . . .”You know, that kind of stuff. [laughter]

And then he and I and Donald had agang. We were fighting with a gang a blockor two away, and we used to lure them intoour yard while we were up into the large treewith paper bags full of ashes from the fires inthe stove. We’d wait up in our roost in thisbig tree in the backyard. We told these guysto come over to make a treaty, and then wedropped the bags on them. The whole neigh-borhood would be full of ash dust.

And then there was a strange, crazy ladywho lived up at the corner, whose house wasa place of mystery. It was really a wonderfullymysterious, gloomy, four-story old AlamedaVictorian. She lived all alone with a stuffedmonkey that had been her pet, and she usedto bring us in, and the monkey would be sit-

27EARLY CHILDHOOD

ting in a chair, stuffed with a cap on its headand pants and shirt. And she would talk to itand tell us about it. It had a name and allthat. Of course, we were transfixed by her.

Then across the street there was a housethat had been abandoned. It had a lot of milkbottles in the back. I remember we loadedour carts with all these milk bottles and gotone cent a piece for them. We felt so guilty.We had done something terribly bad. Here’spart of that ethic, that Protestant ethic, what-ever it was that we got. I couldn’t go to sleepthat night. We had gotten fifty cents for fiftybottles. We’d stolen this. We shouldn’t havedone it and all that. It was one of the fewmemories I have of my father as a kindly man.I called him in, and he comforted me andtold me it was all right, that he would takecare of it in the morning. Go to sleep, hesaid. And I had this wonderful sense of re-lease from sin. Of course, he was a Catholic.He didn’t know what sin was. Only mySwedish grandparents knew what sin was.[laughter] But I remember that great relief thatall was right.

And the next day, he just told me, “Well,you take the money and go up and try to findthe people there. If there’s nobody there, thenit’s all right. They were going to get rid of itanyway. But if they are there, you tell themhere’s the money you got. You do that for twoor three days. If they’re still not there, forgetit. It’s all right.” Oh, what relief. I had a sensethat the world, the sky had lifted, you see.

But then we didn’t know what to do withthe money. We bought bubble gum, and thenwe felt a little guilty about having so muchbubble gum. I must have had a bag full. Weburied it in the ground in a tin box. The ideawas that it was our treasure. You know, thewonderful things kids do.

There were a lot of crazy people in theneighborhood, mainly crazy old ladies. There

was one across the street who used to throwthings out of her window at us. She was therich lady. She was very rich, and she’d openher window and scream and throw things atus, and we loved her. Oh, and she had a bearskin in her backyard, a big old moldy bearskin. Obviously they must have had a veryfancy house with bear skins, stuffed bears, andall. And we used to go out and sit on thebear skin. Then she’d open the door. “Getoff my bear skin!” Then she’d throw outbottles and all kinds of things at us and screamand yell. She was a very old lady. We adoredher.

We had a landlady living next door. Ev-eryone thought she was also crazy. She hadan electric car, and she’d get in her electriccar and go buzzing about with barking dogsbehind. Now and then, she’d have great fits,particularly when we’d drop ashes from ourbackyard tree and it would blow all over heryard. And she’d come out and scream at us.We loved people who screamed at us. Theywere the best.

You said that you’d been christened or baptizedboth Catholic and Lutheran, but were you goingto church at all?

My grandparents used to insist that wego to church when they were around, andwe’d go to their church. But my parents wereuncomfortable about it because theirs was awild and wooly holy roller church, and I re-member feeling kind of strange about it, too,as I got older. My father had become quitesecularized and withdrawn partly from hisfamily, yet he still saw them. Although hebecame a non-Catholic, he was somewhatreligious and sort of gravitated toward mymother’s Protestantism, and my grand-parents’. He had a lot of respect for mymother’s parents. Now and then she could


drag him to church on a Sunday, but usuallyhe was too busy, wanted to be too busy. Shewould go, but mostly she’d send us alone toSunday school. So, we went to Sundayschool, which I used to hate but sometimesenjoyed if there were interesting people andif they were doing something interesting. Likein Modesto, I led a Sunday school class. Ididn’t know what I was doing, but I led theclass. And we put on plays to dramatize sec-

tions of the Bible, and I was the director andall that, so I had a role. And there were someinteresting kids there. Yes, Sunday school wasa kind of social thing. My mother seldomwent. Both of them were estranged from theirpast and their families and yet were very reli-gious in their own ways, their own mysticalways. I can go into that later. It had an effecton what I did.

3FAMILY DYNAMICS

ALKING ABOUT estrangementwithin the family, part of which wasexpressed in religious views. In a way,

interpreted everything in highly charged re-ligious terms. I think, he found a kind ofrefuge in my mother’s family. It separated himfrom his own, though he kept contact withthem, close contact.

And my mother having been the rebel-lious young woman in her family, and havingbeen involved in the scandal of my birth, andhaving what she considered to be the terrible,humiliating experience with my father’s fam-ily and her so-called nervous breakdownwhen she withdrew for almost a year and lostmuch weight . . . . They thought she wasgoing to die. She was just miserable.

By the time I was grown up slightly, and Iand my brother were five or six years old, shehad built some kind of personal boundarybetween herself and that world. She was veryreligious and respected the views of hermother and father, but, at the same time, feltshe was an American in a fast developingworld. She felt restricted by her immigrantfamily and yearned to move out into theworld and tackle new problems.

She read a great deal. I remember she hada shelf of Harvard Classics, and she would

Tthat conflict, that intra-family conflict, wassomething that had a deeper effect upon methan I would ordinarily realize. The problem,actually, was that my father, because of thetrauma that he and my mother went throughwith his family and her family over theirmarriage and the conditions under which ithappened, withdrew from the orientation ofhis family, particularly with regard toCatholicism.

He developed into a kind of agnostic. Partof that had to do with the fact that he was inmedical school and working very hard. I re-member him studying all night with the lighton in the other room, while my brother andI slept in the porch next to him. And I re-member him being gone most of the time toschool. I think the experience of medicalschool was to him a secularizing experience,but at the same time, he was surrounded bymy mother’s family. He had her parents liv-ing with us, and they were of coursefundamentalists and prayed constantly and


read things that she didn’t understand, butshe felt she should. She wanted to knowabout Aristotle and Horace and Plato, andshe would now and then talk about it withus. She had this aura about her of somebodywho wanted to learn, who wanted to get outin the world. But there was also a sense oflost opportunity. She had wanted to be adancer; she had wanted to travel; she hadwanted to do a lot of things, but marriageand children had tied her down. So, therewas always around her a shadow of disillu-sion and resentment about her life.

Nevertheless, she was loyal to my father.She encouraged him to go back to school.She had encouraged him to do things thatwere very difficult for them both, and I thinkhe looked to her for a kind of strength andleadership which he may not have had him-self. That was a very rough period. It wasduring the 1920s, the beginning of theDepression. They were extremely poor. Hisparents no longer had the kind of funds thatthey had once had, so that he got very littlehelp from them. And that’s when I remem-ber him working all night in the labs takingcare of the monkey and the rat cages. Andsometimes I’d go along with him for part ofthe night.

I remember making friends with an oldrhesus monkey that would come to the sideof the cage, bang, shake the wire and screamat me when I’d come in and then go off inthe corner and look at me. And little by little,I got so that I could go to the cage and talkto him, and he would come up and sit by me.One time I brought him a mirror, a little tinymirror. It drove him absolutely wild. He’d runall around the cage. Now and then he’d lookat himself and then turn somersaults andcome running around again and then throwit out at me. Little by little, he and I devel-oped a very strange relationship. I remember

this because it was like later relationshipswith certain people. [laughter] It took a longtime, but I had this sense of success. I wasabout seven, I guess. I had this feeling of greatsuccess that I could go there, and we wouldrecognize each other, and there would be akind of communication between us.

I remember one time, I had the mirrorout, and he reached out for it. And he tookit, hid it under some straw at the other endof the cage. He kept it, so I realized that Ihad made a conquest, and he and I werefriends. My father cleaned cages, and some-times it would take him all night. But I’d onlystay a couple of hours. We had to walkthrough this eucalyptus grove, a sort of for-est, that was around Stanford at that time, toour little house across the railroad tracks.Sometimes I would walk home alone, and Iremember this feeling of having done some-thing important.

My father would try to make connectionswith his kids. He had a hard time. He didn’tknow how. He really wasn’t very outgoing onthat level—in fact, on any level when I cometo think of it. He wasn’t outgoing with mymother, and she was always trying to provokehim into some kind of reaction to things. Andnow and then, she would succeed, but itwould just make him uncomfortable. He wasvery much an introvert on that level. He hadmale colleagues at school and at work. Hehad people that he knew, and now and thenthey would drop over. He was much morelively with them than he was with the fam-ily. There was a kind of reticence when hewas within the family. So, there was thisaspect of him that I remember cleaning therat cages; I’d help him with that. There musthave been thousands of rats, white rats. Weeven had some in our garage at home. And Iremember the horrible time when we cameback in our little Tin Lizzy and opened our

31FAMILY DYNAMICS

garage door and the lights shone in. And thisfemale rat ate the heads off all of her babies,because she was frightened. Here were all ofthese baby rats, just born, with their headssevered. And my father calmly just says,“Well that’s what they do when they’rescared.”

And I thought, “Well, why do we havethem in the garage?” We had rabbits that alsocame from the labs. We had a rabbit cage.My brother and I took care of them. Thosethings were very important to us.

I remember one time my father, in hisstrange way, thought that he was introduc-ing me to the practice of medicine just as hewas beginning to become one of the mainstudents in the medical school. He took meinto the rooms where they had all of thesecadavers. I remember steeling myself and feel-ing, “Why am I here? What is all of this?”All of those bodies lying around partly carvedup. And then he went over to a ceramic tub,took the lid off, reached in and pulled up ahead, a man’s head. The skull had beencarved like a basket. You could lift it up. Andhere was this smashed face of a very ugly look-ing human being. I just stood there, and Itried to be calm, because I didn’t want himto know I was afraid.

I always wondered about that, what itmeant to him. I connected it in a way withearly medical school, the stories told some-times when some of his friends were over.They would talk about other colleagues andstudents, medical students, and talk about theway that they had hazed a couple of youngwomen medical students. Once they hadhazed one—it was a hilarious story to them—by taking a hand off of one of the cadaversand putting it in her bed. So when she wentto bed, she felt this thing up against her andlooked and became hysterical. Now as I heardthe story, I thought I would be hysterical. It

was a horrible thing to do to somebody. Itsounded so cruel, and I sympathized withthese women who were trying to becomemedical people. And these men were tryingto scare them, haze them, with a lot of sexualinnuendo, too. You know, things that wouldfrighten or upset a woman or a kid. It is awonder that any woman got throughStanford Medical School under those con-ditions. It happened at other medical schools.

I suppose my father thought he was arous-ing in me an interest, an excitement aboutmedicine, but you know, I thought, “I don’twant that. I don’t want to be involved withthat kind of world.” Yet that was very early.It took me many years to really decide thatthat was the case. But this was one aspect ofmy father’s life. There was also the great per-sonal struggle he had with regard tophilosophy and religion. He tolerated mymother’s people and their religion as well asmy mother’s much more rarefied philosophi-cal, spiritual view of the world. She wasn’t afundamentalist in the same way that her par-ents were, but an extremely, I suppose,spiritualized Christian, philosophical Chris-tian. He had sort of gone along with that.They used to read Harry Emerson Fosdick, apopular Christian revisionist who wrote up-lifting, mind-improving books from aChristian point of view. They read thosethings together. A few years later when I wasin my early teens, my answer to that was toread Robert Ingersoll, who was this greatatheist who was looked upon as the devil bymany Christians. I found him in a library, andI read avidly his whole collected works. Thatwas my break with all that.

My mother, through all this, always hada kind of sense of herself as an outlaw, assomebody who believed she had been re-jected by my father’s family though she wasn’treally. And because she wasn’t able to get into


it [the family], she used to say, “I’m not anin-law, I’m an outlaw.” Then in her own fam-ily, because she had always been a kind ofadventuresome person, she had been calleda bad girl when she was younger. She was theone who was going to get into trouble. Andshe did, with my father. So, she felt herself assomebody who had made deep mistakes, whohad been vilified by people around her, andshe tried to rise above that. She used to al-ways make sure she dressed well. She madeher own clothes, and during the 1920s, I re-member, she used to go out in a kind of flappergarb, you know. She always looked well, andpeople always complimented her. That wasimportant to her. She was quite beautifulactually, and she was trying very hard toachieve a kind of status on her own and tobe the kind of person my father needed forhis coming career. So, the conflict was oftenexpressed in terms of philosophy and religion,though they didn’t argue about it at all. Mybrother was a very perceptive, bright, youngkid even when he was five or six years old,and we used to have long talks about thefamily. And later on, this would happen alot. We would lie around in bed and talk forhours about different people in the family,and we would analyze them—what theirfoibles were, and why they did this, and whythey did that. We were quite aware of thisproblem between our parents that really re-flected the two sides of the family in a way.

These two people were in the crucible ofthat cognitive dissonance between these twofamilies and their divergent orientations tothe world. My father’s withdrawal fromCatholicism had made my mother more ofan anathema to his family, though theytreated her well. They didn’t treat her badly,but she felt everything was a slight. She hadbecome paranoid about them. I remember mybrother and I talking about how terrible it

was that all she could talk about was this ter-rible humiliation that she had gone through.She talked incessantly about it. It was a kindof an idée fixe with her. The more I thinkabout it, the more real it becomes that therewas this early, very early discord in our lives.

My brother handled it differently than Idid; in fact, he accommodated it more. Hewas younger, and he had a hard time whenhe was very young, because he was always theone who was crying, always the one in theway. I was always the one that was out doingthings, and he was the one who tagged along.Everybody was complaining about him, be-cause he just didn’t do anything right. But ashe got older, he was able to cope with themand deal with them more directly than I was.I became more and more rebellious about myfamily. He never rebelled. Later he did—much later, in his late teens and in hismarriage—but that was much later. He hada wonderful mind. Right now to this day, Icall him when I want to remember somethingaccurately that happened. He has a calendricmind. I mean, he can remember dates, timesand names and places, things that just escapeme most of the time.

I used to argue a lot with my family. Ididn’t argue much with my father because hewas non-responsive. He would just grunt.Well, sometimes he would get angry. Hewould argue a bit, but he was a Jesuitical ar-guer. I always felt totally at a loss when I hadeven ordinary discussions with my dad, be-cause he would go around and around in amost convoluted way and end up, in his mind,winning the argument, when really he hadsaid nothing. [laughter] And I used to be sofrustrated. Once you’d get him started, you’dget this speech from him, a monologue.When I look back, it was utter nonsense. Itsounded pontifical. I was aware of that whenI was young, when I was ten or twelve, and

33FAMILY DYNAMICS

in my teens, feeling it was hopeless to get intodiscussions with him about religion, aboutphilosophy. He would always become verypompous and sonorous. He would hold forth,and when he was through, I still hadn’t theslightest idea what he’d said. [laughter]

I think a lot of people get impatient withthat. I think that’s part of the business of go-ing on, is that you become impatient withbullshit. But, his wasn’t merely bullshit. Hemeant it. He didn’t know he was afraid ofcommitting himself to an idea, so he wouldgo around and around and around. If he feltthat you were wrong, and often he did andhe wanted to correct you, he didn’t know howto do it directly. He had to do it in this mostindirect, convoluted sort of a way, whereyou’d get lost. You didn’t know what he reallybelieved. So, I didn’t have much of a directconnection with him. Yet when I was twelveor so I created a kind of idealized version ofhim in my mind, particularly as a doctor, as aman who helped people and who really didcommit his time and energy to his professionin a way that few doctors do. He was a ruralphysician and surgeon later on, and he spenta tremendous amount of time with his pa-tients. But he neglected that aspect of his lifewith his family.

It was always confusing and mysteriousto me, because I was never sure where I stoodwith my father. I don’t think he was surewhere anybody stood with him. He hadtrouble with his two brothers, because he wasthe oldest and he had to deal with them al-most as a father. He had to correct them andadmonish them, and I suppose he felt thatthey were losers. They weren’t. Well, one ofthem was, turned out to be a ne’er-do-well;nice guy, though, Virgil. And then his otherbrother, Alfred, whom my father, again,looked down on like he would a youngerbrother who was never doing things right.

Alfred, when I was very young, was a starfootball player at the University ofCalifornia—Azevedo or “Aze” as he wascalled, the famous Portuguese football player.Later he became very important in the SanFrancisco school system and in the Demo-cratic Party, but my father never gave himcredit for that, always looked upon it some-how or other as a fluke. He also had a programon TV. My father couldn’t stand that. It justmade him furious to listen to Alfred holdcourt. Yet my father, himself, whenever hehad a chance to speak, they’d give him fif-teen minutes and he would be there twohours. He loved expounding, but he couldn’tstand his brother doing it, because his brothercould not possibly know anything.

I think he felt that way about both of hischildren too, that they were just not comingalong the way they should. He didn’t under-stand anything about the development ofchildren. [laughter] And the way he handledit was by just withdrawing, or now and thenhaving a kind of a rage. Seldom did he everspank us, and then only when my motherinsisted on it if we had done somethingwrong. He just wanted to leave us alone. Wewere to grow somehow like weeds in the field.And yet, because children do, I rememberidealizing him, his work and his career andhis determination, his hard work. And as kidsdo, if they’ve got a chance, they seek theheroic in parents. My mother helped in this.She helped create a myth about him. Shewanted us to admire him and to be loyal tohim, and she would sometimes try to explainhis behavior to us. But at the same time, inthe same breath, or at another time, shewould be in an absolute state of desperation.She’d have tears and hysterical rages over thefact that he was so difficult to get along with,because he was so silent; and he was gone somuch, and he didn’t talk to her about any-


thing. When he did, it would only upset him.And she was a very voluble, talkative per-son, very high strung, and very intelligent.So we had this feeling that she was trapped,that she had been trapped in a relationship.That was one part of it. Another part of itwas, of course, that we idealized her as thehelping, loyal wife and all that, the mother.

But do you think that when you were growingup you had this, these realizations? Or is this inretrospect?

Well later on in our early teens, we couldarticulate it to one another. We felt it. I re-member talking about it with my brother. Ifyour mother has tantrums and depressionsand locks herself in her room, you knowsomething is going wrong. Now, I’m sure thathappens in many families, but it was a dis-turbing thing during those years.

Did you have other relatives, aunts and uncles,that would try to explain it to you?

Yes. That she was high strung, and thatshe had always been a problem in the family.And yet everybody admired her because sheworked hard, and she always dressed well, andshe’d made all of our clothes, her house wasneat, and she did all the right things. So,there’s always this double entendre, youknow, about people. Also, about my father.They thought he was wonderful, and they’dalways tell her, “Don’t complain about him,he’s a fine man. Look what he’s doing, lookhow hard he works.” These were my aunts,the two aunts. They were always telling mymother, “What are you making such a fussover?” and, “How lucky you are.” But she feltthat she was unlucky. On the other hand,there were long periods of time where things

went very well, and we all had fun and didthings together.

Most of the time, my brother and myselfwere left alone, left to just do our own thing.In a way, I look back upon that with a cer-tain amount of delight. We had a lot of timeto ourselves, a lot of space. We could do allkinds of things. There were just a few thingsthat we got into trouble about, but if we fol-lowed certain rules we were left alone tothink, to do what we wanted, to wanderabout. And my rebellion was to run away.

Did they pack your bags for you? [laughter]

Well, not exactly. There was a pointwhen my father intervened. I must say thathe had some sense. Later in Oakland or inAlameda, when I said I was going to go, theysaid nothing. They just waited, and so I went.And when I came back, the door was locked.It was late, oh nine o’clock at night. The doorwas locked, and there was a pillow and a blan-ket outside, which was really clever of them.[laughter] That was to them a diagnostic fea-ture of my personality. I was a difficult person.And, of course, there was the family legendabout me. I had been born under strange cir-cumstances and from their point of view thiswas always problematic in a person. Lordknows what the Lord had in mind, you know.The devil did do it. At the same time it cre-ated sympathy for me. I think this is how myAunt Edith felt. Her child had died just be-fore I was born, and his name was Warren, soI got his name. I’m so glad, because mymother was going to name me Horace. Shewas reading the Harvard Classics at that time.When I think of it, I shiver. [laughter] Any-way, my Aunt Edith, really was very much asecond mother. When Helen was not well orshe and my father, Joe, would go away, Edith

35FAMILY DYNAMICS

was always taking care of me. So, I got to feelvery close to her. And there was not only theidea that I was replacing her own baby, butat the same time, there was always a kind ofdeep sympathy for me, because of how I’dbeen born and my mother was consideredsuch a problematic person.

You know, you said you moved around a lot,and this was characteristic of your youth, but itseems like in a small enough universe that youcould maintain contact with this extended family.

For the first few years, it was all aroundthe Bay Area, and, yes, we would keep see-ing the family, but our schools and our friendswere constantly changing. Our basic envi-ronment was changed, but there was alwaysthe family connection. That’s true. Thatmade some difference. And, my aunt, Edith,was really a port in a storm to me. When Iwas a little kid, two or three years old, andwe were living in Oakland, I would run awayand get lost. I would know that I was lost,and I’d be worried and crying. Then I wouldlook over and see her house, and I’d go to it.So, my folks always knew where to find me.[laughter] I was over at Aunt Edith’s. So, thatbusiness of running away, I don’t know why Ireally did it. But it might have had to do withthe lack of attention and . . . I don’t know.It’s hard to put those things together, but onecan guess.

My brother, he didn’t do that. He was justmiserable. He was just a miserable kid. Forexample, we’d go get ice cream cones. We’ddrive out to Berkeley. There was a place outin Berkeley where you got chocolate-covereddip cones. I think it was a partly dirt roadgoing out to Berkeley in those days—all farmsand marshes. And we’d go out on Sundays toget these cones. And almost every Sunday,while the rest of us were eating our cones,

my brother would hold his until it started tomelt. It would be melting and dripping allover him, and he’d scream and yell. He’d spoilthe day for us. I remember once my fatherreached back and grabbed his cone and threwit out the window of the car. And Don wouldscream some more. He was an unhappy kid.I think he was pretty much set aside by thefamily when he was very young. Later on thischanged. He worked very hard later on toget the approval of the family, accommodatedmuch more than I was able to do.

It was about that time that he and I be-gan to communicate with each other. Wegave one another a lot of mutual support;however, we also fought terrible battles.People say we came close to killing eachother. One time, my brother threw a frogspearing hook at me when I was driving awayon his bicycle. He was furious with me. Sohe threw this frog spear, and it stuck in myback. Now, that was a serious thing, youknow, close to homicide. [laughter] So, he’dhave these furies, and we’d fight tooth andnail—I mean batter each other, and peoplewould have to separate us. Sometimes we’dgo at it secretly in a room and quietly fightone another, so we could fight without get-ting into trouble. In fact, my Aunt Edithremembers us in our teens at a time when wehad to live together and sleep together up-stairs in this little, hot room of her house.We’d get into arguments, and she and myuncle said they’d hear us in the middle of thenight biff, biff, bock, bock [fighting sounds],with no one saying anything. However, whenthat wasn’t going on, he and I were able totalk a lot about things, about the family.

He was very smart. He had a good mindfor things that I didn’t—mathematics, sta-tistics, remembering details, methods. Takeour stamp collection, for example. He saysto this day that he wanted to organize the


stamps according to country, and I wantedto do it according to color. That’s his idea ofan insult—but he is wrong. I probably hadsome idea that color was significant. [laugh-ter] So, anyway, a lot of our early life wasoverwhelmed in a sense by family conflict andthe personalities of my mother and father—the drastically different personalities.

Was English spoken almost exclusively, or didyou hear other languages from the grandparents?

My Swedish grandmother had a hardtime with English, and we had a hard timewith her patois. Portuguese was spoken in myfather’s family, almost exclusively, but theyall spoke good English as well. My father, whowas a fluent Portuguese speaker, never spokeit in the home, and that’s part of this second-generation phenomenon.

Were you ever aware of your father dealing withany prejudices or ideas about him as a Portu-guese versus a WASP at Stanford?

He never talked about it, but others did.There was a woman doctor in Modesto, RuthSchmidt, who, when he was sick and dying,told us how he had gone to bat for her whenshe started her practice. When the other doc-tors were giving her a hard time as a woman,he was supporting her and helped her to getstarted. She just adored him, and she knewhe had similar problems when he started, asthe one non-Anglo doctor. Well, of course,he had a Portuguese family, and some ruraland uneducated Portuguese relatives as well,so he had that experience early in life.

I don’t remember either of my parentshaving any kind of prejudices against otherethnic groups. They’d grown up in very mixedneighborhoods in the Bay Area, amongimmigrants of all kinds. But my Aunt Edith,

oh, the Chinese terrified her. She couldn’tbear the Chinese. You don’t go to Chinatown,because they’ve got trap doors in the street,and women are taken down and sold intowhite slavery. You don’t eat Chinese food,because they have rats and bugs and, lordknows, cats and things. She never got overthat. My Aunt Edith was a marvelously dottywoman. I loved her dearly, but she was dotty.She had a narrow, little life, but she was won-derfully generous to us. You go by what peopleare to you. But she had trouble about racialminorities. My mother and father, as far as Iknow, if they had them, they didn’t expressthem to us.

So you don’t feel like you grew up with any atti-tudes yourself?

No. Just in the family, just in the rest ofthe family. My Swedish grandparents and theothers were outspokenly critical of other mi-norities. They had tags for all of them: Poles,Chinks, Irish, and Catholics. Oh, those aw-ful, dirty Catholics, and here my mother hadmarried one, you know. But they learned toget along with him. They admired him, be-cause he was a hard working successful man,and he wasn’t a real practicing Catholic, youknow. Yes, there was a lot of that. Those werethe prejudices of that period, but my parentsseemed relatively free of them.

Kd: Didn’t your father threaten to sendyou to military school?

Oh, that was in Palo Alto. Yes, because Ihad been so bad. Well, my brother had beenbad, too, but it was always my fault, becauseI was the oldest. I always got blamed for whathe did, and he always told on me whatever Idid. But I got into some kind of trouble.Maybe it was this business of constantly go-

37FAMILY DYNAMICS

ing down to the creek, or I don’t know, dif-ferent things.

But anyway, my father had a lot of troublewith disciplining us. I don’t know how hedisciplined his brothers and sisters. It musthave been an ugly scene, because he prob-ably just got glowering angry and glared atthem. Something like that. I don’t think hewould ever physically hit. The few times Iwas spanked was when my mother insistedon it, and he would reluctantly take us into aroom and give us a few slaps and that was all.Strange man. Later on, I had no troublespanking my kids. In fact, I regret it to thisday. I feel guilty about spanking them.

So one time, he says, “Get in the car.”He and my mother seemed to have workedthis out, and he put both of us in the backseat. They had little bags packed.

And my mother said, “We’re taking youto the military school.”

There was a military school near town.There were terrible stories about how hard it

was for these kids, and how sad they were tobe away from their families, and that theywere all kids who were put there because theirparents couldn’t do anything with them. Sohere they were taking us to the militaryschool. I must have been about seven. I re-member that my brother was crying, and wewere both scared. And I was thinking, “Theydon’t mean, they can’t mean this. They don’t,they aren’t going to do this.” I remember tell-ing myself, “Don’t give in. I am not going tobe scared of it. I know that it is not going tohappen.”

And as they drove they kept talking abouthow sorry they were they had to do it, butthey just had to. But I just was quiet and justwaited. And sure enough, just before we gotthere, my father said, “Well, we’ve changedour mind.” And I had a sense of tremendousvictory, an inner assurance that I knew it wasnot going to be that way. So, yes. Those arethe little things.

4MOVING AROUND

GUESS WE WENT to San Franciscoafter Alameda. Yes, because I wasyounger in Alameda. And in Alameda,

other side of the world and outside into thecosmos. I remember seeing a little ad in somemagazine about the American RocketSociety and Robert Goddard, and I sent theslip in with my name, and I think I becamethe youngest member of the AmericanRocket Society—one dollar a year. I wish Ihad my membership card. And I would getthis little circular every now and then aboutrockets and rocketships.

I, Donald, and our friend, Steven Mills,who was an Hawaiian kid we liked verymuch, would sit around making drawings ofrocketships. I still have them. They werewonderful. I was terribly absorbed and mys-tified by the problem of how you could havea propeller inside of a closed vehicle, and howyou could route the air so that you weredriven forward. Why won’t that work whereyou have the stream of air from this big pro-peller going through a series of tunnels andthen around the skin of the ship and to thefront and just circulating? Wouldn’t that pressyou forward? It wasn’t until years later thatsomebody who knew something about phys-ics explained to me how it just won’t work.

Iwith the Mollers next door, my friend, Clyde,and I began to be interested in space, in outerspace, of course. I ran away a number of timesin Alameda, and the idea of spaceships some-how engrossed me. I don’t know what I wasreading or seeing. There were comic booksin those days about spaceships. Buck Rogers,I guess. Or was that later? And also FlashGordon. I was into this business of spaceships,going to the moon, to Mars or Venus. Oh,Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs,maybe I was reading those things at that time.But somehow that was just the beginning ofit.

It was in San Francisco, a little later, thatI got very interested in space travel andthings. I had been reading Edgar RiceBurroughs and H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.We had the whole sets in our family, and Ihad also started going to the libraries. Thiskind of imaginative thing really attracted me,because it really was getting away. This wasreally running away. This was getting to the


So, I drew a lot of ships that had big pro-pellers inside, and a little place for people tosit, and a very strong nose for landing. Thatoccupied a lot of my imagination at the time.I was determined to get off the planet. Itcouldn’t be another town; I was going to getoff the planet. [laughter] That was a wonder-ful period. It went on for a couple of years. Iguess I was about eight to eleven or so, whenwe were in San Francisco and even inOakland, until I was about twelve. I’d ma-tured a bit by that time. I’d decided balloonswere the way to go, because I couldn’t handlerockets.

I remember we tried to make a balloonin my Aunt Jenny’s basement. We had oldsheets and canvas that we sewed together.This was inside a basement, and we had avery heavy gondola made out of old boards,and we were going to blow up this balloonwith the gas jet. [laughter] This is what kidsdo. We could have blown up the neighbor-hood. The thing is, we could never get thegas to stay inside. We didn’t know how tomake it air tight. But this was all a businessof getting us off the ground and off the planet.I found that terribly absorbing, and I think Igot my brother excited about it, too, al-though, he was much more intelligent aboutit. Nevertheless, he went along with thesethings.

So, at that point, I think I was doing alot of reading. I was reading Dickens andJoseph Conrad. These were around my par-ents’ house. And, oh, James Oliver Curwood,a wonderful series, and Jack London’sAlaskan stories, about animals, from thepoint of view of animals. That was in SanFrancisco when my father was interning atthe S.P. Hospital—the Southern PacificHospital, out near the panhandle. The pan-handle of Golden Gate Park was our greatrange. We’d spend a whole day going out

through Golden Gate Park, getting bamboospears and chasing the peacocks to pull theirfeathers and doing all sorts of wonderfulthings. Out at the Japanese Tea Garden wefound frog’s eggs and little tad poles, and we’dbring home jars of them and watch the eggshatching. We’d play in the trees like Tarzan.That was when the Tarzan series was in themovies. Back in the late 1920s there was thatweird Tarzan who wore a bear skin. What washis name? Lincoln or something. A terribleversion of Tarzan. Oh, we had read all of theTarzan books. But, anyway, we were Tarzansand explorers out there in Golden Gate Park.

We were there one year, while my fatherwas interning at Southern Pacific Hospital.He wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Hehadn’t quite finished, and we were at a kindof impasse, so he decided to help his father,and we went to Oakland and lived in a placecalled Rockridge in a nice house there. Hehelped his father keep his practice, becausemy grandfather was failing.

My father carried his practice for a yearor so, but he was looking for a place wherehe could open his own practice. Finally hegot his medical degree and passed his stateexams. Then, of course, the question waswhere was he going to practice? This was in1932 or 1933. The Depression was still go-ing on. That’s why he was helping his father,because his father had all the equipment. Buthis practice was falling apart, and there wasno money. I don’t know whether he reallyhelped him get back on his feet or not. Butanyway, that’s where we were. Then he de-cided that he better get into his own practice.

Finally, some of his relatives, said, “Whydon’t you go to Modesto in the valley? Thereare a lot of Portuguese there, and you will bethe only Portuguese doctor.” My father didn’tlike this at all. He didn’t want to be thePortuguese doctor somewhere, the token doc-

41MOVING AROUND

tor. Yet he spoke fluent Portuguese and thename of his family was known, so he finallydecided to try Modesto. He and my motherleft us with my Aunt Edith in Oakland andwent to Modesto to see what it was like. Theyhad a tiny apartment, a basement apartmentwhile he was searching around. He met a lotof Portuguese families who not only wel-comed him but begged him to come, so hehad this feeling that maybe that was the placeto go. He had no money, so he had to rent aspace next to a dentist who had a large officeand let him use part of it. My brother and I,we were still going to Clairmont Junior HighSchool on College Avenue in Oakland. Ienjoyed that place and got along pretty wellthere. I had some friends. They had a won-derful library, the Clairmont Public Library,and I spent hours in that library, because itwas boring at my aunt’s place. I would stayafter school and before school and on theweekends. I think I read everything in thedamn library.

As for my teachers, I don’t recall themwell. In Palo Alto, when I was in early gradeschool, I remember how they looked, but Ican’t remember their names. And I don’t re-call any particular relationship with them,except the teacher who used to put me un-der her desk all the time for being out of order.Then there was the school I enjoyed inAlameda. I remember the looks of the teach-ers, two or three of them, but not their names.I just enjoyed myself and did my work. AtClairmont Junior High, I don’t remember anyteachers at all but I do remember the kidsthat I got to know. We used to tool up anddown College Avenue and get hamburgers.And then I spent a lot of time in the library.As far as I recall, the school was all white. Infact, all through my early schooling, I don’tremember any minorities. There must havebeen at least a few, but they didn’t register.

As for being a “Portugee,” that tag had dimin-ished after I got to junior high school. Nowand then somebody would say something like,“You’re Portuguese, aren’t you?” but in afriendly way. I don’t remember any hostileribbing, because I didn’t look Portuguese, Iguess.

My parents voted for Roosevelt, and theywere excited about the New Deal. I wouldsay they were moderately liberal politically,but I don’t recall any extensive discussionsabout politics, except the war, the first WorldWar. You know, how the politicians havegotten us into it and all that. I don’t recall itbeing talked about very much.

The key thing that was on everybody’sminds that we knew was that the war wascreated by old politicians while young peopledied. It was created not just by misunder-standings, but by evil intent, people with evilintent or people who didn’t care what hap-pened to others. War could be avoided, butit wasn’t. Every effort should be made to keepthere from being another war. Another warwould destroy the world, so people had toresist war. Well, that made a lot of conscien-tious objectors, and I was one. In fact, myson was one later. I suppose I influenced himin a way, but that was my feeling. It was likemany of my friends felt. It wasn’t politicized.We didn’t talk about political movements oranything like that. It was the general feel-ing. We had strong feelings about ethical andmoral issues.

I liked staying with my Aunt Edith andmy Uncle Armand. He had a lifetime jobwith Pacific Gas & Electric. He was an ac-countant and office worker who left at exactlysix in the morning to catch the bus to goacross the Bay on a ferry to San Franciscoand got home every night at six fifteen. Andmy aunt would have breakfast on the tablein the morning, and she’d have dinner on


the table at a certain time every night. Andmy brother and I tried to adjust to this amaz-ing household.

We were a bit looser in our own house. Imean, even when I was twelve or thirteen, Ithought, “This is an awful life.” Poor AuntEdith was a bird in a cage, you know, but sheliked it. She was very comfortable in her life.She felt that she was doing the right thing.And we ate well there. She fed us magnifi-cently. She said she cooked for us, becauseher husband was an Englishman. She alwaysput it that way, “You know, they eat very little,and they’re very picky.” He wouldn’t eat verymuch, and she loved to eat. She loved to goto delicatessens and bring home differentthings. So, when we were there, we were theexcuse, and we had this great food all thetime. I remember her partly for that and alsoher many kindnesses. She was a very gener-ous woman and loved kids. She was always alot of fun and took us places, places that therest of the family didn’t have time to go to ordidn’t want to do. She would take us to themovies and shows that my grandparentsdidn’t want us to go to. I saw Clara Bow whenI was eight or nine years old. Dancing ladiesand all that kind of thing in those terriblystuffy little movie houses where the film wasbreaking every ten minutes, and black andwhite film and no sound. She’d take me, be-cause my brother was always whining. Andthen we’d look around all the stores and doall kinds of wonderful things and then comehome and not tell my Uncle Armand.

I always wanted to go to sea, like my greatgrandfather, being a whaler, an adventurer. Iwas always wild about the idea of travelingsome place—out beyond the Golden Gate.But here were my parents in Modesto. Mymother wrote very long letters about what itwas like, trying to prepare us for the place.Really very nice, terribly hot and all that. She

liked the farms, like her parents had comefrom. Nice letters. I wonder if I still have someof those. So then the time came when wewent down to visit. We were shocked to seemy mother in this basement apartment. It wasdown some steps, under a house. But she hadfixed it up neat and clean. She had a tablecloth, and flowers, but I felt very sad. I feltshe was doing this to cover up the fact thatthey hadn’t made it yet, you see. Yet it wasvery nice.

I remember she had fresh strawberries,and she was very happy that here was a farm-ing area. They had enormous, ripe strawberriesand fresh cream, and she was very proud ofherself about all these things. Fresh fruit,which I remember Modesto for. We ateoranges and peaches and plums and tanger-ines and pomegranates, fresh vegetables. Wewere surrounded by miles of orchards, farms,and irrigation ditches.

There were a lot of Portuguese there.Modesto was an old California community.Modesto was a hundred years old when wethere. It started in the mid-eighteen hun-dreds. There were thousands of Portugueseon ranches and farms, the mines and workgangs. Not just Modesto, but Manteca, CeresTurlock, and Knights Ferry and all those littletowns. Modesto was the central, rural town.My father was still trying to get an office go-ing and make connections. He had a positivereaction from the Portuguese farmers andranchers, and he decided to stay. So, mybrother and I went down, and they got a littlehouse. They were paying something likethirty dollars a month for it. That was sub-stantial in those days. It was a little clapboardhouse on Magnolia Avenue, I remember.

I don’t know the exact date when wewent down. I was fourteen years old, so it wasprobably 1933, 1934. We went down in thesummer, and it was so hot. It was just like an

43MOVING AROUND

oven, yet it was beautiful, all these orchardseverywhere and ranches. We had been veryurban, so this was really a culture shock. ButI recall that we’d take cold baths. There wereno showers—I don’t think that people tookshowers in those days. Showers were a fancything that came later, or maybe at the schoolgym or in the army. But we’d fill the tub withcold water and lie in it just to cool off beforeyou went out. Of course, nobody knew any-thing about deodorants and things like that.You were always sweating, and you had tochange your clothes a lot. People took a bathonce a week in those days. I mean, when Iwas a little kid, they’d make hot-water baths,and my brother and I and my parents wouldall take baths in the same water, you know.It took a lot of electricity to heat up water. Iremember the big pots poured in the tub towarm the water. We didn’t have a hot-waterheater there.

But in Modesto, this little house was allright, very small—something like the one inPalo Alto—and near an irrigation ditchwhich became really our major area of recre-ation. We’d swim in the irrigation ditch. Itwas just half a block away. Beyond that wasall vineyards. Now it’s all built up, one largetown all the way up to the mountains, but inthose days that was all vineyards and orchardsand ranches beyond the ditch right where wewere. It was so hot in the summer that wecould hardly move, and it took us a while toget acclimated.

But then my father had this little officenext to the dentist office, the dentist whoput in all my gold fillings by exchangingmedical care from my father for the fillingsin my teeth. He put gold in almost every-thing, and my dentists today look at my teethand say that’s the finest job they ever saw.They tell me to stay out of dark alleys. Anddon’t smile. That was all done by barter.

Then my father needed somebody to bein the office when he was on calls and toanswer the phone. So, for about two monthsduring the summer, I was his secretary. I wouldput on a clean shirt, wear white pants andwhite shoes, which was the way you dressedup in those days in that area. And I’d walk acouple of miles down into town, to his office,to this one room that he had. The phonedidn’t ring very much, but when it did I hadto answer and make record of it. I felt veryproud of myself. When he was there withpatients, all Portuguese, they adored him.They treated him like God. You know, “Oh,doctor, thank you, God bless you.”

Most of them were poor. We got verylittle money. For that first year or two, I thinkmost of our income was in the form of food.We got meat, which we had to keep in theicebox. We had to get ice. My mother usedto complain about how much the ice cost,but you had to have it. And we’d get meat,vegetables, and boxes of fruit. I remembereating twenty oranges a day. I loved them,because they’re cool, and when they’re juicy,fresh, wonderful. Grapes—we had so muchthey would rot, and my mother would givethem away to tramps that would come to thedoor. She would give away the food, becausewe had very little money.

Sometimes she had to borrow from hersisters. We couldn’t borrow from my father’speople anymore, because they were reallybroke. My grandmother had seen to that.[laughter] In fact, a few years later, my fatherhad to support her. She lost her house andall that. So, they were really in a crunch, andthis was mid Depression. It was the worst ofthe Depression. But I remember getting a realrespect for what it meant to have done whatmy father did to get himself through medicalschool, and then go out to a place like thiswhere he had to establish himself, establish


a practice with nothing. Just from scratch.We were really living from hand to mouth,but I don’t think we ever were hungry, but itwas all what people gave us at that point. Ithink we always ate well. I remember want-ing things we didn’t have, but there wasalways food.

We didn’t see much of the extended fam-ily, because that was a long distance in thosedays. That was a two-hour drive in one ofthose funny old cars to get out to Modesto inthe 1930s. A lot of it was dirt road. I didn’tdrive at that point. We didn’t have anothercar, and my father needed this one badly. Hewasn’t going to let one of his kids tool aroundin it.

I remember going out with him on housecalls during that period. It was probably theclosest to him that I ever got, during that yearwhen I was sort of helping him, and he wasvery nice to me in his way. This was in thesummer and partly when I’d just started go-ing to Modesto High School. After schoolsometimes I’d go to his office and help, andhe would have house calls. We had a phone,which again cost more money than we had,but he had to have it, and he’d get calls allnight long. I remember him getting up at two,three in the morning, sometimes four or fivetimes, and going out to all these distant farms.Sometimes I went with him if it was earlierin the evening. I’d go out with him, and I

had this wonderful sense of watching what Ithought was noble work—going out, deliv-ering a child, the family crying and mourningabout the pain that the woman was goingthrough, the men outside trembling and theycouldn’t go in because the woman wouldn’tlet the men in the house.

I had the feeling that I was seeing anotherpart of the world which I was terribly curiousabout. It was also a period when I was able toidealize my father to some degree, eventhough he was still the most taciturn, unre-sponsive character that the world everproduced. There was very little conversationwith him. I remember writing a story aboutgoing out with him, and I read it to him. Hesaid something like, “That’s pretty good,” andthat’s all. That’s where it ended. I was veryproud of it. I think I still have it. It was wellwritten. I was about fourteen, I guess. It wasthe beginning of my interest in writing. So,that part of the experience was pleasant. Ihad a feeling of being involved, that we weresort of doing something, all of us, together.And my mother felt good during that periodlike she was important. She was for the firsttime out of the realm of the influence of herfamily—away from both families, which wasprobably very good for her. I don’t rememberus being visited much up there. That was ahard trip for anybody to make.

5HIGH SCHOOL

HEN I WAS in high school inModesto. That was the beginning ofan awakening. I was there long

no help. They had gruesome stories abouthow terrible it was, and how you were goingto die. Oh my god. [laughter] What an era!

It was then I ran across Havelock Ellis inthe library, a wonderful, fortuitous thing. Butthere in the most lugubrious and formal lan-guage everything is explained, yet put into amoral framework where you better watch out.The devil will get you. Not that Ellis did this,but his oblique exposition with mysteriousfootnotes in Latin left much to the imagina-tion. I forget the titles of the book or twothat I read, but that library was a mine. I readeverything. I knew parts of the library thatnobody else in my generation knew. [laugh-ter]

That’s when I was not only into HavelockEllis, but learned what little I knew aboutsex, and a lot of it badly, because you don’tlearn that way. But at least it put me at ease.I knew that I wasn’t going to die or go crazy—that it was all right sometimes—thatmasturbation was not something one shoulddo, but it happened and you don’t go crazy orbecome a moron, as my family might havetold me. Or go blind, yes, like all the kids

Tenough so that I could go through highschool, going to one school and having a lotof friends, all the way through high school.That was four years in which I developed anenvironment for myself. I did a lot of read-ing. The Modesto library was absolutelymarvelous. I spent hours and hours there.One of my first readings was Havelock Ellis.That’s how I learned about sex, because Icouldn’t talk about sex with my father, andasking my mother would have been out ofthe question in those days. And my brotherwas more ignorant about such matters thanI.

My folks didn’t know how to talk to kids.My mother would say some things indirectlyat times, but they seemed horrendous andscary things. She should have had a daugh-ter, you know. Two boys were just a little bitbeyond her ken, and my father didn’t knowwhat children were. I remember wanting totalk to my father about nocturnal emissions.I was worried about it, and my friends were


that have glasses on at school. [laughter] Andyour friends telling you what their parents ortheir buddies said—you know, your dick willfall off and all that. But anyway I think thatI got so that I was able to tell others what thefacts were. But still, it was a terrible time forthat sort of thing, you know. You didn’t reallyknow. You had to go to a source like that tobe told that it was a natural thing. That wasa relief. At the same time, it was loaded withmoralism, even Havelock Ellis. I remember,there was the admonition, “You must be verycareful, you know. You’ll have to avoidthings,” and on and on.

So, anyway, that’s why the Modestolibrary was a great source. Oh, that’s where Igot into mysticism. I ran across a book calledThe History of Oriental Religion, by WillDurant. I read through this big, thick vol-ume about Buddhism and the various sectsof Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, et cetera. Iwas fascinated by all this. It gave me a per-spective on Christianity. About that sametime I began to read Robert Ingersoll, thegreat atheist. My parents were reading HarryEmerson Fosdick and all those help-yourself,spiritual-uplift books, and I was readingRabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet. Ithought he was wonderful, and Donald wasalso reading him after I found his work inthe library.

I was also very much involved withRichard Halliburton’s book, Royal Road to Ro-mance, traveling and doing all theseadventuresome things. Then there was SvenHedin, the explorer in Tibet. I devoured it. Iwas going to go to Tibet, to Lhasa, if it killedme. I was going to get there. Oh, the Rubaiyat,Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayam, andthen a lot of crazy things like Don Blanding.His poetry from Hawaii got me all involvedin Polynesian fantasies. Also James NormanHall and Charles Nordhoff ’s South Seas

Adventures. And, of course, Roy ChapmanAndrews across the Gobi Desert! Oh, andthe theosophist, Madame Blavatsky. I gotvery much involved in that. It really fasci-nated me, because it was so mysterious andwonderful, another language.

So I began to think of myself as some-thing of a mystic, that I might become aBuddhist, or follow a guru and do the earlySwami days thing. And there was a couple,the Ballards—their first names I don’t re-member—who led the I Am Society, and theRosicrucians were very active at that point.A friend of mine, Pierce Young, and I wentdown once. We were very interested in theRosicrucians. They did such marvelousthings. We’d see these ads in the paper abouthow you could influence the world aroundyou. I must have been about sixteen or sev-enteen at the time. We drove down to SanJose. That’s where their temple was. We wentinto this building where they were having aconvention in a great big amphitheater.Everyone was sitting around trying to put acandle out down in the arena. They were allconcentrating on that candle. And we satthere respectfully intent, but we always man-aged to get each other giggling, and somehowor other, after about fifteen minutes of look-ing at the candle, we looked at each otherand we started giggling. We couldn’t controlit. You know what you’re like at that age. Imean it was absolutely irrepressible. Both ofus were rolling on the floor. We were led out,and we got out on the lawn and rolled aroundfor fifteen minutes or so. I remember, youknow, this double sense one has. The one thatyou want to believe because it’s so marvelousand it fits in with other things you’ve beenreading and thinking, but also you’re veryaware of reality. That damn candle is notgoing to go out that way, you know? I alwaysremember that as being a moment of truth,

47HIGH SCHOOL

like telling my grandmother, “Mama, youwere sleeping.” It just ain’t so. On the otherhand, it was a beautiful experience seeingpeople trying to blow out a candle. There’ssomething kind of holy about watchingpeople who believe it can happen.

When I was at Berkeley I got to knowSwami Ashokananda. I am not sure of thename, but there was a Vedanta center inBerkeley at the time, and I remember goingthere quite a bit. Yes, that stayed with me fora while. This part of my interest was mysti-cal. It was a way of handling the religiousmillennialism of my grandparents. The I Ampeople possibly were millennialists in thesense they thought there was a colony ofLemurians living in Mt. Shasta who hadspace ships and all that. At some point, theywere going to emerge again and cleanse theworld. Aside from fundamentalists like mygrandparents, these were the onlymillennialists I remember. I don’t recall if anyof the other mystical groups that I was inter-ested in thought in millennial terms, but theymay have.

Nevertheless there was this strugglingwith religion through mystical alternativesand finding a new level for myself. I remem-ber arguing with my mother about it, andsometimes my father whenever I could gethim involved. But all I’d get from him wouldbe these long, lugubrious philosophical ser-mons that I couldn’t understand, and it endedup where in some way he was always rightabout something that I had questioned. Heloved to converse as long as he could workout this weird, Jesuitical type of solution thathe always had. I don’t really understand him,so I really shouldn’t talk too much about it,except that it didn’t register on me. And mymother would argue a lot about these things,you know, how it wasn’t really Christian.

There were these very excited discussionswith my mother, and often my brother wouldbe in on it. He was sort of on the side linesbeing a referee. I think she was glad that Iwas interested in anything that was spiritual,but she wanted it to be more Christian. Shefelt that I was moving away, and I was. I wasmoving into the stratosphere, into the cos-mos, where I wanted to be rather than downin those little houses and Sunday schools. Shewas very bright but very conservative in away, religiously. At the same time, she un-derstood that there were many ways oflooking at things, and she’d done a lot of read-ing in philosophy, so she liked thephilosophical search aspect of it. But she al-ways wanted to bring it back to thefundamental Christian thing. Like her fam-ily said, “You’ve got to be saved.” You have tobelieve in Jesus Christ, you have to believein the scripture and all that, even though youmight have doubts, and even though youmight have other ideas, fine, but you have tocome back to that. Well, I didn’t want tocome back to that. I thought I was leavingthat.

So I would argue a lot, and I was quiterebellious on that level. I was determined tomake my points now and then with my fa-ther, but he would just sort of mumble. Hedidn’t have much to say. He had too manyproblems about that himself, his whole prob-lem with Catholicism. His problem wastrying to absorb the orientation of mymother’s people, and he liked that, and hegot along with them, and they respected him.But he wasn’t comfortable with any ideol-ogy. He had an awful time with any kind ofreligious ideology. He would try to talk to meabout such things, but I could just tell it waslike pulling teeth. And as I say, he wouldbabble on in this pontifical way of his that I


always thought was nonsense. It really wasn’t,but it sounded to me like he didn’t want toface facts, didn’t want to face realities. Soanyway, there was a lot of that. I got verymuch involved in that.

In high school in Modesto I have somerecollections of people. One clear recollec-tion is an old professor, Willie Brown, whowas the physics professor, a great hulk of aman, a big shambling kind of a guy. He hadthe lab and a classroom. His classroom wasfull of marvelous things—skeletons andstuffed animals—and the lab was full of testtubes and Bunsen burners. It was a fabulousplace to be in. At that point I still had somenotion that maybe I was going to go on intomedicine, so I had to take physics and chem-istry. He taught chemistry and physics, and Ireally responded to him. He was a very gruffguy. “Azevedo!” he would say . . . . I wasAzevedo in those days, because there weretoo many Portuguese around who haddropped the “d”, and my father dropped his.“Azevedo, what about this, and what aboutthat?” and he’d ball me out for things thatI’d do in the lab, but he was always watchingbecause he liked me. He thought I had prom-ise. I found the specific gravity of something,some metal ball that he dropped in water. Idon’t even know what it is today, but I workedout the specific gravity to his satisfaction.And when we got around to physiology—healso taught that—I remember I was the onewho went out to the slaughterhouse and gota cow’s eye, a great big cow’s eye, and startedreading about lenses and the structure of theeye. And I dissected the cow’s eye before theclass. He was very impressed, but he was toogruff to say so. “Now that’s a pretty good dem-onstration as far as it goes.” I really liked him.He never gave a real compliment. It was al-ways off hand.

I learned one thing from him that I’venever forgotten. He used to put things on theboard that we were supposed to copy into ournotebooks. The whole class would be therecopying. And I would copy, and I’d look up,and I’d copy and look up. Then he’d say,“Azevedo, I’ve got to tell you and the classone thing. You look at that board, and youget a whole sentence in your head before youput your eyes down on the paper. Otherwise,you are going to break your neck!” He was soright. I learned from that time on even whenI’m typing to look and get at least six wordsor seven words, and not to look up every time.Otherwise, you’ll break your neck! He was awonderful character.

When my grandfather’s medical officewas being dismantled, they were taking thingsout of it and selling them, and one of theitems was an old roentgen X-ray tube. Ibegged for it. A beautiful thing, you know. Abig bulb, two terminals on each end. It wasstill working, and I loved the thing. I made afine wooden platform for it, and I had it as akind of a display in my little room at home. Iwas very proud of it. Anyway, I took it to oldWillie Brown, and he said, “Oh, let’s see whatwe can do with that.” And he rigged it up,and he made a fluoroscope. It worked. Thewhole class was showing the bones in theirhands. There must now be a number ofpeople with cancer, you know. [laughter]

My father lost his hair by playing withthe same tube when he was a young guy help-ing his father with the first X-ray machine inthe East Bay. So, here we were all looking atour hands, walking in front of it, seeing ourskeletons. My brother claims that it couldn’tbe, that didn’t happen, but I remember thisclearly. Yes, Donald says, “Oh, it couldn’thave happened. He couldn’t even have got-ten it going.”

49HIGH SCHOOL

I says, “Willie Brown got it going. I wasthere!”

“How did he get an image?” I said hemade some kind of a sheet or a florescentscreen. “Well, I never heard or saw such athing,” says Don. [laughter] But it happened.It actually happened, and for two or threedays there were these demonstrations goingon in that classroom with students comingin. How times change. So I remember WillieBrown very clearly. I liked him a lot, and Ilearned from him not to look up at everyword, not to break my neck.

Then there was Miss Johnson. See, I canremember the teachers there. She was thedrama coach, and she was an interesting largewoman. These are all “Miss.” All the womenteachers at that time were Miss. I rememberone married one, Mrs. Hardy, who was themusic coach. She was a Mrs., but all the restwere Miss, Miss. So, Miss Johnson, a sort of alarge, heavy-set woman with a kind of apretty, big, round face, and she taught dramaand put the plays on.

I was reading Don Blanding, this maud-lin poet, a sentimental, romantic character.But it was about the islands, and I was all hipon going to Hawaii or to the South Seas. Andshe let me and my girlfriend, Bobbie Jean,put up a bunch of palm fronds in her class-room. We made a hut, and I got a Victrola,and I played some hula music, and I wouldread Don Blanding. Miss Johnson wouldbring in class after class. She got me out ofmy other classes to give readings to all of herclasses. I felt wonderful, and I was readingabout the islands, you know, and hulas, andmoonlight and sea. Oh! Bobbie Jean danced.[laughter]

Bobbie Jean Miller. Bobbie Jean Miller,who became a friend of both Kathy and meat one time, was an energetic woman and verybright. Her parents had open house where

all the kids could go and do absolutely wildthings, where you could get away with mur-der. I learned to drive in her family’s car, thatold Ford. You could do anything in her house.It was a southern family. They were kind ofrural, Midwestern types, and very nice andall that, but they’re a little different from theother people around.

Bobbie Jean was a very bright, energeticyoung woman, and she had lots of friends.That’s where I met Kathy for the first time,through Bobbie Jean. Kathy was staying ather house. I don’t know if she remembers methen, but I do remember her. A dancer, shewas really a gorgeous creature. But it was alittle early for me even to be interested ingorgeous creatures. And she would havedanced there at Miss Johnson’s class if she’dbeen in my high school. But Betty MayAnderson danced there, and Bobbie Jean.

“A dancer, she was really a gorgeous creature.”Kathy d’Azevedo.


They danced with skirts that they had madefrom palm fronds, and they did hulas, while Iread Don Blanding. Miss Johnson loved it.She thought it was so marvelous and talentedof us to have done this. [laughter] So, I en-joyed her class, and I was in a number of playsin school, probably because of her.

Oh, and another thing about MissJohnson is that she took one summer to goto Tahiti. So, this young maid school teacherwent to Tahiti, and when she came back weasked her how it was, and she would lookmysterious. We all guessed that she must havehad some kind of thing going on, or shewanted us to think so. Miss Johnson madeher mark on my mind. And a number ofothers. Miss Peron, I will never forget her.She was our French teacher, and she was won-derful. I wish I had spent another year withher. I might be able to actually read and speakFrench with some fluency. Now I merelystumble through it. She was marvelous. Alittle skinny woman. She looked like a reed,and she had a little tiny mouth, you know,intoning “pum, pume, puce.” And she’d tellus stories about Paris. She would go everysummer to Paris and come back with thesefabulous stories of food and la Tour Eiffel, andthe Musée, the Louvre, and all that. We allthought she was kind of funny, but she taught,and I remember her. Her teaching methodwas excellent. She knew how to teach a lan-guage. I took German with someone else. Inever learned any German, and yet I passedthe German exam for my degree. Well, Iknow how I did it, but we’ll get to that someother time.

There was Miss Painter, who was incharge of the school newspaper and the year-book. I became the editor of the schoolnewspaper. I wrote editorials, which shewould edit and change. I fought with her all

the time, because they weren’t mine; theywere hers. She would change them. She’d say,“Well, your grammar is terrible, and you can’tsay those kinds of things,” when I would talkabout the problems in the school and all that.So when I’d look at them, they just didn’tsound like me at all. So, anyway, I was theeditor of the school paper.

The one minority I remember is TsugimiAkaki, a Japanese girl. Very smart, veryhardworking, and she really did most of thework. She was good. I would help lay out thepaper, but she actually would lay it out. Halfthe time I didn’t know what I was doing. Butwe had a very good paper, mainly because ofher and Miss Painter, who was a “QueenVictoria” about the whole thing.

And there was one African-American.Her name was Samantha Henderson. Shewas a light-skinned mulatto African-Ameri-can, who was a brilliant, top student. She gotA’s in everything and was very reserved. No-body really got to know her. I tried to knowher, because she was very interesting, and Idon’t know, I just had some feeling I wantedto know her. She was very aloof and cool.When she’d leave school, we didn’t knowwhere she lived. Samantha Henderson.Funny how you remember certain people.She reminds me of the story by GertrudeStein called Melanotha about a black woman.Somehow or other, I related that toSamantha later, when I read Stein.

There were some Portuguese and Italiansat the school. There was Joe Gallo, of theGallo Winery. I knew Joe off and on. He wasItalian, and I was Portugee. Now and thenwe’d go out to the vineyards, and he wouldsnitch a jug of dago red from the winery.Really, in those days, dago red! The Galloswere still doing jug wine. And we’d go outand lie in the grape vineyards and drink. He

51HIGH SCHOOL

would get drunk, and I would just sort of drinkwhat I could of the stuff. But we’d talk a lotabout life and things. [laughter]

Joe Gallo was the disgruntled youngerson. That was where my friend, Pierce Young,was going, too. And the now lawyer, NickStephans, the Greek kid, and another whosename I can’t remember. Nevertheless, therewere four or five guys. We had a little groupwhich we called the Minks. That was reallyracy, because we were saying, you know, wewere all so sexy. We were the Minks. So wewould fool around town in a car, cruise upand down the main street. Nothing wouldhappen, but we were always talking aboutwomen and sex. I don’t think any of us, wellmaybe at that point Nick did, but none ofthose guys had a real girlfriend or knew anywoman they could get real close to. But howwe could talk! Could they talk a big line, andyou’d think that every one of us was what wecalled launce-men. Nevertheless, that wasgood experience.

I liked that bunch. We had a good time.We went to somebody’s house every weekwhere our mothers would make dinner forus. My mother made a wonderful dinner, andwe sat around being big shots and even had alittle wine. And we’d go out to the roadhousedances together. We’d go to meet girls anddance, because you’d find all these farm girlsat the dances. At that time the pop musicwas crooners, big bands and crooners. If Iheard the music, I’d know that that was theperiod. But it was pre-country music. It wasn’tcountry music. Oh! We didn’t listen to that!I didn’t get a taste for that till Kathy and Iused to go across country to Evanston in the’50s and we’d listen to all this marvelousMidwestern and southern music and got tolove it. But nobody I knew listened to coun-try music or even the blues. It was just Okiemusic. Or, music by blacks. It had to be fil-

tered through, you know, like the Presleything later. White—black, white men withblack hearts sort of a thing.

So with this group I really began to getaround a little bit, and I had a couple of girl-friends, but I didn’t smoke until I wasnineteen or twenty. No, I didn’t smoke at all.Didn’t care to.

Then I was in plays. I was in operettas atthe high school, and I was in sports. Thatdropped completely when I went to the uni-versity, but I was a track man. I was prettydamn good! I ran the mile in something orother rather good. And I played basketballand golf. George Porter, a doctor’s son, and I,we used to go out and play golf two or threetimes a week. I got fairly good at that, what-ever “good” meant, but I could go around thecourse. But, the track thing, I was pretty good.I was a good runner, and the coach was go-ing to send me to a track meet. Then I gotsick and I couldn’t go, so I ended my trackcareer. But anyway, those things were goingon in high school.

Now, any other teachers? Oh, Mr.Mancini [pronounced Manchini]. People say“Mancini” today, but Mr. Mancini, who maybe a relative of the popular screen composertoday, was the director of the band, and theband would play for the operettas. Mrs. Hardywas the music teacher and director, and MissJohnson was the organizer, and I was in twoor three plays and things of that kind. So Ifelt that I was really moving someplace whenI was in high school. All kinds of things werehappening. And Willie Brown was shapingme up on not breaking my neck. It was quitea high school for a rural area.

And this is about the time that I was ex-ploring the Rosicrucians. That was justbeginning. It was something I didn’t discussmuch with the other guys in the Minks group,except with my friend, Pierce. Yes, with the


Minks we could mention it, but they weren’tinterested. They had other things on theirmind. But Pierce was somewhat philosophi-cal, and he was a musician. He played thepiano and was pretty good, and he thoughthe was a composer. But really, to a composer,he wasn’t a composer. [laughter] As they sayamong sea captains.

Anyway, it was a time of political andsocial problems. In 1936 was the biglongshoremen’s strike, the development ofthe CIO longshore union—the ILWU Andthe farm workers were really living in a dis-mal condition, the so-called Okie period.Hundreds and hundreds of Midwesternerswere moving in and camping around thefarms and along the rivers. That’s when I usedto go up to Beard Brook in Modesto. I usedto wander out there on weekends. There werehundreds of camps. Okies, migrants livingthere, and I got to know some of them.

There was a county hospital along thebrook, where I met an old Negro man whohad two withered legs. He would go out andsit by the brook and watch the people wash-ing clothes or swimming down below from alittle cliff. And I got so I’d go out there everyweek and have a long talk with him. He hadno teeth, and we would sit and talk. He wasa wonderful old guy, and he would make inter-esting comments about the people he wouldsee and what they were doing. He would tellme what was happening down there and whothese people were, and what that family haddone yesterday, and what this person had saidto that one. There was a swimming hole, andI used to go swimming there with some ofthese kids. So it was Beard Brook, anotherone of those escape places where I went outto see different people. And here was this oldman. I used to know his name. I’d talk tohim for hours, and for many weeks I remem-ber going out there.

But in 1936 the longshoremen were go-ing on strike, and the CIO was organizing inthe Bay Area. They were also sending outcontingents to organize the workers in thefields. Well, I can remember one day, whenthe Modesto editorials and headlines werefull of the communist revolutionaries com-ing up the road to turn the workers againstthe growers in the canneries and the fields. Iwould say two or three hundred farmers wentout with pitchforks and scythes and put theircars across the road to stop the longshore-men. Well, the longshoremen never marchedthat way. They just filtered up, you know.[laughter] But, here was this local mob wait-ing to stop an army of longshoremen thatnever came.

Actually, they did do some successful or-ganizing later, but it was very hard. Thesepeople were so poor, they didn’t want to takea chance on anything. There were some sum-mers that I worked the orchards. Donald laterdid it really very thoroughly. He did a lot ofcannery work and picking work. But I did itsometimes for a few weeks at a time duringthe summer just to earn a little by going outto the apricot-drying sheds.

You carry these great big trays of apricotsthat the women had cut in half to lay out inthe sun. I remember one time I dropped atray. I was the one non-Okie among them,and I remember them all stopping and look-ing at me like, “What are you doing here?” Ihad dropped the whole tray. I felt awful, butI went on working.

I felt I should just leave, but I rememberone older woman came up to me, and shesays, “It’s all right. We have all done it at leastonce.” I’ll never forget that. She was beingvery kind to me.

The others were, obviously, thinking,“Why doesn’t this nincompoop get out of

53HIGH SCHOOL

here? We don’t need him.” So, I worked thereoccasionally.

Was that kind of like pick-up work?

Yes. Just go and ask or stand in line tothe foreman. I was getting a couple of dollarsa day, or something like that. It was just ter-rible wages these people were getting and theway they were living.

Then I worked sometimes for farmers.One farmer I’ll never forget. I went out totake the job that was in the paper. He neededsomebody to clear a ditch, and I went out onmy bicycle, way out on some farm. There wasthis irrigation ditch, which was dry, but it wasfull of tules about ten feet high for at least amile. He gave me a cutlass, a scythe, and ahoe and said, “Go to work.” [laughter] I lastedabout a morning. It was hopeless. Maybe hegot somebody to do it, but I remember cut-ting about fifteen feet of these big things likelittle trees falling on either side, and I wasexhausted after a few hours. They were sohard to cut. It was like trying to cut throughtough rubber. I remember just taking the toolsup to him and saying, “I’m sorry.” He was giv-ing 25 cents an hour. He gave me 75 cents,and I went off. I remember that as one of myfailures. I was strong enough, but I just didn’thave the knack or the technique. He couldget one of these people from the Midwest andthey would find a way. They would probablyknow how to do, you know, thirty-five feet aday or something like that. I couldn’t getthree yards done. It was swampy with frogsand snakes and scorpions in it.

Anyway, I remember when the long-shoremen came. I thought, “How wonderful.”And I was thinking how stupid these guyswere that were trying to stop the organizersfrom coming up. Of course, later on I was

connected with those unions and remem-bered that. There was a kind of a small localpanic. I can remember my family being a littleconcerned about it. My parents made com-ments, but they never seemed terriblyconcerned about events like that taking placearound them. But I remember people talkingabout it, and the papers were full of it. Howterrible it was that these people can’t mindtheir own business. They come up and try tocause trouble, you know. Why don’t they staywhere they are and cause trouble down there?But leave us alone, and that sort of thing.

And of course, the communists were in-filtrating everywhere, you know. So, maybethat gave me an inkling about one way torebel, you know. [laughter] That was aboutthe time I felt like I had to get out of town.This was about 1938. I guess I had graduatedfrom high school and was just ready to gointo Modesto Junior College, and I figured Iwanted to do something different. I wantedto get out, travel. My parents were very busy,and my father had a growing practice. He wasdoing very well. They were beginning tosettle, to have furniture and be able to payfor it and rent a better house and all that sortof thing. We still had an icebox, but one ofmy great moments was at the little moviehouse that my brother and I would go to everySaturday and pay ten cents to see the mati-nee. At a drawing, I won a refrigerator. Thefirst refrigerator my family ever had. The onlything I ever won. So we had a refrigerator. Sowhen we were in Modesto, we started outwith nothing, but we could have a refrigera-tor and all that. Yes, things were improving.And when I was going to Modesto JuniorCollege, we had moved and were living rightnear the college, so that was the beginningof the new era. But I always wanted to dosomething else.

6EMERGING SPIRITUALITY

EFORE WE move on, let us pick up someof the threads on your ideas and develop-ing feelings and opinions about religion.

the university and studying anthropology,that I began to see how ridiculous the wholething was.

All of that had been tied in with theBallards and the I Am Society. The Ballardswrote numbers of tracts on the lost continentof Lemuria and how at Mt. Shasta the rem-nants of the Lemurian society still existed inthe bowels of the mountain. And that if youvisited there, you could feel the presence ofthe ascended masters of these great civiliza-tions. If you were very fortunate and there atthe right moment, you could see great shipsrising from the tip of Mt. Shasta, hoveringabove the mountain, and taking off towardthe Pacific. These were, of course, Lemuriansof this advanced society.

That was about the same period as theRosicrucian experience. Yet I took this allwith a grain of salt. My friend—who had gonewith me to the Rosicrucian meeting—and Iwent and we camped at the foot of Mt.Shasta. We spent two nights, I think, andtwo days looking and waiting for some kindof apparition above Mt. Shasta. Although,it was a very beautiful and wonderful experi-

BAll of this had to do with trying to find

my way out of the box of family orientationand to find an identity of my own. And sotravel was one thing, getting away, goingsomewhere else in the world, much as I’dearlier been involved in space travel. Theidea of getting off the planet was a terriblycompelling thing to me. Finding strangeworlds. Oh! And Churchward. CharlesChurchward, The Lost Continent of Mu aboutthe continent of Lemuria in the Pacific. Hehad this marvelously elaborate theory thatthe pyramids could be explained by Atlantisin the Atlantic and Lemuria in the Pacific,and these great ancient civilizations had leftlegacies throughout the world. This ac-counted for similarities in writing systems,hieroglyphics, and in sculpture and architec-ture. It was very compelling to somebody whodidn’t know anything like myself. [laughter]I thought it made very good sense. And itwasn’t until years later when I was going to


ence, we had no indications that anythinguntoward was taking place. [laughter]

I did go to some lecture that the Ballardsgave, I believe in Stockton, and I was veryunimpressed by them. They were two dowdy,ordinary people, and I thought they soundedrather ignorant. I’m not very clear on thatmemory. But, I was at that stage, and so wasmy friend, just checking things out. Wewanted to know. We had inquiring minds, asthe sly phrase goes today.

My father had very little to say about suchthings, as I’ve already indicated, and mymother looked upon it as, at the best, just aphase one of her sons was going through. Onthe other hand, she was a little attracted bythe mysticism of it. She tried to lead me intoseeing it as related to Christianity in someway, but that was a very hard sell. [laughter]But the real thing was that I was associatingwith the wrong kind of people. These werepeople who would mislead one, because theywere loaded with strange ideas, and they weremaking money from their ideas. This wasn’tquite true of the Ballards, I don’t think. Iimagine they made a living off of it, but Idon’t think they made any fortunes. Thesewere the true believers of the movement, andthey went on for many years. They did well.There were enough people in the UnitedStates I suppose, who were swept up by thesekinds of beliefs. Today, of course, it’s rampant.These were the early manifestations of that,and I feel kind of proud of myself in a waythat I was in at the very beginning. [laugh-ter] I didn’t know anybody else who reallysaw this as interesting or important.

My friend, Pierce Young, was very inter-ested, too. We both wanted to believesomething. That was the thing. We bothwanted to have some kind of, not religious,but some kind of spiritual experience thatwould give us extraordinary insight about the

meaning of existence. For a while my read-ing was all in that area. I remember havingthis awful feeling of boredom and contemptfor those mind-improving and life-remodel-ing people like Fosdick and others. Myparents were reading a kind of a watered-down Christianity, full of the Protestantethic, which of course, it would be, and I justfelt that it wasn’t enough. So, I was doing allthis intellectual exploring while I was goingto school.

By the way, before that, another aspectof my relationship with my mother’s familyand my grandparents occurred when I wasabout eleven or twelve and they were livingwith us in Oakland. I remember my grandfa-ther having visions. He referred to them ashis Visions of heaven and hell, when he andmy grandmother would pray and speak intongues. This very wonderful old man . . .not a Swedish peasant, because he had hadsome schooling, but he was relatively unedu-cated and deeply involved in the evangelisticmovements of the time. And he would talkto me at length, because he couldn’t talk tomy parents. They would tell him to be quiet.So he would tell me about these visions. Hewrote some of them up in his very scratchyhandwriting and very poor English. And heasked me if I would help him make them fine,fix them up. I was about eleven or twelve, Iguess.

I remember sitting for hours with him. Iwas fascinated by these visions. I don’t re-member having any sense of belief in themat all, but a sense of wonder that a personcould have such magnificent dreams. Hiswere so intact, so complete, so loaded withdetail. He would come to tears while he wastelling me about them, and this affected me,because it meant so much to him. So, I wouldsit with him and try to write out these narra-tives. I remember there were two. One was


the vision of heaven, and the other was thevisions of hell and things to come. And so Iwrote them out in standard English for him.I think I have copies somewhere. They’re lessinspired than his rendition. If I had only hada tape recording of the old man, they wereterribly moving. But when I got through withthem, cleaning them up at the age of twelve,they were pretty dull fare.

He was very proud of them though, andtook them to a printer, and with what littlemoney he had, he had them printed. He hada great stack of them, and he wanted me tohelp him pass them out. And I said I didn’twant to do that. [laughter] This was the sameman who had sent me out in the streets ofOakland at the age of four or five to pick upthe horse manure on the streets to fertilizehis vegetables in the backyard, telling me thatwe must waste nothing. Everything must beused. [laughter] And now this old man wastelling me to pass out tracts when I was twelveyears old. But I really wanted to help him,and I felt I had helped him. And so he wouldtake these tracts downtown to the streets inOakland, and we would pass out his tractsand preach. While he was preaching, hewould feel very, very good. He’d come homefeeling like he had accomplished something.We didn’t tell my folks. My grandmother hadgreat admiration for his scholarship—thathe’d put these tracts together. But I remem-ber that with affection, because it was, again,my feeling of identification with certainaspects of my parents’ families.

With my mother’s family, I really had agreater identity with my grandparents, whowere very strange and different from othersin the family but whose lives had been sowonderfully courageous. They had done suchmarvelous things. They had come from theold country and come here, were dirt poor,had many children and brought them up, and

were able to send them to school. In the fam-ily, there was this kind of romantic mythabout them and how wonderful they hadbeen. At the same time, the family looked atthem askance, because they never really be-came “American”. They retained thesestrange, peculiar ways, like making hop beerand blowing up the basement. And my grand-father with the clabber that he wouldmake—the odor could be smelled through-out the neighborhood. My mother and hersisters were always upset by the image thatthey would make for our houses in any neigh-borhood: they were such peasant-like people.My identity was with them, however, becausethey were from another time, another society.

On my father’s side, it was with my great-grandfather, Joaquim, the seaman, the manwho had run a winery in early California. Theadventurer again. The one who had lefthome. The one that had gone out into theworld. So, my identities were with the grand-parents and great-grandparents, rather thanthat second generation which was denyingits past.

My father never spoke Portuguese in thehome. My mother, although she was alwaysvery respectful of her parents, was alwaysmaking fun of them because she was embar-rassed by them. When we’d have company, Iremember she would spend hours fixing mygrandmother up, fixing her hair, putting ona new dress. My grandmother was alwaysfrumpy. I mean she was a hard-working peas-ant woman, and she didn’t care about herpersonal appearance. My mother and her sis-ters were always fussing over her to make herlook better. They even took her to a beauti-cian once, and she came out looking sohorrid. [laughter] She was another personthat had nothing to do with the grandmotherthat I knew. So there was this kind of ten-sion always, admiration and yet distance,


maintaining distance, and treating them aschildren. You know, they just had to bewatched all the time and kept from doing sillythings. I always felt on their side.

See, it’s a terrible contradiction. Here wasmy very religious mother and her two reli-gious sisters. Her brothers who weren’t soreligious. They were kind of wild characters.Though they were less respectful of all that,they sometimes were dragged to church andthe like. But my mother and her sisters werepious ladies, and my mother also was an intel-lectual. She read current affairs, she read theclassics, and she had read Plato and Aristotle.Not that she understood it, but she felt con-nected with some line of intellectualdevelopment in western society. And, shequestioned religion. She wasn’t just a truebeliever. But she was deeply religious, andtherefore, she had this respect for her par-ents’ beliefs that had helped them survive intheir earlier life. All her siblings respectedtheir parents. They couldn’t bear them.[laughter] They were always sent from oneto the other. They were always doing theseoutlandish things, and were always embar-rassing their children in front of their friendsand neighbors.

So, my grandmother, who would begussied up for photographs or for company,she would get back to her old ways as soon asthey were gone. I enjoyed this. I loved her inthat mode. And my grandfather was ahardworking laborer who always had rheu-matism, and my grandmother rubbed himevery night with these evil-smelling lotions.What were some of them at that time? Vick’sVapor Rub, Sloan’s Liniment, Kerosene poul-tices. Well, anyway, I can’t remember, butthere were these awful lotions that stank upthe house, and he would rub them all overhimself at night under his winter underwear.Sometimes I’d have to sleep with him. If we

had company, I had to sleep with my grand-parents. I remember this heavy smell of stronglotions for rheumatism that my grandfatherhad.

My grandmother had other kinds of lo-tions. She would rub herself with flax seedand drink flax seed, and she forced me todrink flax seed, which was the most terriblething in this world. Then I’d have to sleepwith them, sometimes between them. And Iremember waking up, feeling that I was suf-focating in a cave. These two large people,one on each side breathing heavily—and thisaroma. My brother probably sometimes sleptwith them. He was younger, so he had a bedof his own. But my bed would sometimes begiven over to company. Maybe this happenedto him, too, but I don’t remember. I do re-member those long nights. They were verystrange and quite memorable. So that waspart of the identity I had with these two nur-turing, hardworking people of anotherculture.

On the other side, was this professional,richly ornate, emotive, Portuguese extendedfamily living in a large house with grand waysand wonderful objects around like Chinesefurniture. My father’s mother and father hadgotten wedding presents from ArchbishopNunes, who was Archbishop of the Far Eastor something of that kind at Macao. And hehad sent them these marvelous, carved,Chinese benches and tables. I would walkinto their house and feel I was in anotherworld. The ambiance that I felt in myPortuguese grandparents’ house was reallyone of grandeur. Perhaps it wasn’t that grand,but to me it was, compared to the life thatwe lived in my mother and father’s house.We were in the deep Depression. My fatherwas a struggling student, and we had scarcelyany money. But on the Portuguese side of the


family, there was this sense of grandeur anddrama.

I later realized that they really did nothave close relationships. My father loved hisfather. Yet the old man was considered by thefamily to be kind of weak, that he didn’t reallypush hard enough. His practice was declin-ing. My grandmother, was the real power. Sheruled the roost with an iron hand. She was agrand lady.

But when I was very young, that was thegrand house. That was the place of fascina-tion, where they only spoke Portuguese. Theywould speak English to me or to others whowere there who didn’t speak Portuguese, butamong themselves they spoke Portuguese.There were tumultuous gatherings with greatlong tables for all of the family who at-tended—the Portuguese families fromHayward, from Sacramento and San Leandro.They would all come down. Most were pro-fessional people of one kind of another. Allwere devout Catholics.

But still, the person who stuck out in mymind was Joaquim, my great-grandfather,whom I had not known but heard about.They talked about him with some reserve.He became an icon to me—the man whostarted it all. The man who had come overand done such marvelous things and sailedon whaling ships and became a gold rushminer and farmer.

So here were the two sides of the family.My empathy was linked to the ethnicity, Isuppose. No, that would be too fancy of aword for it. It was with the foreign adven-turesomeness of the certain persons on eachside, those who had struggled to comethrough a great deal of difficulty and whowere looked down on by the new generationbecause they had not become full Americans.I felt the ones who hadn’t become fullAmericans were the ones that I liked the most

and were most interesting. I saw the genera-tion of my parents as kind of pallid, as peoplewho were trying so hard to make it in theAmerican society that the connection withtheir roots had gotten very attenuated.

It was also the exoticism. When youthink of the kind of mystical stuff that I wasreading at the time, it was exotic. There wasSven Hedin and the expeditions to Tibet.Oh, yes! Tibet! Tibet was very much in mymind. The descriptions of Lhasa blew meaway. The film Lost Horizon came later, but Iwas prepared for Lost Horizon, because Lhasawas a place I yearned to see. The valley andthe society of Lost Horizon was right up myalley. So there was all this business of exoti-cism, I suppose. Wanting to get out of theworld I was in to that world of adventure andwonders.

When I was in high school, RichardHalliburton came through Modesto and gavea lecture at a local theater. I had read theRoyal Road to Romance but he somewhat dis-appointed me. He was a scrawny little guy[laughter]. I looked at him and thought, “Isthis the man that I have been reading about?”Nevertheless, he gave a whale of a lectureloaded with adventure. The right thing forhigh school kids. But I was swept away andwent up afterwards and talked to him andsaid I wanted to go on the junk he was tak-ing from Hong Kong to Treasure Island,where the San Francisco’s World Fair wasplanned. He had talked about this, theButterfly Boat voyage across the Pacific! I re-member him saying, “Well, you know wehave a crew, and we’re all set. But drop me aline.” So immediately I dropped him a line.Then a few weeks later, as I was waiting im-patiently, he wrote this very nice letter sayingthe crew was complete, and that I was a littleyoung and inexperienced, and he wasn’t surethat I should go on this thing. Well, the up-


shot is that the boat sank in the Pacific onthe way over. It never got to Treasure Island,so I was spared. But that was a great disap-pointment, and I dreamed of it. Halliburtonand the boat disappeared at sea, and nobodyknows what happened to it. There were someradio messages of a storm or a typhoon. I’mnot sure what year. I think 1938 or 1939. Ijust felt crushed that I didn’t go. Then lateron, I was glad I didn’t.

So, there was this tremendous desire andneed to differentiate myself from my imme-diate family, even though I had a lot of respectfor them. I felt very protective of my mother,who was sometimes very sickly. She was anunhappy woman in many ways, and loadedwith a sense of obligation and guilt about herlife and lost opportunities. And my father,who was burdened by coming rather late tohis career. In medical school he was at leastten years older than most of his confederatesand so involved in himself and his work thathe was a very remote person to his family.Nevertheless, I admired him. I admired thestruggle that he was going through. And mymother would insist that we admire that,even though she saw him and his family ashaving victimized her early in life. Yet de-spite this ambivalence, I feel they loved andrespected one another deeply and through-out life.

Accepting this role of my mother as themisused woman, I think affected both mybrother and myself. Also, her constant ob-sessive recollection of the betrayal by myfather’s family was with her all her life, andprobably was connected with her stress andher frequent illness. Yet at the same time, shewas a woman of tremendous resolve. She reada lot. She did a lot of thinking, analyticalthinking, and she’d talk to us about booksand about ideas and encouraged us in that

way. So, I have a mixed recollection of heron that level.

My father, as I said, was a more remoteperson. Also, I suppose, I identified with mymother’s sense of lost opportunity, that shehad not gotten away from her family. She hadnot gone off when she was seventeen. Shehad met a woman who had a dance troupeand wanted to take her with them to NewYork, but her mother wouldn’t let her go.Then, of course, she had this affair with myfather, became pregnant, and was thrust intothis very strained atmosphere of my father’sfamily. Then there was her own parents’ re-action to her “infidelity”—her prematurepregnancy. However, to my grandparents thatwas not a terrible thing in itself. It was thatthey had not gotten married right away. If youdo that, it’s all right. But to the Portugueseside of the family, there was something deeplysinful or shameful about having had sexualexperience and pregnancy prior to marriage.

Well, added to that, you had pointed out, too,that from your Portuguese side that it was notnecessarily a good match, but from the Swedishside, it was a good match, it’s just, the timingwas . . . .

Well, a good match, excepting they werevery upset about the fact that my father hadbeen so impetuous and had taken advantageof their daughter. So, my Swedish grand-mother—as I think I told you—went over tothe Portuguese grandmother and said, “Lookhere, we have to do something about this.”And something was done. They were veryquickly given a marriage—a rather elaboratemarriage by the Portuguese family—and mymother was put into a kind of seclusion, Isuppose, a hush up, until I was born two orthree months early. What a pathetic business!


But in those days, to that sort of a family, itwas very important, but not to my Swedishgrandparents. It had to do with obligation.My father and his family had an obligation totheir daughter.

Now, did your Swedish grandparents come tostay with you? The part I got a little confused onwas if they stayed with you once you moved toModesto.

Oh, they stayed with us frequently, be-cause they were, in a sense, farmed out tovarious sectors of the family who would takethem in turn. But my parents got them mostof the time.

Well, it sounds like Modesto also provided anopportunity for your mother more to forge herown identity.

In a way. She had more friends, but atthe same time, she was a relatively isolatedperson. And although she did have one ortwo friends at times, she was an unhappywoman. Always a sense of never havingachieved what she wanted and of havingbeen ill used, I think. She was always talkingabout what she might have done, what sheshould have done, and how people had to dowhat they felt. So, that was a contradictionwhen later I was doing what I wanted to do,and she found it very difficult to chastise meabout those things. She would do it on a re-ligious basis. As long as one was living a morallife, one could do these things. And I wassometimes living an “immoral” life.

At this time, my grandparents were stillinvolved with the evangelist Amy SempleMcPherson. I forget what year it was thatAmy Semple McPherson had become a cele-brity, got national notoriety for having beensupposedly kidnapped. There was a wild storyabout her being abducted and taken to somedesert place, and then later found in disarrayrambling on the beach in southernCalifornia. It was a strange and yet wonder-ful story. Everybody we knew was reading thestory about Amy Semple McPherson. Thecynical speculation was (not on the part ofmy family) that she had just gone off on atoot with somebody and had an affair some-where, and the cover was that she had beenkidnapped. The other story my grandparentshad was that some bad people had kidnappedher in order to get a ransom. There was aransom note and all that. I don’t rememberthe details.

But she was a religious figure at this time?

She was one of the great evangelicalpreachers of the time, and she had a tremen-dous following. I recall my grandparentstalking about her and wanting me to go withthem into Oakland to see her when she camethere. I didn’t go. I saw her much later underconditions that I’ll talk about. But actuallyseeing the people who were doing thesethings always was a disappointment to me.They were not what I expected.

7EARLY EXPLORATIONS

OW IS THIS the time period whereyou said you were going as frequentlyas you could to the estuary in

were driven off by watchmen. But most ofthe time, nobody saw us and we spent hours.I remember, sitting in the wheel house withmy hands on the wheel thinking that I wassteering this great ship. So that was an im-print of some significance to me, because Iwas away, I was on my way to Alaska when Iwas standing at that wheel.

And was this the same time period that you couldwalk home from school along the brook with thehobos?

That was in Palo Alto. That was evenearlier. That was Palo Alto Creek. Yes. Thatwas earlier. And then later in Modesto, therewas Beard Brook—the period that we aretalking about now. Beard Brook was anotherlarger stream—I think it emptied into theStanislaus. It ran through the edges of whatwas then Modesto, which was a very smalltown. I spent all my spare time wanderingalong Beard Brook.

That was the period, too, in Modesto,when I got some odd jobs now and then. Ihad the job with the apricot drying shed, then

NAlameda?

No, that’s much earlier. That’s when wewere living in Alameda. I was seven or eightyears old. I spent hours and hours of manydays wandering. There must have been tenor twelve big Alaska Packer ships tied upthere, no longer in service. I was absolutelyenthralled by them. I can even remember thepassageways and the fo’c’s’les [from “fore-castle”, the crew’s quarters on a ship]. WhenI finally went to sea later myself, I still re-membered the Alaska Packer ships and thefo’c’s’les and the brass fixtures and the wheelhouse.

So did you get on board when you were a littleboy?

Oh, we climbed up the side. My brotherwas with me sometimes, or sometimes I justwent alone or with a couple of other friends.We just would climb on, and sometimes we


I mentioned working for that farmer, tryingto clear his irrigation ditches, which was oneof the worst jobs I’ve ever had in my life. Thatdidn’t last very long.

Were you in junior college at this time?

No, I was in high school. When I got intojunior college, I upgraded. I finally got a jobas an usher in the local theater, the PrincessTheater.

Now, when was this when you had the radio pro-gram?

Well, yes, that’s about the time. Yes, thisfriend of mine, Bobbie Jean Miller, when Imentioned before had a number of peoplearound her, and her house was open house.Anyway, Bobbie Jean knew people at the ra-dio station. I believe it was KTRB, but I maybe very wrong. She had a chance to get afifteen-minute program, and so she linked meup with her. We developed a kind of a per-sona—a Bobbie Jean and Warren kind ofthing. She sang songs. I remember most of itwas Jeannette McDonald drivel. She wasn’ta very good singer, but she could get awaywith it. I sometimes sang, because I had sungin school operettas and things, and I have aterrible voice. I also wrote scripts. I even haveone left, handwritten, an anti-war script. Iwas very much involved with the thoughtsof the coming war, because, I think, my par-ents were very anti-war and pacifists—as mostpeople were in the 1920s and 1930s. In themid to late 1930s, as things began to heat upin Europe, and although it seemed very dis-tant, I remember being very concerned aboutthe possibility of there being a world war. So,I was writing these scripts, usually conversa-tions between people about being drafted, orwhat would happen if they went to war, what

was war like? Recounting the things that Ihad heard about World War I and all that. Iwish I had more of them. They must havebeen quite a thing on the radio in Modestoin 1936.

Well, how do you think they were received?

I haven’t the slightest idea. All I remem-ber is we’d go there and do our programs andfelt very good about it. Had a lot of fun, andmaybe some of our friends listened. I remem-ber my parents heard one, and they were kindof quiet about it. [laughter] So, there was that.

Was this about the time that the German couplevisited?

Yes. I guess it was about 1938. My fatherhad some patients who were fromGermany—a young German couple. Theyliked him very much, and he got to knowthem. He invited them over to our house fora visit, and I remember very clearly sittingwith them as they were telling us aboutGermany—what a wonderful place it was,how all the lies told about Hitler in this coun-try weren’t true, and that Hitler was really avery kind and warm and wonderful man whohad helped remake Germany. And theythought we should go and see it. I rememberbeing fascinated by the strong feeling of loy-alty these people had to their country andtheir urgent proselytizing. They were obvi-ously trying to convince us of how the newNazi Germany was the best thing that hadhappened to Europe. And they, both of them,were very convincing people.

I remember my mother and father andmy brother talking about it afterwards. Mybrother has a different recollection of this.He says he wrote a paper for school aboutthe wonderful new system in Germany based

65EARLY EXPLORATIONS

on what he had heard. But I remember feel-ing very doubtful, because there was theSpanish Civil War going on, and although Ihad no connection with it, I had been read-ing about it and how volunteers were goingover there. Again, because I wanted to getaway, I was thinking I should, but I was tooyoung. It just wouldn’t have been possible forme. But I remember thinking that I ought tobe doing something like that. I ought to betaking part with the Loyalists. I didn’t under-stand the political significance very much. Ijust knew that it was a war against fascism,against Franco.

So that was in my mind as I was listeningto these people. I had this great sense ofdoubt. They were saying that Hitler wasn’tagainst the Jews, though it was the Jews who’dcaused the trouble. And everybody was try-ing to get along with them, but it wasimpossible. They were people you could notget along with. Their whole tradition, theirwhole life and culture had been so differentthat they were unable to assimilate inGermany.

I remember later, my mother saying shewas very concerned about their view aboutthe Jews, but then she talked about Joe Gray.This was back in her youth when her motherand father were going to these evangelicalmissions in Oakland, where all sorts of dere-licts and other people from the mission werebrought to their house to stay and to be fed.Among them was a man who was impover-ished but very well educated, named Joe Gray,and he was a Jew. Her mother and father hadbefriended him and fed him when he was onthe streets. He later got a very good job as abutler for a wealthy family, and he was al-ways meticulously dressed. He spoke very welland was a handsome middle-aged man. Hewould visit the various members of mymother’s family, once or twice a year for many

years, with a big box of fine chocolates. Theyall spoke of Joe Gray, what a wonderful manhe was, and he was always thankful to mygrandparents. That was something I remem-ber about my grandparents how grateful hewas to them, what respect he had for them.

So my mother mentioned this. She says,“You know, we knew lots of Jews.” They hadlived in this sort of semi-ghetto in Oakland.It was a working-class neighborhood inOakland, and they lived with all sorts ofpeople—Armenians and Jews and Italians,but no African Americans. I don’t believeanybody had much contact with AfricanAmericans in those days. But it was a verymixed immigrant society. The Jews weretaken as just another group of immigrants,and Joe Gray was an exemplary figure, be-cause he was educated, and because he got agood job, and because he came and paid hisrespects once or twice a year. As she said, “JoeGray is a wonderful man.” I remember hertalking about that in relation to what thisGerman couple had been talking about.

Oh, the only bias I remember in mymother’s family, was about the Chinese andthe Catholics, as I mentioned earlier. [laugh-ter] My Aunt Edith used to say, “Oh, you haveto watch out for the Chinese, and you don’teat in Chinese restaurants.”

She used to warn me, because I was al-ways eating in Chinese restaurants. Nobodyelse I knew did, but I was going to Chineserestaurants all the time when I stayed withher. I’d go over to San Francisco. The Yee-Jun was one of the great restaurants. It wasdown in a basement, a very dark and grubbylittle place, but it had absolutely marvelousfood. I loved it, and it was cheap. I could eatfor twenty-five cents, fifty cents, I could eatall I wanted. And then I would go to the the-ater, the Chinese theater in San Francisco.I’d sit there for hours. I was the only non-


Chinese in this large, old, ornate Chinesetheater on Grant Avenue, and I’d sit therelistening to these very elaborate Chineseoperas. I didn’t understand a word, but youknow, I got the idea watching it. [laughter]The audience was all eating and talking, andit was like a Shakespearean theater. I lovedit. Every time I’d go to San Francisco alone Iwould go there. My aunt would constantlywarn me, “Be careful. It’s terribly dangerous,and don’t eat that food.” And I would tellher how I was eating the food all the time,and the people were wonderful, and I likedit.

There was also the Oakland Chinatown.Later when I was going to Cal, I would godown to the Oakland Chinatown and spenda lot of time at, I think it was called, theImperial Palace—an old, very exquisiteChinese architectured two-story building. Ithink it’s still there, but it’s now a run downhotel. They had modern Chinese floor shows.I’d go there with twenty-five or thirty-fivecents and have enough rice and vegetablesto fill me up. But all of this was taking placewhile the Spanish Civil War was on. I feltvery remote from that, but it was there.

Was there discussion of it in your family?

My family didn’t talk much politics. Ithink most [conversations about] politicswere around the early 1930s when Rooseveltwas elected and the New Deal and when Pro-hibition was lifted. I look back with surprisethat my parents thought it was great whenthey repealed Prohibition. And we all drankbeer. I was sent out for beer. Roosevelt andthe New Deal was a positive thing to them,because Hoover had been, to them, a terriblepresident. He had caused the Depression, andeverybody would speak cynically about hisslogan—a chicken in every pot and a car in

every garage kind of thing. That’s the onlypolitics that I remember. It was an apoliticalfamily really. The Spanish Civil War was avery remote thing, but it would tricklethrough to me, and I was aware of that. Alsoit was a way to get away. I wanted to go anddo something important.

Well, is this about the time that you tried to go tosea?

Yes. I had gone to visit my wonderfulAunt Edith and Uncle Armand. When I’dgo down to the Bay Area from Modesto, I’dsometimes go down and stay a few days withthem. And while I was there, I’d spend all ofmy time in San Francisco, Chinatown mostly.And one time, I was determined I was goingto go to sea. So I went over and I got mypassport, and I still have that, my first pass-port. That must have been 1936 or 1937. Icouldn’t have been more than sixteen or sev-enteen, and I got the passport, and I wentaround to the union halls just desperate to tryto get on a ship. I was scared to death, but Iwent to the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Ithink I maybe went to the NMU, but I don’tknow if they had a hall then.

What’s the NMU?

The National Maritime Union. It wasjust beginning actually and had been formedafter the 1937 maritime strike. I even wentaround to some of the shipyards to see if Icould just get on. I didn’t care if it was unionor non-union, I just wanted to get to sea. Butit was a very tight period. There were guyslined up—I felt terrible—a block long to getjobs.

Because you were competing for jobs right?


Yes. I tried for two or three days, I remem-ber, and I just felt like a beat dog. I was stuck.I couldn’t get out. And if I had gotten a job,I think I would have just gone. My familywould have been very upset, but I was deter-mined I was going to do it if I got the job. Iwas still in high school. Yes, 1936, 1937. Andthen junior college in 1937.

Well, would they have been upset if you hadn’teven finished high school?

Well, yes. I didn’t care.

It sounds, actually, like all your elders had to dowas to tell you that something was not a goodidea, and you knew the next thing you were go-ing to do. [laughter]

Well, I don’t think I reacted that way. Idon’t think I reacted against them so muchas it was a matter of my own inner drive to,to do my own thing.

Well, you were in such a wonderful setting toexplore the exotic and be curious about otherpeople. I mean the time and the place that youwere.

I don’t know about that. I think some-times one discovers the exotic where one is.It’s all around everywhere. These things wereavailable to anybody. It’s just that they suitedmy disposition at the time and what I wantedto experience. It was experiential, the searchfor experience—the search to prove oneself.I don’t remember it being against my parentsor anything, it was just the idea that I wasdoing it apart from them.

Also, it sounds like with the two major influ-ences you had there, that you may have felt freeto kind of create your own identity.

Well, that is something that interests metoo. And maybe I have mentioned this be-fore, but my brother and I were left prettymuch alone. We had a lot of space. If we gotout of line, we got into real trouble and therewould be long, long lectures and haranguesby my mother, and occasionally a spankingfrom my father, but mostly just disapproval.The look of disapproval was enough. Butmost of the time we were pretty free to wan-der about and do our own thing.

We had a lot of free time as I remember,which I think was a very good thing. I re-member being oppressed by my family only interms of their attitudes and the crowdednessof my mother’s family. You were just sur-rounded by extended family and you were inthat world continually, and I had this feelingof being trapped and wanting to get out of it,wanting to be out of that world. I didn’t hateit. I just felt smothered. I wanted to do otherthings. So, it wasn’t against my family . . . .

I had more freedom to wander about andtime to myself than I think most kids havetoday. Both my folks were busy, busy. Mymother was busy with her own thoughts andher own life and doing a lot of sewing for thefamily. She sewed everything for the family.She made our pants or altered clothes passeddown to us from her family throughout ourchildhood and also made her own clothes.She hated housework, but she did it. She feltshe had to, because the place had to look niceif people came in. She was very attuned tohaving a nice-looking house. She also spenta lot of time by herself, reading, and sincemy father was away all the time, my brotherand I were pretty much on our own.

When I look back, it was probably verygood. I did a lot of reading. I was able to wan-der around the landscape. I remember doinga lot of hiking when we were living with myaunt or when we were living near her in


Oakland later on, in Rockridge. We wouldhike up into the hills, really wild in those days,all built up today. There were forests, therewere woods and streams and lots of animals.

I remember we’d hike up to JoaquinMiller Park, named for Joaquin Miller, theCalifornia poet. His daughter was there; Ithink her name was Juanita Miller. She hadhis books of poetry, and she would sit theretalking to visitors, and I remember talking toher for hours. She gave me copies of his poemsand she would read them to me. She was astrange lady. [laughter] But again, it was awonderful thing to be able to do and wanderthrough those eucalyptus groves. And therewere streams up there. There were no houses.Today, it’s all houses out in that direction.

Being gone all day, sometimes for two orthree days in a row, was just sort of taken forgranted. That was a good thing as I remem-ber. I did a lot of personal thinking, and mybrother and I, as I’ve mentioned, did a lot oftalking about the family. And even thoughwe fought a lot, and we were quite different,we had a mutual interest in the kind of fam-ily we had. We were always sort of analyticalabout our family: what they had done at thelast get-together; why this argument had goneon; and what was wrong with this person orthat person. We did a great deal of thinkingabout the family.

There was no mass media, although laterwhen we were in Alameda, we had a radioand we used to sit together as a family, whichwas nice, and listen to something called theCockeyed Parrot. I remember, it was a serial,a marvelous mystery, horror story. [laughter]And we would sit there getting very fright-ened and horrified at night. This little tinyradio was where we also heard Roosevelt’sspeeches and things of that sort. But asidefrom that, there was no impact from the mass

media of ideas, news, advertising, or faddishstuff.

We chose our sources of information. Ispent a lot of time in libraries. And we had afairly interesting library at home that my fa-ther had brought from his parents’ home. So,there was a lot of reading and then a lot ofspace just to wander around.

But we also had to do a lot of housework.We’d always do the dishes. My brother and Ifought about that for years. My brother al-ways saved his money, and I would borrowmoney from him. The way I would pay himback was I’d do his turn at the dishes, and hewas meticulous about it. He knew everypenny that I’d owe him. [laughter]

We had to do the wash once a week onthis old ringer washing machine. We did thefamily wash and hung it up and sometimesscrubbed floors and things of that sort orworked in our little gardens. So we were ex-pected to do housework, but most of the time,if we were gone, nobody asked about it. I re-member we’d wander. We’d do a lot ofwandering.

Now, as far as the media is concerned,even when we had our first little radios—which were very bad—there was nothing onthem except dance music at night from somehotel in San Francisco or sometimes littlenews broadcasts and sometimes plays. Oh,before that, I got a crystal set. I don’t know ifyou’ve ever seen one. It’s a little crystal set ina box, and it had a little handle or gadgetwhere you’d move a kind of a wire, a feelerover the crystal. You had earphones, andyou’d keep messing around with the crystaluntil you’d get a station. To me, it was a mar-velous thing.

You didn’t know what you were going toget. [laughter] I got Mexico a number of timesfrom Modesto. Certain nights at a certain


time I’d get this faint sound of Mexican mu-sic and blues coming from Tijuana. Mybrother tells me now it couldn’t have hap-pened. [laughter] “It’s impossible.”

And people’d say, “Oh you couldn’t . . . .”But I got Mexico, and I had this wonderful,thrilling feeling that I was really reaching outinto the world.

I remember blues programs. Nobody weknew listened to country music or blues orAfrican-American blues at that time. I mean,you just didn’t do it. I didn’t get to like coun-try music until years later when I was drivingacross country and used to go through theMidwest and hear these great country sing-ers. And jazz and blues were something thatcame later in my life as an appreciation. Butthen, I remember hearing this weird, won-derful blues music coming from Tijuana.

I can remember one of the songs that Imuch later saw on a disc that some friends ofmine had. It was somebody like SophieTucker singing “Hot Nuts.” [laughter] It wasalso very scatological, and I wanted one. Ihad this feeling that I was really out in thatwonderful world out there.

That crystal set is also connected withanother aspect of my youth—the mysticaland the spiritual readings that I had done. Ihad the feeling that maybe I would pick upsomething from outer space. I was probablyone of the first scanners of outer space formessages. [laughter]

I was thinking that maybe there wassomebody sending messages from a spaceshipor something like that, and maybe I’d pick itup. Or maybe they were picking up my fool-

ing around on the crystal, you see, and I wouldmove the crystal to make strange little noisesand things.

How wonderful you could just pick up things.That, too, was kind of an exploration.

Yes. Because it was always accidental,unless you really knew your crystal. [laugh-ter] Sometimes if you hit the same spot, you’dget a similar station. It didn’t have muchrange, but on certain days, if the meteoro-logical conditions were right you could getSan Francisco or, now and then, Mexico. Sothat was to me truly exotic. And, of course,I’d report things that nobody would believe.

About 1938 is when, on our little radio,we heard the War of the Worlds with OrsonWelles. I was the only one I knew who hadheard any part of it. Later when there wasthis big flap in the newspapers and on the airabout people running into the streets andgetting in their cars and getting out of town,I remember while I was listening to it, I knewit was a drama, because I had read H. G.Wells. I thought it was kind of marvelous,and I just heard the tail end of it, I think.Then all of this happened, and I rememberfeeling very superior. I knew. I knew all thetime. What’s wrong with these people, youknow? They’re just ready to believe anything.Of course, I had to tell myself over time laterthat it’s very easy to believe anything if you’renot careful and if you don’t develop a rea-soning mind, an informed skepticism. So, yes,about 1938 I guess it was.

8LIFE IN MODESTO

HEN I LOOK BACK, I have avery nostalgic, romantic feelingabout that whole area in San

and green. They can’t ripen off the tree oroff the bush. But here there were thesecracked, splitting, ripe pomegranates every-where.

And long hikes that I would make intothe ranchlands and up to the creeks. TheTuolumne and the Stanislaus River banks,and all those little towns—Knights Ferry,Ceres, Turlock, all of those rural villages atthat time—a feeling of really having lived ina bountiful area. In fact, across the train tracksand the main highway, through Modesto,there is an arch, something like the Renoarch “Biggest Little City in the World.” Ithink it’s still there which reads “Water,Wealth, Contentment, and Health.” We usedto joke cynically about that. It was one ofthe ironies of our young lives. We felt thatwas so very funny—water, wealth, content-ment and health. How hokey could one get?And yet, it was that. There was this wonder-fully verdant, productive area, and it was slowand calm and hot.

And also, I remember Modesto was thefirst time I had run into such a variety ofpeople, or had the opportunity to. I men-

WJoaquin Valley and the town of Modesto atthat time. It was a very bucolic experience,living in this rural environment when I’dbeen growing up—up to that time—in highlyurbanized environments. And there wassomething about the space, something aboutthe great expanses of farmland, ranchland,the long, very, very hot summers one feltwould never end. And the sun was scorch-ing, and you felt terribly hot. But I canremember going into these irrigation ditchesto swim, and the contrast between the air andthe heat and these cool irrigation ditches.

And the fact that so much produce wasavailable. I remember we used to eat tons ofpeaches and oranges fresh off the trees, andgrapes all summer long, and plums, and pome-granates that I had never dreamed grew onlittle bushes, and here they were almost wild.You could pick off ripe pomegranates. I’venever been able to eat pomegranates since,because the ones that you buy are wrong.They’re just not ripe. They just taste bitter


tioned the so-called Okies, the people fromthe Midwest that were driven out by the greatdroughts and the dust bowl experience andcame west, and how they flocked into thisarea, into the orchards as workers, into thecanneries. A stranger group, different thanpeople that I had known. And I had this de-sire always to know them and to get to talkto them and be among them, which I didoccasionally, but I was very shy and I wasn’tvery outgoing. I was really afraid to intrude.Nevertheless, I tried.

Also the Mexicans. There were not agreat number. They also fascinated me, andafter my later trip to Mexico, they became avery important ethnic object for me. I wasfascinated by their little camps in the or-chards and near the canneries, their foods andtheir appearance, the way they dressed, andthe expressiveness of their speech and ges-tures.

And the hobos. We had hobos comingthrough town. This was in the midst of theDepression when we first went there, but itcontinued through the 1930s, streams of ho-bos off the freight trains. One of the majortrain links came through Modesto, north-south, and every time the freight would stop,all the hobos would come piling off andothers would go piling on. I used to go downand watch them coming and going, and I’dgo out and hang around their campsite. Inever had the courage to go into the campsand meet the people, but I remember stand-ing off and watching these camps, as thepeople were cooking and washing theirclothes, trying to hear what they were say-ing. But I never had the courage to actuallyconfront them.

In that period, just as earlier in Oaklandwhen we were living there and Palo Alto,the tramps as they were called—these werelegitimate hobos, people without jobs, job-

less men with some women and kids—wouldcome around to the back doors of our houseand other people’s houses asking for food orwork. One thing I remember about mymother, she never turned them away. Shealways had something for them to eat, or shehad a little job, because she didn’t like to justgive things out. She’d have a little job likeclearing the yard or carrying something outback or something of that sort. She wouldsay, “Please do that.” And they would workfor fifteen or twenty minutes, and then shewould fix a plate of food for them. If therewere two or three, she’d always do it, havesomething, a sandwich or something. I alwaysadmired that. That came of course from her,from my grandparents, her mother and fa-ther, and their experience in the missionwhere they took care of dozens and dozens ofderelict people. Their house was open topeople to stay and to sleep and to eat, andshe felt that very strongly. I never rememberher turning anybody down. She would some-times complain that some of them looked likelazy people who wouldn’t do anything or werejust looking for a handout, but she’d alwaysgive; she’d always give out.

Did you ever want to jump a freight. I mean,was that a part of the wanderlust?

Oh, yes, of course. [laughter] One of thefascinations of watching people jump off andget on freights was I wanted to do it. I neverhad quite the courage to do it. I thought aboutit many times. Just to make a little pack andmeet one of these people and go on thefreight with them, wherever that freight wasgoing. That was a kind of day dream. Oh,yes, that’s true. That was one of the fanta-sies.

Like trying to get on a ship in SanFrancisco, or getting on a freight and going

73LIFE IN MODESTO

someplace, or stow away—fantasies of stow-ing away, and stow away on airplanes. Thereweren’t many in those days, just little propplanes. But oh, yes, I wanted to go up in aplane. Go somewhere, just to go somewhere.

So, part of the fascination of these hobos eventhough they were out of work and . . .

They were itinerants. They were adven-turers. They had been places and were goingplaces, and they seemed so self-sufficient.They seemed to be able to live on so little.They were able to get along.

Is your impression, when you’re talking aboutthese hobos, are they mainly on the freight trains?Is that how they moved in and out of Modesto?

Yes, there was hardly any other kind oftransportation, you know, unless somebodyhad a car or a bus. No, that was the best trans-portation there in those days. And, a fewyears later, towards the end of my time in theSan Joaquin Valley, Steinbeck’s book cameout—I think 1939—The Grapes of Wrath. Iread that just before I left. I was deeply, pro-foundly struck by what I had missed, becausehere were the people I had been seeing andworking with occasionally, and seeing aroundtown, the edges of town, along the river. Andhere was the in-depth study.

So, his book really resonated with you?

Oh, yes, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath andlater the film. That had a tremendous im-pact on me. Yes, really. And the idea of peoplestarting with nothing and working and strug-gling to maintain themselves and to surviveunder enormous obstacles, that resonatedwith my view of my grandparents on mymother’s side, that they had done that. I felt

that they were in a sense, as immigrants, verymuch like the so-called Okies coming in, thatthey had been like that. So, that had a pow-erful effect on me. But when I read it, I felt,“These are things that I missed,” the thingsthat Steinbeck had shown in great detailabout the thinking and the lives of thesepeople. the heroism of some of them, thestrength, the great power that they had aspeople.

You once asked me about any contact Ihad with Indians. Well that’s interesting,because I had read some about Indians, theusual things in school—Longfellow’sHiawatha, and all the usual, the Last of theMohicans, of course. So I had a romantic andmythological notion of Indians. I rememberat one point in my life in Modesto—it wasaround 1935, 1936—I began to wonder,“Where are the Indians?” I never saw anythere. Also I was wondering where were theAfrican Americans in Modesto? That onewonderful young woman, SamanthaHenderson, who was at high school—an “A”student, top of the class and terribly with-drawn. She would not talk to anybody, and Ialways wanted to have more to do with her. Idon’t remember there being any others inthat whole area. And the same thing withIndians, if there were Indians around, I wasnot able to distinguish them.

Did you ever find any arrowheads or anythingwhen you were wandering around?

No. Never thought to look. First place, Idon’t think I would have recognized them. Idon’t think I had that much savvy at thatpoint. I mean, I was interested in people. Whowere they? What were they?

I now know that there were Indians liv-ing around that area—a few, scatteredTuolumne Indians, living out in the various


ranchlands. There were little camps, indis-tinguishable from that of the Okies andothers, but they were there. I didn’t knowhow to identify them. However, I ran acrossa book in the Modesto library. By the way,talk about strange and marveloussynchronicities, I also ran across the book herein the university library just a couple ofmonths ago, the same book. I would neverhave been able to find, because I couldn’tremember the author or the name of it. I wasgoing through one shelf, looking for a cer-tain kind of material, and there was a bookon Stanislaus County in California. I justpicked it up, and there was a whole chapteron the Indians of Stanislaus County.

That’s the one I had seen in Modestowhen I was a kid. I have it here, Stories ofStanislaus by Saul P. Elias. There is a chapteron the Tuolumne Indians who were con-tacted in 1848 by miners. And they wereattacked, rounded up, and put to work. Oneof the groups was called The Jose, the JesusJose Mission Indians living out by KnightsFerry where I used to go all the time to swimand to fish near Modesto. There was in the1840s a large camp of these Jesus Jose Indianswho were among the first to be disrupted byminers. Some of them worked for the min-ers, panning for gold, and others justdisappeared into the foothills to the east. Bythe 1860s, they were practically extermi-nated. There were hardly any of them left.Heizer had written about the destruction ofthe California Indians. Well, they were partof it. By the turn of the century, this writerSaul Elias says there were hardly any of theold Indian groups. He has names for the vari-ous tribelets that existed in that area, wholelists of them, strange names. I don’t thinkanybody today has ever heard of them. AndI looked through the Handbook of NorthAmerican Indians for California, and I found

a few names that might be like the ones thatSaul P. Elias mentioned. He had long lists,from treaties that were made in the 1850swith the Indians.

The treaties meant nothing, becausetwenty years later when the so called “rabbithunts” were in vogue, the Indians were scat-tered and killed or died from disease. But Iremember reading Elias when I was inModesto. Much of it didn’t register on me,but I was thinking, “Oh, there were Indianshere. Why can’t I find any?” I didn’t knowanybody who knew anything about Indians.Oh, some said, “There are no Indians aroundhere anymore. You have to go to SiouxCountry and the Plains.”

Texas!

There might be a few in other parts ofCalifornia. Also the “Semetes”—which waswhat Elias called them—the YosemiteIndians that had been driven by a ColonelJohnson in the 1850s back to Yosemite.That’s how Yosemite was discovered. Andthere was a man named Savage, of all things,a rancher who had a camp just east ofModesto. He hired hundreds of Indians, andthen when he was through with them, hewould send them off with nothing. Most justdied. Horrible stories. Later he was the firstto raid Yosemite Valley.

So, I remember having this feeling of,“My god, all this had happened long before Iwas here in this country.” When I would goout hiking along the rivers, I was thinking,“This was their river; this was their place; thisis where they’d been.” When I’d go to KnightsFerry, I would look to see if there were anyaround, and of course there weren’t. It didn’toccur to me to look for evidence of their exis-tence, which any of us would do now. We’d

75LIFE IN MODESTO

walk around seeing if there’s any indicationof habitation sites or whatever or ask locals.

I wasn’t an anthropologist, whatever thatmight mean. So, anyway, that was in my mindat the time.

9YOSEMITE AND TAHOE

HEN I WAS a little kid, we usedto take trips up to Yosemite. I’dusually go with my Aunt Edith

of the car kicking up the dust on the edge ofthe road, and saying, “We’re too close,Armand,” to my uncle. “We’re too close.” Hewas too busy keeping us on the road. And sowe’d go to Yosemite and camp. There wasalso a place called Big Basin, and that hadbeen a large Indian encampment in previoustimes. I didn’t know this. To me, though, themythological presence of Indians was every-where whenever I was out in the mountains.Somehow or other, their spirits were there,and you know, you could see feathers stick-ing up out of headdresses everywhere youlook. It was wonderful fantasy.

But I remember when I was about ten oreleven going to Yosemite and wanderingaround the valley and coming upon this littleIndian camp. That was the camp of ChiefLemhi, who was a Mono or Miwok Indianmarried to a Yosemite woman. They had afamily of about seven or eight people, livingin what he called a wigwam, but it was a littlebark shelter the Washoe would call a gálisdángal, a little lean-to. There were two orthree of these little lean-tos. They had someflat rocks that they would build fires under,

Wand my Uncle Armand.

Now, would they drive, or?

Oh, they drove in these horrible flivvers.That’s what they used to call them, flivvers.These were little Ford flivvers. But my unclehad a Chevrolet, and it was a great open carwith a vinyl top and side panels and plasticflaps that you could see through. You couldtake off these panels, and you’d have an opentouring car. They would just rattle andsqueak, and you had to start them with a handcrank. As I remember the tires were verysmall. The tread was small, and they werealways going flat. You had to get out andpump them up. You always carried extra tubesand patching. It was a job to go any place.

I remember going to Yosemite. It was hairraising, because you’d go along these narrowlittle roads, dirt roads. I remember lookingout the side of the car and looking straightdown into great gorges, and seeing the tires


and they would take acorn flour and makelittle cakes. They’d sell them to the tourists.And little trinkets, they had little thingsmade out of white deerskin and turquoise—watch fobs and things of that sort.

And I sat around. These people fascinatedme. I couldn’t leave them. I’d spend all daythere. If anybody wanted to find me fromwhere we were camped a mile away or so,they knew where to go. They would send mybrother to find me, and there I’d be sitting,getting to know Chief Lemhi and his wifeand his two daughters, two lovely youngIndian women. This was to me the epitome.I had found Indians. I helped them over aperiod of about a week when I’d come up. Ibegan helping them sell their watch fobs andtheir acorn cakes, which I loved. I don’t knowif they were any good, but I decided I lovedthem. I would take them and hand them out

to the tourists, and say, “Would you like one?”or something. I forget what they cost. Andthen I’d take the money back to Chief Lemhi,who was always dressed in a very fancy, em-broidered vest with some kind of silveramulets all over it. He’d wear a featheredheaddress with feathers sticking straight up,proper style for that area. I don’t know whatkind of feathers they were. He wore a blackshirt and a kind of leather apron and mocca-sins. He was dressing up for the tourists. Nowand then they would dance. They would dothis kind of shuffle, pounding, stampingdance, like a circle dance, just the four orfive of them. The sad little group dancingaround the fire, and then I would go aroundwith a basket and pick up the collection.[laughter]

I was so proud of myself. I felt so wonder-ful being part of that group. So, I saw themmaybe two or three times later before thatfamily disappeared. We’d go up every nowand then. They were still there. He’d alwaysremember me and have a gift for me, oldChief Lemhi. I gathered, later, that he camefrom Mono. He was one of the westernMonos perhaps. I’m not sure. But veryuntalkative about where he came from.“Yosemite, I’m from Yosemite.” You know, hewas being a Yosemite Indian, and maybe hewas if any of them still existed.

So, that was one thing. And the otherthing was Lake Tahoe. We’d go up, occasion-ally, to Lake Tahoe, two or three times in mylife. And in those days going up to Tahoe overwhat is now Highway 80—which was then40, I believe—most of it was dirt road whenyou got up there. Then there was that wind-ing section now that’s closed off when youcome down from Donner Summit. Have youever been on that snaky road? That was adirt road. And really, for those old cars! It’sabsolutely amazing that they were able to do

“These people fascinated me. I couldn’t leave them.I’d spend all day there.” Left to right: Donaldd’Azevedo, Chief Lemhi, and Warren d’Azevedo.

79YOSEMITE AND TAHOE

the things that they did, to either go up ordown the grades with the kind of brakes theyhad. It was frightening. I think of my uncle,who was a very nervous man. He was a verystrange and agitated man who liked thingsquiet and peaceful, but here he was drivingthe car crowded with people. And my aunt,being a great front-seat driver, telling himwhat to do every minute, and him telling herto be quiet. [laughter] We’d finally get up andstay at South Lake Tahoe, I think near what’snow Camp Richardson, in that area.

Did you camp?

We camped. Oh, yes. We couldn’tafford . . . .

With tents?

Oh, yes. We’d put up tents, drive stakes,and have a camp fire and cook. People justdid that in those days. There was a lot of thatsort of camping, and hardly any tourists.There were other people around, but youdidn’t have the feeling of being crowded bytourists—a lot of space. I recall wonderingwhere the Indians were. They were there, butI didn’t know how to recognize them. And ifI had, I wouldn’t have known what to doabout it. But that’s the period when people Inow know of were there, the basketmakers,and, my gosh, Captain Pete and Ben Jamesand Maggie James.

Well, wouldn’t that have been when Siskin wasdoing some of his research?

Nineteen thirty-six. Siskin, Heizer, Lowiehad been up there, and earlier Kroeber andBarrett. But I didn’t know about these people.

No, but it’s just interesting to think that . . . .

Oh, yes. Siskin and Stewart were downin the valley. They were with the newPeyotists. In 1934 to 1938, I think, they didtheir first fieldwork. Yes. Well, that was a littlelater than when I was first up to Tahoe.

Oh, right, as a child.

Yes. I was there probably when I was eightor nine years old the first time. That wouldhave been in the 1920s, late 1920s. And itwas so absolutely beautiful up there thatpeople would be in a state of awe. I remem-ber people were silent there. It was sobeautiful. You go up now, and your heartbreaks looking at what’s happened there.

The water was really what they said it was,crystal clear straight down a hundred feet. Youcould see things on the bottom, enormousfish swimming around. Even by that time thefish were pretty well fished out of Tahoe, butnevertheless you could see them. And youhad all these wonderful myths that the wa-ters of the lake were so light that you sank.You’d never come up again. You would sinkto the bottom if you drowned. Also, thatyou’d get pulled down by currents.

All of this, I now know, had to do a lotwith Indian mythology, Washoe mythology,about the lake, about the dangers of the lake;because they didn’t go out in the middle ofthe lake. They didn’t like to swim in the lake.They stayed around the shores. They hadthese stories about the bottomless lake andbeing pulled down by water babies in the lake.Well, a lot of this was picked up by whiteswho adopted the idea of the bottomless lake,et cetera, and later the tale about a hole atthe bottom of the lake. All these were partof Washoe legend. But I didn’t know. I don’tthink I even knew that the people up therewere Washoe. And yet, there were dozens ofWashoe people working around there. Right


where we were camping was the father of mywonderful friend, Roy James. Ben James wasleading pack trains up behind Tallac, but Iwouldn’t have recognized him as Indian.

Were you aware of them selling baskets?

They did, but I don’t remember. And itwould have been to me just a quaint thing. Iwouldn’t have thought of it as . . . I don’tknow. I would have seen it just as tourist stuff.

Like the Yosemites?

Yes. But if I hadn’t gotten to know Lemhiand felt so proud of being in his family, Iwould have just seen them as a tourist attrac-tion. It didn’t register on me. When I thoughtof Indians, I was thinking of my idea ofIndians, not these poor bedraggled Washoe,living or working around the lake. So, I maynot have seen any. It’s possible I didn’t seeany.

When I was about sixteen, just finishinghigh school, I had a chance to get a job atLake Tahoe. Although I had been there oc-casionally with the family, it had been atSouth Tahoe. But there was this camp innorth Tahoe, a camp with girls, young, fromvery rich families in the Bay Area—I don’tknow, fifty, seventy young girls, quite nubile,quite wonderful creatures. And there was awoman named Birch, a very severe, tall, hard-nosed lady who ran the camp. She waslooking for two guys to go up and act as fac-totum, I suppose. A young fellow named Redwho I knew at school was going to be theswimming and sports instructor, and I wasgoing to be a sort of general handyman.

So we went up there to north Tahoe,somewhere in back of what is now King’sBeach, probably just west of King’s Beach,back against the mountains. It was all for-

ested at that time, hardly any houses. Andthere was this large area that was CampTallawanda which Birch had named. It hadsomething to do with Indian mythology. Shewas loaded with Indian myth. She used torecite Hiawatha ad nauseam.

She brought us up to this camp whichwas a lot of little cabins—screened cabinswhere the girls stayed. I was set to work emp-tying the trash every morning and buryingit, cleaning up the camp and, in general, be-ing a handyman—fixing things which Ididn’t know how to fix, but I fixed them oneway or another.

The whole camp was based upon somenotion of how Indians were supposed to live,according to this woman Birch. The girls hadto get up early in the morning and bathe in astream or at the pump. They had to stand ina circle and hold hands and say things like,“Oooga, oooga, oooga.” [laughter] And Birchwould sing the Indian Love Call that shethought was the greatest song ever known. Ithad been in the film, Rose Marie, withJeanette McDonald. That was about the sametime that Nelson Eddie and JeanetteMcDonald were down around Meeks Bay, Ithink, or Camp Richardson, filming RoseMarie.

So, Birch would sing the Indian Love Callatrociously. [laughter] It was one of the worstexperiences that one could think of early inthe morning to hear this woman bellowingthe Indian Love Call, and the girls all stand-ing in somber attention. The whole day wassort of that way. They would come to eat andthere was always something Indian, youknow, like corn or I don’t know what else.She assigned me one time—and I was quitewilling, because I believed that I could doanything—to have an Indian feast for thegirls outside the camp, up in the woods some-where. I found a place, made a nice circle,

81YOSEMITE AND TAHOE

and we built a fire in the center, and I wentaround trying to find Indian things that Icould serve. I found manzanita berries, for Ihad read that the Indians ate manzanita ber-ries. Oh, yes! Chief Lemhi’s family had hadmanzanita berry cakes. And I thought, “Gee,I can do that. I can make acorn cakes.” But Icouldn’t get the acorns, so I’d used oatmeal.I had a whole menu planned of wild things. Ihad no idea what I was doing, but I was go-ing to make an Indian feast. Well, we hadthe feast, and we had a dance where every-body held hands and jumped around in acircle and did the Love Call while I drummed.[laughter]

That night and the next day, and for twodays following, the whole camp was at a standstill. Everybody had diarrhea. [laughter] Ber-ries that aren’t totally ripe and haven’t beenleached and pounded dry are very potentlaxatives. So everybody was sick and mad atme, and Birch was berating me. But I hadgiven a feast, and they were eating oatmealcakes baked on rock. I felt very proud of my-self. And I didn’t have trouble. [laughter]Maybe I didn’t eat any of it. However, theupshot was I was told to take them on a hike,a long excursion up into the mountainsnearby. I was supposed to be the expert, be-cause I had spent two nights on top of anearby mountain by myself, very Indian, andbuilt a fire up as a signal to the camp downbelow.

Oh, that you’d got there.

That I was up there. And I slept on thisbarren rock. I remember how beautiful it was,the sky and the moon. And I had felt veryadventuresome up there sleeping all alone,with all the wild animals around and all that.And building a fire and knowing that theyknew I was there. Boy, I was a hero for that.

So then I was told to take them on a longhike. Well, we went on a long hike to a placethat we named Bare Lake. It was a beautifullittle bowl-like lake way up in the mountains,and it took us about two or three hours hik-ing to get there. Then here was this long lineof young women, young girls—I guess theywere all twelve to fifteen, sixteen—and verymischievous.

For example, there were times at campwhen they would very purposefully leave theirused menstrual pads in the waste baskets thatI’d have to pick up in the morning, and theywould be watching from their windows andgiggling. You know, young women can beruthless, and they were. But I got along prettywell. So did Red. We were sort of their mas-cot pets.

But anyway, we hiked up to this place wecalled Bare Lake, because they didn’t haveany swim trunks, and they told me I had tohide behind some trees. Then they allstripped. I peeked, of course. What a beauti-ful sight, seeing, you know, twenty or thirtylovely young girls cavorting about in thismountain lake. It was absolutely beautiful. Ihad the feeling that I was really living a verywild and wonderful life. I peeked for an houror so. It was quite wonderful. I was a truePeeping Tom. Then they all dressed, and Istarted to take them back. But of course, Igot them lost. [laughter]

We wandered around all afternoon. I keptthinking, well, I just need to go down. I knowI should go down. I couldn’t see the lake oranything. It was a very thick forested area inthose days. And we just wandered, though Icould find no paths. I had to act as though Iknew where I was going, but they began tosuspect that something was very wrong. Andthey were getting hungry and tired. Some ofthem were crying. It was a terribly anxietyridden afternoon. I’ll never forget, and I


thought, that’s what I get for acting as thoughI can do something I can’t do. Eventually,however, we found a little cabin. It belongedto some summer people. Here was, at last,civilization, and they told me how to getdown to the road. I went to see them aloneand didn’t tell the girls. And the people toldme how to get down to the highway, the olddirt highway, and then from there I would beable to find my way to Tallawanda. Well, Idid that, and I told the girls, “Well, I knowexactly where I’m going.” [laughter]

We got to camp three hours late, andBirch was absolutely furious. “What have youdone? They were suppose to be back at threeo’clock or four o’clock, and it is now pastdinner. These girls are hungry and tired.What have you done to them?”

But most of the girls were very happy withit, and they were defending me, saying, “Wehad a wonderful day. We went to Bare Lake.”

“Where’s Bare Lake” says Birch. [laugh-ter] “Where was Warren? What was hedoing?”

Oh, she was Queen Victoria! She was notamused by anything.

So anyway, I remember wondering wherethe real Indians were. Of course, this wasnorth Tahoe, where there would have beenvery few Washoe. But again, Captain Peteand one of his wives at least, were makingbaskets, and he was doing something for tour-ists in that period. But, you know, three orfour Washoe Indians at most, and how wouldI have known of them?

There was the old Cal Neva Lodge. Atthat time, it was just a small place sitting right

on the border between California andNevada. We used to go down there and illic-itly drink beer, myself and Red and maybetwo or three of the older girls. We wouldsneak down there. So, it wasn’t far from King’sBeach. It was one big room with a line in themiddle, which was the California-Nevadaborder. We used to drink on the Nevada side.And there was a slot machine, one slotmachine.

But you couldn’t drink on the other side.And that lasted all summer. It was to me quitean experience. But, again, my experienceabout Indians was all through this mishmashmythology of Birch, our leader, who haddeveloped a ritual all of her own.

Yet they were in the area, but nobodythought to go out and find a real one. [laugh-ter] I mean, that would have spoiledeverything if they’d ever met old CaptainPete, because later I knew his son, Hank Pete.Old Captain Pete was a rugged old guy anddidn’t look like what an Indian was supposedto look like, and they would have been veryupset. So that’s Tahoe.

Did you ever at this early time get into CarsonValley, Nevada? Did you have any notion aboutNevada?

Yes, just once or twice. Once I went toReno with my parents when I was a youngkid, but it was Tahoe mostly. All that waspart of the Modesto and pre-Modesto expe-rience.

10IN AN IDEAL WORLD . . . .

T WAS IN MODESTO around 1936 or1937 that I realized I was not going to gointo medicine. I made this sort of crucial

where in the South Seas, because I thoughtthat was the ideal place in the world. I wasgoing to find this small island and start thisnew society. I had it all organized. I wish Ihad that thing now. I had every detail, thewhole structure of a totally unworkable soci-ety. [laughter] But it was delightful. It waswonderful. There was free love, nobodymarried.

Is this while you were also reading the Ballards?

All these things went on in phases. No,this was when I was reading the South Seamaterials I’ve already mentioned—HermanMelville and James Norman Hall, all thoseSouth Sea tales. I was even reading PeterBuck—Te Rangi Hiroa. How I ran acrosshim, I don’t know, because later, when I wasat the University of California and in anthro-pology, I rediscovered him. But early on I hadrun across some of his work on Hawaiianculture and Polynesian culture, and the factthat he was a Polynesian was enough for me.Later I met him when I was going to sea, andthis stuff all came together.

Ilife decision that I was not going to do it andlet my parents know.

“Well, what are you going to do, Warren?”I hadn’t the slightest idea in this world exceptI wanted to get out in the world and haveadventure and maybe be a writer. And I waswriting. I was writing masses of poetry. [laugh-ter] Very bad poetry.

So when you were keeping journals you did havesome notion of being a writer?

Yes, in a way. To me, it was important towrite. It was important to keep a record ofwhat I was doing and put down my impres-sions and my thoughts. I did that at home.There was one journal I kept for years. It wasa ledger—a great, old bank ledger, very thickold thing, with the marbleized sides. Gosh,it was about eighteen by twelve inches, bigold ledger. I kept record of the new society Iwas eventually going to build. I had a notionI was eventually going to find an island some-


So to me, that was the place that if I hadmy druthers I wanted to be. I dreamed of be-coming the grandmaster of a new society, thewise director of the new way of life. And itwas going to begin with some Polynesians,but anybody else could come if they couldqualify. I had a whole list of qualifications. Iwas very concerned about not only orderwithin the group, but also with reproduc-tion—you know, how the next generationwould be born and taught and raised prop-erly. I don’t think marriage was involved. Acertain kind of ritual commitment had to bemade between people. I thought of every-thing. Not only food and agriculture—whichI didn’t know anything about, but I had ideasabout it. [laughter] And fishing—oh, a lot offishing, because I liked fishing. We were go-ing to do a lot of fishing. We were going tohave certain ceremonies and rituals, but theywere going to be spiritual rather than reli-gious. And that was one of the . . . .

At that point how were you distinguishing be-tween spiritual and religious?

Well, mystical. By spiritual I mean philo-sophical and metaphysical rather than anykind of religious system or order.

So, when you say religion, you’re really talkingabout the established . . . ?

Organized. Christianity. [laughter] But Ithink a little Buddhism was all right, a littleVedanta and Hindu culture was allowed.

When that old question, “What are yougoing to do with your life?” would come up,it would be extremely disturbing to me, be-cause, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I justknew that I had these great, powerful urgesto do something important and different andget away—actually to get away. Freight train,

ship, spaceship, anything—off the planet,into a new, another world.

Which reminds me—the ideal societythat I planned in this ledger had incorporatedall the things that I thought would be theway human beings ought to live, and thatsomewhere in the world there must be peoplelike that. Of course, there aren’t. There couldnever be people like the ones that you con-struct under these conditions.

I also wanted to be a writer and a trav-eler. That was Halliburton syndrome. Thatwas one possibility. I thought of some otherthings. I’d go to the South Seas and live therefor the rest of my life like Paul Gauguin. AndStevenson—Robert Louis Stevenson—wasanother one of my heroic figures.

Then there was the idea of becoming amonk. I suppose this is where kids pick uptheir parents’ lost chances or lost desires. Myfather would say how, when he was in hisearly teens, because he was Catholic, he ad-mired a certain priest named Brother Leo atthe Catholic school he had gone to. Hethought how wonderful it would be, to belike that, or even to go into a Trappist mon-astery to contemplate and do good the restof your life. So I was thinking, gee, I could bea monk. Also, it would fit in with my idea ofphilosophical development and spiritual ex-cellence and all that. It wasn’t a serious thing,but it was there. In fact later, when I got toCal, I did explore the Pacific School ofReligion as a possibility. Also SwamiAshokananda’s Vedanta church, right nearthe university. I think it’s another kind ofchurch now. But that sprung out of explora-tion into these possibilities.

Anyway, all those things had come to mymind in my early teens. I remember, I waswriting poetry and keeping journals. I musthave written more poetry at that time than Iwrote since, though I wrote much better


since. [chuckle] But I wrote a lot—all thoseepisodic, sporadic journals, my experiencesand thoughts at that time. So, I had the feel-ing that I wanted to do some kind of writingand new thinking, being an original person.I even thought I wanted to go into the the-ater, to be an actor. I even had a very short,fortunately, brief episode of deciding I wasgoing to enter the ballet school in SanFrancisco. I was very interested in dance butsoon discovered my limits. I hadn’t met Kathyyet, but when I met Kathy, my interest indance increased quite a bit, as a non-per-former, as an art form. All those things weregoing on, a sort of a stew at that time.

I remember we went down to the 1938San Francisco World’s Fair where I had oncethought I would sail in with Halliburton onthe junk. I was very depressed by the fact thatI would not be coming that way, but I wouldbe going with my family on Treasure Island.Treasure Island became a naval base two orthree years later during the war, and I wasstationed there as a cadet in the NavalReserve. But anyway, we went to the World’sFair. My memory of it is very dim, except thatit was kind of glitzy and impressive. Mybrother and I sneaked in to see Sally Rand,because we had some time to ourselves, andhere she was with her great feather fan. Shewas a celebrity in that period, and here shewas one of the attractions at the World’s Fair!

Was she an exotic dancer?

She was called a fan-dancer, a bad exoticdancer. She had this enormous ostrich fanwhich opened up six feet, I’m sure. She was alittle lady, a little blond, rather cute and nota great body. She was mostly naked. She prob-ably had on a body suit, but it was consideredvery daring. She would come on, and every-body would scream with excitement, because

here was the famous Sally Rand. She wouldplay with her fans and hide behind them anddo all these . . . . It was really, when I cometo think of it, a terribly, terribly stupid show.But, we had seen her, and that was impor-tant.

And I remember the folks asking, “Well,what was it like?”

“Oh, gee, it was great,” you know. But itwas actually pretty boring, because she reallydidn’t do much. And you didn’t see much,because her fans were in the way. But we hadseen the famous Sally Rand.

Now what was the other thing we sawthat I remember that was impressive? Oh, yes,Martha Graham was there. Martha Grahamhad a little show that was put on in a littletheater, and I talked my brother into going. Iwanted to see Martha Graham. I was inter-ested somehow in modern dance, and I hadheard of her. Maybe I had met Kathy by thistime in Modesto when she went through withher troupe at Bobbie Jean’s house. It is pos-sible I had met her by then, and maybe thatsparked my interest in it. But, I must havehad other . . . . Well, of course, I had gonewith Betty Anderson, this tap dancer in highschool, but she wouldn’t have known aboutor cared about Martha Graham. Whatever. Iwanted to see her. So we went into this tinytheater, and we were among about four peoplein the audience. Well, you had Sally Randdown the street, why would you go to seeMartha Graham?

This is a World’s Fair?

At the San Francisco World’s Fair, in-deed! But my brother and I still remember it.Don has a magnificent memory. He remem-bers things in tremendous detail. He putseverybody to shame. He remembers every-thing that happened there. All I remember


was she did that wonderful dance envelopedin this drapery. She danced all in place. Itwas extremely intricate. I can’t remember themusic, or maybe there wasn’t any. Then mybrother says that she did a snake dance, orthey did a snake dance. Everybody was snak-ing around the stage, and it was remarkablyfascinating how they moved. We weren’tfamiliar with modern dance, and here wasan early modern dancer.

That was before modern dance was reallyknown. I remember thinking how wonder-ful it was. Oh, we knew about IsadoraDuncan. She had been well known. Mymother was fascinated by Isadora Duncan.We never saw her but heard everything abouther. It was like Amy Semple McPherson,Isadora Duncan’s life.

So when I saw Martha Graham adver-tised at the fair, I remember thinking thatthis is what Isadora Duncan had introducedinto dance, this kind of free flowing expres-sion, modernism in dance. So I was alreadythinking about those things. And then theother thing we saw . . . it’s the only otherthing I remember. I really don’t recall muchof that fair at all.

Would you stay with your aunt?

Yes, we’d stay with them. We drove downfrom Modesto. So, the other thing was anevangelist who had crowds coming to hisshow. He had a remarkable show, an electri-cal demonstration. He had all kinds ofequipment that made long sparks betweenpoles, and flashes of light. It was a light showwith dazzling electrical phenomena. And ashe went on, he would preach about the won-ders of God, what God could do. This wasproof of the Bible. This was proof of the va-lidity of religion. He was one of those weird

guys who was trying to use science to con-firm religious views.

I don’t know how Don felt, but I remem-ber feeling, “This is just a lot of bullshit.”[laughter] It was fascinating how he was us-ing all this equipment, but I was thinking,“Hell, I’ve used an x-ray in my physics class.”Old Willie Brown, my physics instructor inhigh school, had demonstrated these kindsof phenomena, and there’s nothing mysteri-ous about them. And here was this guy usingthis quackery and giving this table-thump-ing sermon. So I remember coming out ofthere feeling vindicated. Here is what thesecrap artists do. This is what some peoplebelieve.

Did you ever get into, or was your family everinto, that side of the occult? I mean, the tabletappers and the spiritualists?

No. The closest I got to it was trying tohelp put out a candle in San Jose.

The Rosicrucians.

The idea of spiritualism, perhaps. I wasintrigued by the occult. I can’t rememberthem, but I read extensively in occult litera-ture. I’d go to bookstores in San Francisco.There were occult book stores, and I wouldwander through them. Now and then I wouldbuy one. All sorts from strange little cults inEngland and Europe and the United States,and I would glance through them. I was in-terested in it, but it always seemed to me tobe contrived and somehow elite. It was elit-ist, in that the people who were doing itseemed upper-class dilettantes. I was begin-ning to question, “Where did they make theirliving?” Or, “Where do they get the time todo this sort of thing?”


You know the I Am Society always smacked ofthat to me, because I thought it was no coinci-dence that all the Beings were golden haired andblue eyed.

Oh, yes. It was not only elitist, it wassubtly racist. The Caucasians were top of theheap.

Supreme.

There was really no room for anyone else.[laughter] I mean, that was it. Whateversociety they envisioned was sterile. ThoseLemurians had to be all blue-eyed, fair-skinned, blond-haired Caucasians. Thatoccurred to me. I mean, I was aware therewas something very isolated and constrictiveabout their view. A constricted world view.

Because, even then, that’s definitely what youwere fighting against all the time?

Yes. It was too small, and I began to getthe feeling that all these people that wrote

these books and pamphlets—includingMadame Blavatsky—were all from well-to-do, upper-class, wealthy circles. It was a kindof hobby for wealthy, bored people. This be-gan to occur to me later. And all this wasreally before the great fad of Eastern mysti-cism and all that has since hit the fan. It wasjust beginning, the early seeds of it.

So anyway, I remember this electricalevangelist at the fair, because I had a verystrong feeling that one has to watch out forthis crap, you know.

Did you have the sense then that most of theaudience he was drawing was interested in thephenomena, the electrical phenomena?

I don’t know what all of them felt, butthere were a lot of people shouting and say-ing, “Amen,” and, “Hallelujah,” and, “Howwonderful,” and, “Praise the Lord!” But theremust have been others like me there, too.

11JUNIOR COLLEGE

FTER I FINISHED high school, Iwent to Modesto Junior College,and when I graduated from junior

cap, and parade and receive a diploma. Infact, I went and got it at the office of thecollege instead of receiving it in line. Evenwhen I was teaching in universities, I didn’tlike to go to graduation ceremonies, mainlybecause I didn’t want to wear a cap and gown.I always felt they were so silly. [laughter]There was something so silly about a cap andgown. And, of course, that’s a very nutty wayto look at things, because also . . . there’ssomething wonderful about people gatheringtogether and wearing the emblems of theirtrade and of their status. In a way that’s kindof nice, and a couple of times I have beenable to enjoy it that way, particularly if I hadstudents who were graduating. Then I’d feelobliged to go, and then I could find myselfenjoying the situation. But mostly I avoidedsuch things. I didn’t like it; I didn’t want to.

But, anyway, my mother was so unhappyabout it, I remember that one day I said, “Allright. Let’s go take a picture.” And I put onmy cap and gown and walked over (we wereonly a couple of blocks from the college) withmy brother, and we went over there. And Isat on the steps . . . I have the picture. I

Acollege, I refused to go to the graduation cere-monies. And this probably was, to me, at thattime, an overt message to my family that Iwas not going to do the things that they did.I know my mother was crushed. I don’t thinkmy father cared much; if he did, he didn’tsay. But my mother wanted to have picturesof me at graduation. She wanted to show herfriends, because it was so remarkable, I sup-pose she felt, that I graduated at all! But Iwas adamant. I was not going to go to gradu-ation. I felt that it was hokey, that there wassomething . . . .

That, as I look back, was a moment ofclear adolescent rebellion. I felt very badlythat my mother was so upset about it. At thesame time, I just felt I could not do it; andthat’s something that stuck with me the restof my life. I always avoided ceremonial situ-ations when I could. Somehow or other itseemed to me always to be . . . . I have noidea why I felt that way about it. It just seemedwrong; I didn’t want to wear a gown and a


looked very dolorous, my head hanging down,looking very resistant, and my picture wastaken. I gave that to my mother, who wasnot satisfied at all, as well she should not be.But that was about the same time that I wasalternately using the name d’Azevedo withAzevedo. I tried to think earlier today, whenthat started, and it’s hard because I’d alter-nate using it.

My father’s people were d’Azevedos. Mygrandfather, who was a doctor in Oakland,and my great-grandfather, were alld’Azevedos. At least they wrote it with a dwith the apostrophe. And then they beganto drop it. I suppose that when my father wentto school, and about the time he was gettingmarried, it was a burden to constantly spellout that name, d’Azevedo.

And it also seemed to be a little uppity—most of the Portuguese had dropped it. In fact,today most of the Azevedos I know comefrom families who were de Azevedo ord’Azevedo. It wasn’t a status thing; it was justthe way it was written.

When I went to the Azores some yearsago, I went through the archives at Horta,and it was just like that wonderful anecdotetold by Steven Hawking, the physicist inEngland who wrote A Brief History of Time.He opened one of his books with a little storyabout a talk he once gave about the begin-ning of the world. And some woman in theaudience asked, “Well, what happened be-fore that? What I have learned is that theearth sits upon a turtle. And the turtle is whatholds the world up.” And so Hawking says—he was being very smart-aleck—he says,“Well, what’s holding the turtle up?”

And she says, “It’s turtles all the waydown.” [laughter]

Yes, “Sir, it’s turtles all the way down!”[laughter] And so I told my brother when heargued with me the family had not used the

d, that I had discovered not only that theydid, but it was d’Azevedos all the waydown . . . [laughter] all the way down to thebeginning. So somewhere back in the early1920s, my father had dropped the d just tomake it easier to sign his name and to joinother Portuguese who had dropped it. Andmy grandmother, who kept the d, was one ofthe reasons why I use it, because she was tell-ing me how important it was to maintain thistradition, of d’Azevedo. I was influenced bythat, and I at times would sign my named’Azevedo. To me it was rather important.My father never commented on it, but I don’tthink he liked it because it put me in a ratherunusual position within the family, you know.Donald Azevedo, my brother, and Warrend’Azevedo and all . . . . [laughter] And myfather, Joseph d’Azevedo/Azevedo, et cetera.But I did find my birth certificate, where myfather had signed his name d’Azevedo, buthe made me Azevedo, because it was the tran-sition, the new way. My brother was askanceat that; he didn’t really believe it till I showedhim.

Now, your brother has kept Azevedo?

We had that on our birth certificates. Iwas able to change my birth certificate later,a few years later, to d’Azevedo without pay-ing any fee. I wrote to Sacramento and said,“You have made a mistake, and see, myfather’s name is d’Azevedo, and you have notput d’Azevedo on my name.” They changedit without a qualm. [laughter]

So I became legalized that way. But evenbefore that I was using the name. Part of thathad to do with the influence of my grand-mother, whom I would go to visit wheneverI was in the Bay Area—my Portuguese grand-mother. She would not only read mePortuguese poetry, which I didn’t under-

91JUNIOR COLLEGE

stand . . . and she would then roughly trans-late. Particularly, her uncle, da Gloria, thegreat Portuguese poet whom she admired andloved. That’s Guilherme Silveira da Gloria.

And she thought he was wonderful. Shewould read his poetry, and then she wouldtell me, “You see, da Gloria and d’Azevedo—you must keep those things because those arethe tradition.” And her husband, my grand-father, had kept the d on the placard outsidehis office almost to the time he died. But hefinally changed it because his Portuguese rela-tives had all become Azevedos. And then mygrandmother, years later, when she was an oldlady living in Alameda in an apartment,somewhat destitute, changed her name toAzevedo. I thought, what an irony of life . . .a tragedy.

And I said, “Grandma, why?”And she says, “Because I’m all alone in

the telephone book.” [laughter]There was a whole page of Azevedos, you

know, and also in Sacramento—another pageof Azevedos. You had to go to the D’s to findAmalia. All by herself. She began to feellonely there! [laughter] And I felt very sorryfor her. Quite a poignant story.

Do you think part of your going back and forthwith the name was that you were sort of experi-menting with a pen name? I mean, were youthinking of your identity?

Maybe. It was mainly in terms of iden-tity—who I was. I was the great-grandson ofJoachim d’Azevedo.

Yes. Well, one thing interests me a great dealabout what you said in terms of your gradua-tion. Refusing to take part was sort of astatement, an initial statement that you weregoing to craft your own way.

Yes. That came about the same time.There was no hostility between me and myparents. Sometimes my parents felt a littlevexation toward me because of my behaviorand my interests. But, no, we were a fairlycompanionable family.

I mean I had very strong emotional prob-lems about my family because I felt containedand walled off from the world. And I beganto be very irritated by the extended familialcrowd, the stew of family, and the constantbickerings and things of that kind going on.

And, also, though I liked and admiredsome members of the family like my grand-parents, my Swedish grandparents, I didn’twant to remain with them. I didn’t want toremain in that world. wanted to remove my-self from that world for a while, anyway.

So all these little attempts, like the refusalto go to graduation, the ambivalence aboutthe name, were identity things. Also, it wasa subtle critique of my father that I wasn’treally quite aware of. For example, the factthat he never spoke Portuguese in the house.And then when I’d go to his mother andfather’s house, the Portuguese household, Ifelt estranged because I didn’t have the lan-guage. Why can’t I speak it? And I think myvery early problems about language learningprobably came there—the feeling of beingseparated.

Later when I went to Mexico, in my let-ters home I mentioned all the time that I wishI could speak Spanish. Yet I kept saying, “Youknow, you don’t really need to; people are sonice that if you are friendly and polite tothem, they understand your gestures; theyunderstand the way you are . . . you under-stand them.”

And the name thing had to do partly withmy feeling that my father had betrayed hisheritage, had given up. He never talked abouthis relatives; he never talked about the his-


tory. I had to find it out. I used to go and takenotes at my grandmother’s house; take noteson genealogy.

I have a file that I kept up all my life—genealogical records of the family. But whenI’d ask him, he would put it off. He seemedto be disinterested. Now and then he mighthold forth a bit, but it was always as thoughit was a burden.

Yes, and maybe irrelevant to what he was tryingto do for himself?

I think so. I think he had to struggleagainst his family in the same way, in a waythat all adolescents do. And his marriage tomy mother was . . . I don’t think that was arebellion; I think that was a deep and power-ful detour in his life. That problem over mybirth and all that, I think it had shocked himinto the reality that he had to be on his own.And he did. He went out and decided not tobe a doctor, which is something I too decided,but I stuck with it. He became a bookkeeperand did some work in banks and in insurancefor a number of years before he finally wentback to school into medicine, when I was veryyoung. He had a great struggle over that, agreat struggle over what he was going to doand be.

And he was married and had kids. By theway, my great struggle was also after I hadmarried and had kids and the war was on. Solater I had a lot of sympathy for what he wentthrough. But when I was a kid, when I wasgetting ready to leave home and go to schoolI felt a deep sense of loss—the feeling that Ididn’t have continuity with his side of thefamily. It was all with my mother’s family.And he in a sense had tossed in his fate tomy mother’s family and in some strange wayfound an accommodation with them. He

admired them, too. He admired them as gutsypeople.

Do you think there is something also naturalabout your fascination, your interest in him andhis family and his heritage, also, because you werea boy, a young man, and you look to your fatherfor that kind of identity?

I didn’t get much of that.

I think one of the fascinations in studying “othercultures,” where things seem simpler becauseyou’re at a distance, is that those signals you weresupposed to get from your own older generationalways looked clearer to me in other cultures.

Yes.

That seemed to be what the transmission of cul-ture was all about, was from your immediateelders. And if you don’t get that, it’s . . . .

Well, yes, but the identification was of-ten with those elements within a family thatare not necessarily the ones that your par-ents admire or feel strongly about. Myidentification was with my grandparents onmy mother’s side, who were simple, funda-mentalist religious folk, whom I could feeldistance from, but love, and have a positivefeeling about the struggle they had in life.And others in the family admired that, too.But I had a very special connection with that.As for the generation of my own parents, Ilooked upon them as people who were tryingso hard to fit in, to be Americans. I didn’twant to be part of that.

On the other hand, my father, I suppose,was much more aware about that sort ofthing. He wasn’t able to maintain that kindof relationship with his own family, because

93JUNIOR COLLEGE

for all of their wonderful Portuguese-Latinexuberance and expressiveness—which I hadloved and admired—actually as I’ve learnedsince, it was a rather cold and dysfunctionalfamily. But within the big extended familythey did. Always those gatherings were themost rambunctious, exuberant, hugging, kiss-ing kind of thing, which I took on as part ofmy identity from that side of the family.That’s the way the Portuguese are. That’s theway I must be, and I always was in that sensea rather outgoing person. Physically I wouldtouch people and hold hands and shake andhug, because to me it was admirable.

In my mother’s family, they were affec-tionate, but there wasn’t much embracing.

It almost seems like in your own heritage youhad that Ruth Benedict Apollonian . . . .[laughter]

Apollonian versus Dionysian.1

Yes. [laughter] And you could just pick whichmood you were in.

In a way, one could say that, exceptingthere are Dionysian elements in both andApollonian in both. The Lutheran andCatholic aspects for the Apollonians, but thefundamentalist church-going and Latinromanticism was Dionysian. It was wild andwoolly.

But, anyway, it was that part of my father’stradition he had separated himself from, inorder to create his own independence andidentity. Yet his father stood as a model. Hisfather . . . he loved his father. He had a closerrelationship with his father than I had withhim.

Right. Well, he actually helped him in his practice.

I think he felt sorry for him. I think hefelt nurturing . . . . That was a great burdenfor a young guy. And then he had the prob-lem about marriage to my mother and havinga child early.

Well, don’t you think that generation, that re-ally saw itself as quote “becoming Americans,”felt responsible for their parents?

Oh, yes.

Also, they were buffering . . . .

Yes. They saw their parents as depen-dents. And their parents were. Except myfather’s parents remained custodial until hewas on his own and going to school. By thenhis father began to decline; and his motherwas a very poor financial manager, and thingsjust went to pot. So they became a problemfor him. And then he had his younger broth-ers and sisters that he felt obligations to, andwas always irritated by what he viewed astheir lack of ambition or goal in life.

He always saw his younger brothers andsisters as hapless. And I think part of thatwas transferred onto my brother and myself,that the family was a problem, and we werenot always doing the things that we shoulddo. He expressed this in subtle ways; it wasn’tsomething that we learned through words. Icould just feel it, that he felt us to be inade-quate, just as his brothers and sisters wereinadequate. [laughter]

✧

Do you not want to go into the other topic thatwe’d brought up before, your Philippine girl-friend?

[laughter] Did I mention that? Well yes,that’s when I was in junior college, too. There


was a young woman named Pasing Todtod, aFilipino woman. She had a wonderful voice,and she’d give little local concerts at variousdoings around Modesto, mostly Filipinodances. And I got to know her in class andall that, and she invited me to some of thesethings, so, I got to know her. But then onetime, one of her cousins visited. Her namewas Loling. I don’t recall her last name;Dolores was her American name, and Lolingwas her Filipino name. I thought she wasabsolutely, fabulously beautiful.

I became obsessed by her, and I remem-ber that whenever she’d come up, I wouldask Pasing to invite me over. And one time,she invited me down to Stockton where therewas a Filipino marriage celebration, and Idrove down to Stockton with her family. Wedanced together. She was extremely shy, avery young girl. And I remember this won-derful gathering of Filipinos, most of themday-laborers from the ranches and farms, alldressed up to kill, in their rather elaborateattire, American attire—but you know, flam-boyant ties, pinched coats, and sort ofpachuco-like pants and all that.

“Pachuca”?

Well, it’s a word, that’s a word we used touse, pachuc. What was that? It was the urbanMexicans mainly.

Kd: Well, it was for Mexican/Americansout of L.A.

Is that like a Zoot suit?

Yes, and the slang was the pachucs, or thepachucos—I’m just using it very freely here.They were dressed something like that, sortof a mod style of the period but very nice.There were very few women, mostly these

young men looking for these few women, andlots of Filipino food, which I thought wasfantastic. But most of it I had never seen be-fore. Whole chickens, innards and all, andrice, of course, mixed rice dishes. Then therewas dancing to a kind Filipino pop music,and Pasing would sing. She was the celebrityfor all these people, and she was always calledin to preside.

I spent the whole evening that one timewith Loling, and felt that she was my girl-friend and all that. She was terribly shy andgave me no encouragement really. [laughter]However, she didn’t drive me away.

My friend Watson Lacey went one timewith me to one of these parties in Modesto,and he fell madly in love with her, too. Sothe two of us had this adolescent competi-tion over this lovely, exotic creature. Hewanted to go down to San Francisco to by-pass me and see her at her family house, andI remember being absolutely outraged that hewould do such a thing. So, what I did, I re-member picking some magnolia blossomsfrom the park and putting them in a box withtissue paper around. Of course, overnight theywould turn black, but I spent my last centsending this package with some kind of noteto her about how I wanted to see her and allthat and sent it down to San Francisco.[laughter]

Well, that affair slowly withered away likethe magnolias, because obviously her familyhad decided that this character, this honkywhite man was not going to mess around withtheir daughter. And Pasing told me that herparents said that she was not to write to me.She wrote me one note, that she must notwrite to me and all that. And that was a trag-edy. I remember Watson and I would sit,talking to each other about this terrible trag-edy of our joint love affair with Loling thatgot nowhere. But anyway, that was a whole

95JUNIOR COLLEGE

different world that I guess I wanted to be apart of, but I didn’t know how. And it wasthrough Pasing that I was able to touch onall that. So, that was my Filipino girlfriend.

Years later, my brother met her, knew herhusband—a Filipino man that he had knownat Stanford who had become a medical assis-tant of some sort. In San Francisco he ranacross these two people in a car. The womanwho was with him said, “Are you Warren’sbrother?” And so there was a connection.[laughter] This was at least ten years later.He said she was a nice looking woman, noth-ing fabulous. But boy, she was a fabulouslooking young lady.

Well, ten years is a long time to remember some-one that you’re not allowed to write to.

Well, because obviously it was an eventin her young life, as it was in mine.

Were you introduced to, or interested in, in an-thropology at any point in junior college?

Anthropology, as such, I didn’t knowanything about. Maybe I knew what the wordmeant, but I don’t think that I connected itwith anything that I was interested in. His-tory and archeology I knew a little bit about,but anthropology as a study of culture and allthat, I don’t think I knew anything about thatuntil I got to Cal.

Were you writing poetry at this time?

Oh, yes. I was writing poetry all the time.I wrote scads of poetry, probably from aboutthe time I was eleven, twelve years old.

Both of you sort of have indicated to me that itwasn’t that unusual. A lot of people read andwrote poetry, and it wasn’t that unusual. But,

at this point, isn’t it becoming a little more un-usual, to be writing poetry through junior college?

Well, I only knew two or three friendswho wrote at all. I knew people like WatsonLacey, who was a brilliant guy who later be-came a psychiatrist, and he was the genius ofmy class, you know.

Did he write also?

Yes. Jotted poems, and we’d read poemsto each other. And Pierce Young was a pia-nist and also wrote poetry—very good poetryand later went to Stanford and wrotepoetry—but then became a judge because hisfather got him a judgeship. He went into lawand died early. And who else? Pershing Olsenwho didn’t write poetry but essays and plays.I don’t know of anybody else who was writ-ing poetry at the time. But there was thisstimulus from others who were interested.But, I just wrote all the time, and I had, youknow, sheaths of notes and poetry.

At this point, what are your expectations foryourself? What do you think you’re headedtowards?

I didn’t have the slightest idea. I wantedto travel and be an adventurer and writeabout it like Richard Halliburton. That sortof thing.

A travel writer that would have . . . ?

Not necessarily. Just do fascinating andinteresting things and somehow make a liv-ing at it. As I mentioned, I had started outdeciding I was going to go into pre-med, earlywhen I was still in high school. But thenwhen I got to junior college and started tak-ing pre-med types of courses, preparing for


that, I realized it wasn’t for me. I was inter-ested in it, but I just didn’t connect. Myfriend, Watson Lacey, was a brilliant studentthroughout. He went easily through coursesin genetics and zoology from a Dr. Kurtz. Hewas very good at all that, and he used to workwith me and try to get me to understand.[laughter] Somehow or other, I just couldn’tapply myself that well. I just began to feelthat other things interested me a lot more.My brother went on trying to get into medi-cine and got into Stanford and all that.

What things are you reading now?

Well, I was reading all kinds of things:Ralph Waldo Emerson; Thoreau was verymeaningful to me; also the travel books,things like Sven Hedin; the Greek philoso-phers, Locke, Hume, and Berkeley; andBertrand Russell.

Well, tell me about Thoreau.

Well, the Walden Pond period and theEmerson period, I think I came upon that atjunior college, had some professor or someteacher who turned us on to that—theTranscendentalists. And I loved it.

Are you, are you at this point aware of KarlMarx?

No, I don’t think I’d even heard thename.

Freud?

I’d just heard, now and then, the wordcommunist. Freud? Maybe, but if I did, theydidn’t register. It wasn’t important. No, Marxcame a little later and pretty heavy. Therewas James Norman Hall, I read all of thosePolynesian tales, travel books of his. And hewasn’t Kathy’s relative [Kathleen d’Azevedo],but his co-writer was. He had been to Tahiti.Then someone else—Charles Nordhoff? Iread all that sort of thing. Spent a lot of timein the local library searching travel books.

Are you exploring more along the religious, philo-sophical themes, too?

Both of those went together in phasesduring that period, and I maintained thatinterest even when I got to Cal. I even wentto Swami Ashokananda’s Vedanta church forawhile in Berkeley, and the Pacific Schoolof Religion, because I was toying with theidea of going into the church.

Oh, you were?

I was. I was wandering around in a daze.What was I going to do? I was trying all thesevarious things.

Note

1. Controlled, measured, and logical(Apollonian) versus uncontrolled, prone toexcesses, and spiritual (Dionysian).

12CAL, PART I

HEN I WENT to Cal. I went withmy friend Pierce Young whom I’dknown all through high school. We

ghetti. I thought we were going to eat it every-day, I suppose. So he agreed we would do that,and then we’d take turns cleaning up thekitchen.

Now, when you were at Modesto when you wentto Modesto Junior College, you lived at home?

Yes.

So, this was your first time living away, settingup a household?

Yes, so I was very determined to do itright. I think we were paying something likeeight dollars each a month for these rooms.You can imagine what they were. Even thenthat was low. So we started out doing thatfor the first three or four days. I did somecooking, and we ate, and the person who hadnot cooked was to do the dishes. Pierce waslazy and did not do them. I got mad, and Isaid, “Well, then, I’m not going to do themeither,” and it ended up with a great mass ofdishes from my spaghetti sprees. We closedthe kitchen door and never . . . .

Tdecided that we would go to Cal. We wentdown and found the grubbiest little rooms Ican imagine right on Telegraph Avenue,down about five blocks from the university,just below Dwight Way. Actually, right nearDwight, in this four-story barn which is stillthere. It was almost falling down. There werelong passages with little rooms, like a prison,on each side, and we had a room looking overTelegraph Avenue. There were two rooms,so he had one and I had the other. We had alittle kitchen and an absolutely filthy, broken-down bathroom. Our plan was . . . . It wasmy plan really, because I came from a frugalhousehold. He came from a rather free-and-easy, better-off household, and he had no ideaabout how to save money, and I had very littlemoney. In fact, I was always borrowing fromhim—maybe that’s why he was my friend—and he had a car. [laughter] The idea was wewere going to cook, take turns cooking some-thing. We’d just go out and buy stuff and havesandwiches. I’d even make spaghetti, whichI always felt was my forte. I could fix spa-


The kitchen, with its flourishing moldfarm, was closed and not mentioned the restof that year. And we had this little bathroomwith a tub and a toilet. It was always filthy,because I was the only one who would cleanit.

Pierce was a very spoiled young man, andhe thought himself stupid for these things.He got quite a large allowance from his fam-ily every month, and at times, it was all Icould live on. I only had occasional odd jobs.I didn’t have any steady jobs, because I guessI was too busy experiencing. I’d get fifteendollars a month from my parents, and thosewere the days when tuition at Cal was twelvedollars a semester, I think, for California resi-dents. It was extremely low. It might havebeen more than twelve—twelve or twenty-five. I think it was only twelve dollars. I’dget fifteen dollars a month now and then andhave to explain what I spent it for. Well, partof that went for rent and the rest went for . . . .I was a very skinny guy at that time, believeit or not. I didn’t eat very much. I was moreinterested in enjoying what I was doing thaneating. If I needed the money, fifty cents orten cents for car fare rather than eating, Idid.

I loved Chinese restaurants, as I’ve al-ready said. Even in Modesto next to thetheater I worked in there was the one Chineserestaurant in town. I ate there all the time.And of course in Berkeley, I found theChinese restaurants, and that’s where I atemost of the time. I could eat on thirty-fivecents a day very easily.

So, anyway, one of things that I remem-ber about that place I lived in aside fromPierce’s rather extravagant way of life . . . .He always had money in his pocket, and healways dressed well. I dressed in stuff that Ihad brought with me, hand-me-downs andall that, and very seldom had more than small

change in my pocket. I’ll deal with school ina moment, but one thing I have to deal withis this. Below us, on the first floor facing Tele-graph in a storefront, was the studio of ChiruObata, who was and is now a very well-known artist. I don’t know if he is still living,but his work is, and he had the studio underus, two floors below us. He had piles of Sumipaintings that he would sell. Sumi brush.Sumi can be in color, but his was mostly inblack ink. There are little stone mortars thatyou rub the ink stick on with water. I wasfascinated by seeing his work in the windowand talking to him. He was teaching a classat Cal. I don’t remember much that I did atCal that first semester, but I do recall that Ihad this class with Chiru Obata. Totallyabsorbing. To this day, I still do some Sumipainting.

We would go out with our brushes andour little easels, ink stones, and pads of Sumipaper. We’d go out painting around the cam-pus. I was fascinated by it, because it was sobeautiful to watch this man. He could, with astroke, make a bamboo stalk and then theleaves with just a few little movements of hisbrush. He’d get shadow and shading by theway he laid the brush on the ink. I learnedsome of that, not very good, but I learned tobe able to do it, and I loved line drawing withSumi brushes. I did a lot of drawing. Lateron, I even won an award, the Seaman’s ArtContest in San Francisco and had my paint-ing in the show. It was a kind of apornographic painting.

It sounds very structured. I don’t know that muchabout it, but is it related to calligraphy?

You mean formal?

Formal, yes.

99CAL, PART I

It’s very formal in its technique. You learnvery formal strokes. You learn stroke bystroke, and you do it over and over and overagain. It’s very highly formalized at the be-ginning, but once you have that, then you’refree to use it in all sorts of ways. He had hun-dreds and hundreds of his works in his littlestudio that went through progressions. I meanone would follow another and develop fromthe last. He did mostly bamboo, you know,but he did some animals, deer and rabbits.

But the one you won the prize for you said waspornographic?

Well, it wasn’t classic Sumi. I used to doa lot of line drawings. The one that won wasof two nude women kind of wild and fantas-tic floating in the air like clouds, and it soldimmediately.

And a Sumi artist would have recognized thestrokes that you used?

I wasn’t using classic stroke, but theywould recognize the line, the Sumi line, be-cause I was using the shaded line. But I didn’thave any bamboo in it. [laughter] No, and Iwouldn’t have been able to do a good Sumipainting, but I got the feel for that kind ofline. I loved that line. I did a lot of paintingover the next two or three years, off and onat Berkeley, and later, when I went to sea.

Did you do water color?

Mostly water color. Also ink, ink wash. Iliked a dark, black line with Sumi brush withink, and water color.

Did you take more instruction?

That’s all I ever had—just handling thebrush. Even when I was a little kid, I coulddraw well. In fact, one of the things that Iliked most about the school in Alameda wasthere was the art class I think I mentioned toyou, where you brought leaves to school inthe morning, and I was one of the best in theclass. I was very good at drawing things. Soanyway, I worked with him in that class. Idon’t know what else. I was taking classes inEnglish at the time. You know, the requiredcourses. I don’t really recall them. I know Iwas reading Keats and Milton andShakespeare and Shelley and all that, so Iwas taking some class probably in Englishliterature. I was doing some themes and stuffof that sort, and I don’t remember the classesat all.

The only teachers I remember were alittle later, when I had Lowie and Kroeber inanthropology. This was my first experiencewith them. Oh, and Heizer when he was ateaching assistant in the Archeology andHistory of American Indians. That was a littlelater, but it wasn’t my first semester, I don’tthink. Anyway, whatever was going on there,Chiru Obata sits out in my mind, you see.

And oh, the great tragedy. I came homeone day to our horrible little apartment upthere, and Chiru Obata was at the door as Icame, absolutely furious, screaming and shak-ing up and down. “Come see, come see, comesee.” Apparently, my friend Pierce had let thebathtub over flow, so water had dripped downthrough two floors onto a big stack of hisSumi paintings. And I went down with him.I felt just terrible. You know, a few times inyour life, you can remember feeling utterlybeat, utterly beat, terribly embarrassed andunhappy. Because here he was, all of his workwet, and he was flailing his arms. I remem-ber calming him down and telling him howsorry I was, and what could I do?


“What, what can I do?” he says. “Whatcan I do with all these? They’re finished.”The water had stained them all the waydown. So you know what he told me? He gotcalm, and he says, “Just keep coming to myclass.”

And I remember thinking what a won-derful man. He says, “You can’t do anything.You can’t pay for these. They are priceless.You can’t pay for these.” Then he said, “Well,they were just practice ones. They were justpractice, just practice.” And he came downoff of the fury he was in and the terrible senseof loss, and he was very kind. I will alwaysremember that, because I really felt that I wasgoing to kill myself, you know. This is terrible.

So were you taking classes from him at that time?

I was. He didn’t really know me. I wasone of the people in a large class. And whenI came back, or was in the class, he singledme out and give me special instruction andall that.

Was he famous at this time?

He was known. In the Bay Area, he wasvery well known. Not doing too well untillater when his work was renowned. Mybrother has one in his house now that I en-couraged him to buy when he got married asa wedding gift to his wife. And it’s still there,so one of us bought his early paintings.

So, you don’t have any?

No, I don’t have any.

Not even one of the water stained?

I couldn’t have afforded the paper it wason.

Do you have any of your own from that era?

Yes, I have a lot of my drawings and thingsthat I did. Well, maybe I do from that period.Yes, I have some drawings of friends andthings that came out of my sense of confi-dence with the brush.

Are there any that you’d be willing let thedepartment take a picture of?

Oh, I have some that are marvelous in away, that I’m very proud of, but I don’t seehow they really fit in with what we’re doing.But they might.

How about the music scene there?

Well, of course, in that time, I was all in-volved because Pierce was a pianist. Oh, yes,bringing his piano up the four flights of stairs.It almost killed four men to bring it up thisold rickety stair and down into this roomwhere he couldn’t play, because all the neigh-bors nearby were screaming and yelling, “Stopthat. Stop it!” So he had to play at certaintimes of the day. He was very much a ne’er-do-well about things like that. He wastalented and very smart and things came easyfor him, but he didn’t work very hard.

Was he in a group?

No, no. He was going to be a great pia-nist. But yes, he was going to be great at a lotof things. Oh, gosh, we were eighteen yearsold, you know. [laughter] And I’d have to tellhim that when I was studying, he couldn’tplay his damn piano, because the wholebuilding would rock. The floor wasn’t strongenough to hold the damn piano.

Anyway, that incident with Chiru Obatawas very meaningful to me, about somebody

101CAL, PART I

who could turn a very bad situation into awarm and friendly and helpful situation. Andit’s almost as though he decided to help meand like me, because I had been responsible.Well, he knew that I hadn’t done it. Myroommate had done it. But after all, I was upthere. It was my place. Yet he sort of forgaveme, and oh, that was wonderful. I had thisgreat sense of relief and admiration for him.In fact, I brought people who I thought couldafford it to buy his stuff after that. My brotherwas one. But I think he paid twenty-five dol-lars for a painting that later would have beenworth thousands. Well, probably is now. Hewas a wonderful old man. So my first semes-ter at Cal, that’s really all I remember, exceptthat I was reading a lot of English literature.

I had been very much involved duringcollege with Rabindranath Tagore, the In-dian poet and writer, and Fitzgerald, thatwhole series that he did based on OmarKhayyam’s Rubaiyat that he not only trans-lated but actually recreated and developed.Things of that kind, romantic history.

Sir Richard Burton. Were you reading that kindof adventure?

Not yet. I wasn’t reading that kind ofthing at that time.

Yes. Well, I was thinking of the Arabian Nights,but, of course, those were . . . .

Oh, T. E. Lawrence. Oh, god, yes. T. E.Lawrence was another person. I had begunreading Dostoyevsky at this point andThomas Mann. I had read the MagicMountain, and Jean-Christophe—those longmagnificent rich novels that Mann had done.

Was this part of your curriculum, or were youjust continuing to discover?

I think it was triggered by some courses Imight have been taking. I’m not sure. Any-way, that semester passed, and I’m not sure Iwent another semester.

You recently found some of your class lists ofthat year you spent at UC, before you went toMexico. And you said you had taken some anthroclasses?

Well, as I mentioned before, when I wentto UC that first semester I roomed with myfriend, Pierce, and . . . .

And learned Sumi. [laughter]

Yes, and met Obata. I worked with Sumibrush and got this feel for line drawing, whichI’d always enjoyed, anyway. I also did somepainting. And later on, I even won theUnited Seaman’s Service Awards for a shortstory and a painting. [laughter] So it all cameto some fruition somewhere along the line.

But, yes, that first semester at Cal . . . Ihad totally forgotten what courses I hadtaken. I ran across a transcript, hallelujah, inwhich I see what I did in 1939-1940 atBerkeley. I took four anthropology courses!Except for one, I had forgotten them all. Hereis what my transcript says for 1939-1940, forthose two semesters: Anthropology 1 A andB. That was Introductory Anthropology. I’mnot sure who taught that. Anthropology101—Ethnography. That was Lowie, a coursewe used to call “cross-cousin marriage aroundthe world,” because Lowie was involved incross-cousin marriage, and that’s all we heardabout.

And a few little excursions into otherpeople’s literature, like Curt Nimuendajúwho had worked in Brazil and was a friend ofhis. He had a tremendous admiration for thisfieldwork; the anthropologist had studied the


Tupi, a very obscure Brazilian peoples, a for-est people. And things like that would beamong the few little bright points in hisinterminable lectures on comparative cross-cousin marriage. And they were thorough,I’m sure. I even have some notes left. He cov-ered I think every known ethnographic groupthat had been reported in literature on cross-cousin marriage. He covered it all. We usedto have the greatest time imitating him anddoing charades on that course.

Lowie’s lecturing style was very sonorousand pontifical. And he was a very properman, always in a derby and a suit and tie,and talked with great deliberation. Alwaysvery polite. He would bow to you and takeoff his hat if he met you on the pathways atBerkeley. That class was something that weall remembered because we just felt like wewere in never-never land! [laughter] How-ever, later on I recall things about his classthat were very valuable. I recall how impor-tant it was to make these kinds ofcomparative cultural connections—that,though he was able to weave this marvelousweb of the relations of people, their move-ments and the development of types ofsociety . . . material I would never be able toreconstruct now. Only later did I realize howuseful this was. While it was going on, I wasjust a yokel in my first semester at Cal. I justthought it was absolutely . . .

Horrendous.

. . . not only horrendous, but hilarious,you know. [laughter] And yet I took very goodnotes. I have lots of Lowie’s notes.

And there’s another course that I took atthe time, 105, American Indian. I believethat was with Barrett—Sam Barrett, who Idid have a course or two from. It must havebeen that first semester or two. And, there-

fore, I had an earlier kind of academic con-nection with American Indian studies that Ihad forgotten about.

Oh, and Primitive Art—Anthropology127, from Kroeber. That’s the one I didremember. And I have written about thatelsewhere. But that was a mindblower.Kroeber was very busy at that period. Thiswas in the mid-1940s. He was at the peak ofhis productivity, doing all kinds of things. Buthe had this course that was all slides. It wasshow-and-tell. Here was this great man, allhe does is show slides and make passing com-ments about them and put them intocategories. And because I had worked withSumi brush, I was very good at quick-takedrawings. I have a whole notebook of mydrawings from the slides, and Kroeber’s littleremarks which were sometimes a sentence ora couple of words. And we were supposed tomake sense out of this damn thing.

It was impossible; I don’t think there wasanybody in that class that I talked to or knewwho had any idea what Kroeber expected usto get from it! [laughter] It was wild, and itwasn’t “primitive art”. It was show-and-tellslides about sculptures.

Now, in those years how big were the classes?

That class might have been fifteen,twenty. That was a big class.

And, see, that, compared to what . . . .

Oh, god, years later when I taught at Caland when I was an assistant professor there, Ihad a class of over a thousand—Introductionto Anthropology. An enormous hall andmicrophones.

Did you show slides? [laughter]

103CAL, PART I

No, no. I hate slides. I never showedslides. I’m not a show-and-tell person! [laugh-ter] I don’t show slides. I don’t particularlylike to watch them unless they’re really directlyconnected with something someone’s saying.But just a series of slides, they bore me—which is my problem. They can be done veryeffectively.

But, anyway, I had four teaching assis-tants. This was in the late 1950s, and athousand students. I was bowled over by theexperience. Jim Downs was one of my teach-ing assistants in those courses. But in the1940s, classes were small.

The department was housed in an oldQuonset-like building that I think was heldover from World War I. And there were bar-racks. Later they moved into some WorldWar II barracks over on the other side of thecampus—a two- or three-story barrack, thedepartment was there. But when I was a stu-dent, it was in this enormous Quonset hut.And I’ll never forget, in the middle of it, asyou walked in, was a great totem pole. Some-body had brought that down from work inthe Northwest. But this was laid down themiddle of this great hall, and it was the mostimposing feature. It was on its back. And laterit was put up outside, I think. It was erected.

But the lower floor was all open like labswhere students would collect things and dowork. And then up along the wall toward theceiling was a causeway, a walkway, all aroundthe top. And there were little offices therefor the staff. And who were they? There wasJohn Rowe; there was Kroeber, Lowie,McCown, Barrett, Heizer. Heizer, who I thinkwas a graduate student assistant, and I thinkhe taught the class that I took with him inintroductory anthropology. A very dapperyoung lad, as I remember, a lady’s man. [laugh-ter] A collar-ad guy, good-looking, and veryarrogant. Later I got to know him when he

got older and mellower, but I used think,“Who is this guy? Who does he think he is?”because he would sort of strut in front of theclass. And he was just a kid, a student, a littleolder than me, but nevertheless an instruc-tor. I got to know him well later, but at thattime, I just recall this sort of a dapper, arro-gant young man. His lectures were stiffbecause he was new at it, but he always gavethem with the air of knowing it all.

Authority?

Tremendous authority.So there were all those offices and some

graduate offices up along the top. So you’dgo upstairs and walk along this long corridorup there, an open corridor looking down to-tem pole to find . . . to meet your professors.

I remember Kroeber’s office, a little, tinyoffice, loaded with books and papers right upto the ceiling—terribly messy. In fact, theyall had to be, they were so small. I’ve neverreally complained too much about smalloffices since, because I remember what theywere in.

Kroeber had a little cot. It was sort of ajury-rigged cot. I think it was two boards onbricks or something at each end. And at acertain time of the day, I think it was 12:30or 1:00, the door would be closed, and hewould take a nap. And that was true when Icame back later to Cal. You didn’t bother himduring that period. He did it regularly; notlong—half hour or forty-five minutes—butyou didn’t dare knock on his door.

Boy, how civilized. I think that’s wonderful.

Yes, oh, I thought it was . . . . In fact, Itell people now—my colleagues, you know—“Get yourself a cot in your office, by allmeans, and close your door.” [laughter]


Get a blanket and . . . .

Yes, so anyway, that’s amazing to me thatI took so much anthropology that first semes-ter. I wanted to know more about people likethis, and my two Japanese friends and mydesire to go to the South Seas. All thesethings coalesced, I think, to get me into an-thropology. I don’t think that was my major;just optional choices. The other courses, theseare the ones that I loved: Oriental Languages,Chinese Civilization and Chinese Literaturefrom Professor Boodberg. And I really lovedhis courses. His main course was the one onOriental Civilization. We went through thehistory of early dynasties, the beginnings ofChinese civilizations up until the last cen-tury. I’ve forgotten most of that now, but Istill have some notes which are still veryinteresting. And fortunately, one doesn’t tossaway all this information, because I really dugit; I loved it. But the one on Chinese litera-ture was even more exciting to me. Iremember Mang Ho Wan, one of the greatChinese poets and philosophers, and YeeBok . . . we read those works in great detail.

And so Boodberg was a tremendous in-fluence on me, and I got A’s in his courses. Iwrote long themes, and they probably wereextremely romantic and idealized. [laughter]But he thought that I was an interested stu-dent—that I really cared. And I did. I hungon every word. He was a colleague or stu-dent, or both, of Owen Lattimore, the Asianscholar—the scholar of Asian history andpolitical life, who had been attacked . . .when was it? He was attacked a little later bythe McCarthy Committee. But he was un-der some kind of criticism at the time. Iremember Boodberg would talk about thegreat Owen Lattimore, who was so badlytreated, even well before the McCarthyperiod. During the McCarthy period, or

maybe just before, Edgar Snow and others . . .that whole group of people who had com-mented, as liberals, on Asia. And so I had anadmiration for Boodberg as a man who hadspoken up on these matters, but I didn’t knowtoo much about it then.

The other course was Chinese Literatureand something called Recurrent Types, Phi-losophy 102. I haven’t the slightest idea inthe world what that course was about.[laughter]

Now, some mentors that I didn’t mentionbefore. I took a marvelous class from a Pro-fessor Lutz in Semitics. This was to me a greatexperience, because he dealt with the wholehistory of wars and changes of dynasties andinterrelationship of tribes in the Levantine.One thing that I still recall—if I went backto my notes, I might be able to refresh mymemory—but one thing I recall is he spentat least a couple of lectures on Hammurabiand Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal (and I re-member how he pronounced it), who built amound as high as a temple of the prepuces ofthe enemy army that he had circumcised.[laughter] A mound of prepuces as high as atemple, I remember very clearly! [laughter]And there were some wonderful books thatwe had to buy. Books were cheap in thosedays. They were expensive for me and someothers, but when I compare them, you know,two or three dollars for a book as against thirtydollars now . . . . They were very well printedand large books—textbooks. The ones on theNear East, the history of the Near East, werewonderful.

I remember Lutz’s office was at the top ofWheeler Hall, way, way up at the top in alittle garret-like office, with a little room nextto it where we had our classes. And I alwayshad that feeling of ascending into a marvel-ous world of never-never land, and oldProfessor Lutz with his glasses—a very sort

105CAL, PART I

of wizened . . . very European type. And Lutz,I don’t know what his background was. Hetalked with a very thick accent, but he wasvery, communicative and articulate. We hadto write many papers.

And then the other person was Radin.Paul Radin was around. But he wasn’t reallyon campus; he taught at the extension divi-sion because he had problems with membersof the staff. He was the bad boy of the era. Idon’t think I took a class from him, but heused to have students over to his place, andwe would have sort of soirees over there. Butlater on that was more so. I did know him atthat time.

And then I had forgot something aboutLowie. Lowie was a controversial figure tosome degree, because he had come fromGermany. There had been some problemabout whether or not . . . . I want to be verycareful here. One of the students wrote a pa-per denouncing him for having not been veryclear on the Jewish question, et cetera, andhaving accommodated some right-wing viewsearlier in his life. But I don’t know anything

about this, and I shouldn’t be talking aboutit. But, I do remember, that there was onetime where he was responsible for invitingErnest Bloch, the composer who had justcome over from Germany. He’s the one whowrote Schelomo. It was a sort of symphonicpiece, Schelomo. And there was this very largereception for him, where he talked aboutmusic. Lowie introduced him. And I remem-ber being very impressed by the fact thatLowie knew this man and that they had beenfriends.

So all that sort of thing was going on atCal at the time. I wish I could remember moreabout what the criticism of Lowie was, but Idon’t want to go into it because I’m not sure.But I always felt an admiration for him. I feltthat he was a very sound scholar and a goodman, but there was a lot of controversyaround him at that time.

So that was my curriculum that first yearat Cal, which was to me a very fertile year.All kinds of things were going on that wereimportant to me.

13AMALIA AND OPERA

OW I HAVE MISSED talking aboutgoing down and seeing my grand-mother once a week at least while I

died. He had died a few years before, and itwas now a great sort of barren, empty house.And she even had to sell some things in or-der to get along. It was in the process of beingsold . . . creditors being paid off and all thatsort of thing.

But we would sit there in that living roomwith some of her things around her—the cru-cifixes; the Raphael paintings, goodprints—large, ornate frames; various icons,Catholic symbols. But one enormous photo-graph of Amalia when she was a young girlin the Azores, before she had come to thiscountry and just before she got married. Anabsolutely stunning Portuguese beauty. I meanwith those little hips, you know, where thecorsets would pull the . . . . Her waist wasabout two inches, and a great, bountiful bustand lace. And her hair piled up on top of herhead like the turn of the century. The rose inher mouth. [laughter] And I remember think-ing, “There’s nothing like that since earlyHollywood.” [laughter]

She was a stunning woman! And she hadthat up on her wall, always, so that I was look-ing at it when she was holding forth, readingpoetry in Portuguese and then translating it

Nwas at Cal, my Portuguese grandmother, andreally doing genealogical work with her. Iwanted to know . . . . And she was very help-ful; she remembered quite a bit. But I’m sureshe was biased, and she romanticized anddramatized a good part of it. But I had thisenormous sense of the importance of . . . .

Now, how would you get there? I mean did youhave a car or . . . ?

Oh, by streetcar. A car! Nobody in thosedays . . . nobody except my friend Pierce, andone of the reasons why I hung around withhim was he had a car and a little extra money.[laughter]

He was on his folks’ teat. Mine was reallydry. And so, no, I would go down there andhave lunch with her. And she would . . . .

Now, where is she living now? Just for the record.

At that point she was still in the old houseon Lake Merritt, and my grandfather had


for me. And then playing these old 78records, scratchy records, of opera. She lovedCaruso and Galli-Curci and people like that.And these arias would go resounding out ofone of those old phonograph horns. And shewould cry, and the tears would roll down fromher eyes. She was quite a character, a mar-velous character. And I was always enthralledby her!

Now, you’d just go for lunch?

Oh, you know, a snack, and we’d just talk.And sometimes she’d bring out a little winefor me, which was pretty racy, and she alwayshad wine around. And she’d have to bringout her little cut glasses and things like that—what was left of her finery. And she wouldtell me how important it was to remembermy heritage and all that.

She had a manner that hid a world ofcontradictory feelings and emotions that shehad toward my mother and others, but shealways had this front of magnanimity andgenerosity. But because of her I rememberthat Pierce and I went over to see an opera.In fact, he came with me to visit with her acouple of times and also found her enthral-ling. She really put us through our paces. Andwe would leave there kind of stunned inwonder. [laughter]

How wonderful!

She had a powerful personality, and I cansee why my father had trouble with her. Shemade life miserable for him as she got older.She was such a nag, a complainer, anddemanded his time and accused my mother ofkeeping him from her and all those ridicu-lous things. You know, the typical family . . . .Well, you hear about that everywhere.

So, anyway, we went over to the firstopera I ever saw—at the San Francisco OperaHouse. I think we paid thirty-five cents forstanding room. I couldn’t afford anythingmore, and so Pierce decided to stand withme. I hadn’t eaten for days. I was very skinnyat that time; it was just before the war, and Ihad been turned down for ambulance servicebecause I was anemic. I’d eat rice and Chinesefood now and then and whatever I could puttogether in my room. And now and thenPierce would decide to take me to dinner, soI always enjoyed that. [laughter]

So we went over to the opera house, andI remember standing two hours getting diz-zier and weaker at the back of that hot operahouse, watching Tristan und Isolde. It wasMelchior and Kirsten Flagstad—two enor-mous people. They looked like they weighedtwo or three hundred pounds each, singingthe “Liebestod.” I remember that I lasted untilthe “Liebestod.” Here, they were, bellowingout with their magnificent voices from thesefat, rotund bodies. Flagstad had to lie downon this bed of roses for the death song. Butshe couldn’t get down very easily because hercorsets were so stiff. And she struggled andfinally went plop! [laughter] Nobody laughed,and I couldn’t contain myself. I was giggling.

And then Melchior, with his magnificenttenor voice, a little, fat, round man. He hadto kneel to get down beside her, and heslipped and fell flat! [laughter] The two ofthem were the most ridiculous-looking pair Ihave ever seen. In fact, it was magnificentlyridiculous. It was beyond ordinarilyridiculous.

Anyway, so I remember that about thatpoint . . . it wasn’t over yet, because it takesa long for them to die. They were at the topof their operatic powers about that time. Andhere they were on their backs, and then sit-

109AMALIA AND OPERA

ting, you know. [laughter] And I got so dizzy,I had to leave. I went out in the hall, and Iwent into a telephone booth and fainted. Icrumpled up, and I must have been out forten minutes or so. And when I came to,Pierce was pushing . . . “What’s wrong?What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

And I said, “I got to get out of here.”[laughter] It was too much standing for twoor three hours. And listening to the“Liebestod” finished me off. I’ve never beenable to take Wagner since. I added my feel-ings of repulsion, I guess—revulsion—forWagner during the war. I mean, it was made

to order. Wagner was to me the epitome ofeverything that I looked upon as being pre-Nazi. But it was unfair; it’s not really the wayit was. But Nietzsche and others, whom I hadadmired so much when I was younger, andWagner, and Strauss waltzes began to irritateme, you know. People were dying and beingkilled while the Viennese were dancingStrauss waltzes. All that sort of thing camejust a year or two later. But I hearkened backto Melchior and Flagstad and the “Liebestod,”and the fact that I had stood through thatwhole damn thing.

14SOCIAL LIFE AT BERKELEY

LL KINDS of things were happen-ing at Cal. I think, “What a year!What a wonderful year.” I met this

Was this before or after you took the course fromLutz?

It was maybe around the same time, but Idon’t think . . . .

Yes, I was wondering if one lead to another.

No, I don’t know if I made the connec-tion, but maybe so. But this was purely amatter of friendship, you know.

And I would say, “Well, you know, Ellen,maybe it’d be good . . . I wish it were true,but I have no evidence. We need evidence.”

And she said, “We don’t need evidence.I can just tell by the way you act!” [laughter]

A high compliment.

It was. She wanted me to be Jewish. AndI took on a lot of the feeling of that family.

And the two younger daughters, Noraand Renata, I sort of got crushes on in turn.Then two of my friends, Earl Kim and LeonKirschner, who were composers . . . student

Afamily, the Phillipsborns, a Jewish family of apsychiatrist and psychologist, both husbandand wife. They had three very beautifuldaughters. I and a number of my friends, wehung out at their house up in the BerkeleyHills. It was a very charming, intellectuallyoriented house, very European, and I supposevery Jewish in that sense. And there werecontinuous discussions! We’d get togetherand cook and eat together, sometimes six orseven people—students and others, visitorscoming in from Europe. And I got very closeto this family. I felt, you know, they were re-ally another family to me. And I had a strongidentity with that family—actually an iden-tity with Jewishness.

I remember Ellen, the older daughter thatI knew best and first, would say to me,“Warren, you are a Jew.” [laughter] And shesaid, “d’Azevedo has got to be some kind ofSephardic . . . it’s got to be a MediterraneanJewish name.” She was adamant about this.


composers at the time who went on to Yaleand Harvard as professors of music and com-position. But they also were totally enamoredof at least one or another of these daughters.And so we just went around like, you know,honey bees. [laughter] This beautiful family,very European, very, very open and warm,argumentative, and all those things. The par-ents were wonderful people. The fatherworked at San Quentin as a psychiatrist whenhe came over. That’s all he could get, and . . . .He could have done a lot more. And themother did psychological consulting andtherapy.

Do you have any memory of how you met them?

How did I meet them? I met themthrough Doris Woodhouse, who was kind ofa girlfriend. Doris Woodhouse was a friendof Ellen, and then just on campus and . . . .

Oh, yes, I remember now. I was trying toput together a literary magazine, because Iwas very angry at the Grizzly that was turn-ing down all my friends and never publishedthem, and they accepted what I consideredto be utter crap. Their material was so im-mature and asinine, school-boyish andschool-girlish.

Pedestrian.

Well, it was just naive, we thought. Wewere very snobbish. A number of us werewriting poetry and stories. We had somethings we wanted to get published. [laughter]

And so we—myself and DorisWoodhouse—began to talk about this. Doriswas a very active, highly charged youngwoman. She was rather large and imposing,kind of big, and I remember that she had afire of a head of red hair down to her waist.And that red hair was always flying around.

And she dressed rather . . . for Cal at thattime she took on a kind of bizarre attire. Shewore black boots underneath a red skirt. Andshe would go loping around campus . . . .

And she was a student?

Yes, she was a student, and very smart.She later became a psychiatrist in SanFrancisco.

Now, was Ellen . . . ?

They were friends.

But were they also students? Was Ellen a stu-dent?

Oh, yes, they all were. This was all stu-dent life, in the early 1940s. And off-campusstudent life, too.

She lived in a place called . . . it was abig, four-story, old Berkeley house, right thereon Bancroft Avenue. It is still there—twohouses standing there—student housing.And what did we call it? We had a word forit that escapes me now. Gray Gables or some-thing of that kind. And Ellen and Doris livedthere. They roomed together; that’s how ithappened, how I got to know Ellen, and thengot to know her family. But it really happenedbecause Doris and I were . . . .

And, oh, man, I keep forgetting GeorgeLeite, who I was then rooming with, becausePierce and I didn’t get along. His lifestyle wasjust too difficult for me to keep up with,though I always kept friends with him. [laugh-ter] But when I came back from Fresno Iroomed with George. He was a Portuguesekid from San Leandro. I got to know himthrough Pierce. George and I hit it off veryquickly on a highly competitive adolescentlevel. And we were, I guess, rather fond of


each other but also deeply competitive. We’dwatch each other severely and often withdeep envy—if one did something the otherdidn’t and who could be the most macho andoutrageous. It was something that I’m glad Igot over. But George didn’t.

Anyway, when George got wind of whatDoris and I were talking about, he somehowgot in on it. And so the three of us were plan-ning this magazine. I came up with the nameNew Rejections—rejections from the Grizzly,I suppose. The great literary magazine of thatperiod was New Directions. So our takeoff onthat was New Rejections. And we finally gotthe first issue out. It was mimeographed, verywell mimeographed by someone who donatedthe work in one of the old bookstores on Tele-graph. It was about thirty pages with poetryand stories. There was George Eliot; therewas Jean McGehey; also Jordan Brotman andRobert Horan—a number of people whowent on to write, but also a lot of others. Andgood work. I still think it was not bad for stu-dent work. And our explicit purpose was toshow the conservative, conventional maga-zine on campus, the Grizzly and one other,that they were just so much trash. “Here’s thereal writing, and you have rejected it, or youdon’t even know it.”

So even then, in those years, did Berkeley havekind of an aura of a counter-culture?

Not so much as later. It was there, but itwas pre-Beat. There were people likeKenneth Rexroth, who were writing poetryin San Francisco long before the Beats camein in the 1950s. There was Robert Duncanand Josephine Miles, a very well-knownCalifornia poet. I’d also taken classes fromBenjamin Lehman in English, and he sort ofencouraged us to go on with doing something

like this. But we had our differences with himas well.

So Doris and I had a lot to do. ThenGeorge Leite got into it. He was somethingof a street kid from San Leandro, a Portuguesekid, whose father was an immigrant scholar—an older, declining man who George hadproblems with, I think—and a mother whowas a schoolteacher. So they were quitestrapped financially.

So we had a certain understanding be-tween us in that we were not well-to-do kids.But George very quickly caught onto the lit-erary scene. It was amazing. He began to writepoetry—rather interesting, good stuff. Oh,and he took off for a couple of months andwent to sea, which I was terribly jealous of.He got on a tramp steamer and went downto Panama. He wrote me postcards, you know,and I was absolutely beside myself with envy![laughter] And then he came back, and Dorisand I mainly put out this magazine. But wedidn’t put our names as editors on it becausewe felt that was hokey, too. We didn’t wantto do that.

We got out one issue that year—that was1939-1940, and one in 1940 and one in 1941.The last issue I think was 1942 or 1943—during the war. We kept putting it out. Laterwhen I came back from sea, I would go toBerkeley and stay with the Phillipsbornsthere, Doris or . . . . And we would put to-gether this . . . .

The Phillipsborns. So that friendship you main-tained after the war?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. In fact, I met Kathyagain seriously during the war. She and EllenPhillipsborn were very good friends at thattime, but, oh, it’s all very convoluted actually.

I’m trying to find the things here that Ican pull together. And so New Rejections was


something I was very proud of. And, by theway, for years afterwards, various librarieswould write and ask for copies, and it becamea kind of a minor collector’s item, you know.

And so we were very proud of ourselves.And I remember we put those issues outfor . . . we’d get donations and put out anissue of a hundred for thirty-five dollars. Imean those times were wonderful! [laughter]

And we’d assemble them at thePhillipsborn’s house. We’d all get together . . .this was in the fall of 1939-1940, I guess, thefirst one came out. And we’d go up to thePhillipsborns’, about a dozen of us, friends ofours. And we’d take all these pages, and we’dassemble them and staple them and put thecovers on up there at the Phillipsborn’s. Thenwe’d all go out and peddle them for fifty centseach on campus. And they’d go like hotcakes!They’d go so quickly, we’d always say weshould have put out three hundred or fourhundred; we never could manage that. Eachissue ran about a hundred, a hundred and fifty.

Do you have any of them?

I do have some copies. Those few issues,yes.

And, so, now, where are we? Oh, thingsthat I was doing at the time. I mentionedBoodberg. And things I was reading . . .maybe I’ve mentioned before: ThomasMann, Thomas Wolfe; Steinbeck had comeout with The Grapes of Wrath and later thefilm which deeply impressed me. It threw meback on my experiences in Modesto.

A course in the Bible as Literature wasvery important to me. I devoured the Songsof Solomon. [laughter] And Jonathan Swiftand Chaucer, Whitman. You know, that’s theperiod when you’re doing all this marvelouswild reading.

I had three friends who were composers:Leonard Ralston, I’ve mentioned; LeonKirschner; Earl Kim. I knew them very well.But this jumps the gun, because they weremost significant when the war came.

I was also going through all kinds of philo-sophical explorations and concerns. Youknow, a person going through transition likethis in adolescence, late adolescence, tryingto think out what they want to do. They pickup strands from not only their own heritageand family, but new ones. I was—what wouldyou call it?—a new-wave Christian in a sense,on the one hand, and what might now becalled a Gnostic. But I had a feeling that Iwas a kind of a Christian.

And so I was thinking, “Maybe I shouldgo to Pacific School of Religion,” after allthis charging around. The Pacific School ofReligion was right up on the hill, and itlooked so peaceful up there. The studentswere all so well behaved, and they were allso serious and quiet. I used to walk on thatcampus and look around and go into thesemonastic settings.

Somewhere within me was the idea thatthis would make a kind of a sop to my par-ents, that they would be pleased if I didsomething conventional like this, though Iwas certain in my own mind that I would bea very unconventional Christian academic.[laughter] And yet, you know, that this couldbe something that would be equivalent tobeing a doctor or something. I think some-where within my mind was this notion ofaccommodation and providing my parentswith some solace. But it wasn’t serious. It wasjust one of those things that I thought about.

The other was, of course, the Brahmanand Vedanta themes from my interest inTagore. I was reading Nehru, and some of theearly Indian intellectual figures. And there


was this little meeting house down near theuniversity—Vedanta, the Vedanta Center, Ithink it was called, where SwamiAshokananda held forth. And I used to godown there oh, every now and then. I’d stopin or listen to the swami hold forth in thesevery quiet little ceremonies with this littlehandful of Berkeley types in there! TheBerkeley types in those days were sort ofmiddle-aged women with flat shoes and grayskirts, and men very casually but very care-fully dressed. And there were a few Asianstudents of some kind. And we’d sit around,and I remember these quiet, philosophicaltalks and discussions. I read some of theVedanta materials, and so I had that, too,along with Pacific School of Religion—therewas Vedanta!

This mystical Indian stuff, right? Vedanta?

Yes.And, oh, I speak of those little asides and

detours of one’s parents affecting one’s chil-dren. My daughter is deeply involved in Asianphilosophy and Vedanta and the work ofsome leading swamis and gurus, you know—much to my chagrin, when it happened,because I was and had been a hard-hatMarxist and here my daughter is interestedin transcendental meditation and that sortof thing. We’ll go into that later . . . it’s fas-cinating. We had a meeting of minds.[laughter]

And also, I just was struck by the fact that yourson is an artist and . . . .

Yes, what I didn’t pursue, he picked up.What more are kids going to do? I mean,unless something else happens to them intheir lives. Yes, that’s exactly it. And I’ve al-ways had really a great sympathy and kind of

a pleasure in the fact that they did that, eventhough it wasn’t the best course of action,necessarily, in order to survive in this world.Nevertheless, I didn’t worry about that,either.

So there was this exploration; gettingseriously interested and taken by some ofthese ideas. I was writing poetry at the timeand seeing some of the films that were terri-bly meaningful to me. Certainly All Quiet onthe Western Front had been earlier, one of themost powerful films that I had ever seen atpoint in my life, and affected a lot of otherpeople, too; great anti-war film, extremelypowerful. And then The Grapes of Wrathcame out as a film—I’d already read thebook—was also an extremely affective thingto me.

And then, of course, [laughter] there werethings like Dorothy Lamour and Hurricanewhen I was at junior college, the heroine ofall times. And who was the other one? HedyLamar in Algiers . . . [laughter] in Algiers inthe desert. And who was that guy with theaccent who was her sidekick? [laughter] Whowas that?

I can’t help you with the . . . .

Oh, you’re too young to remember anyof these people.

I should know them anyway.

Anyway, Hedy Lamar, I remember.And there were a number of very impor-

tant films that I saw. I remember seeing a film,a French film, called L’Affaire Blum. It was atthe time when I knew the Phillipsborns, andhere was a film about a French Jewish familyduring the period Hitler was beginning tobecome more important and powerful inGermany during the early period of the Nazi


putsch activities. And they (the Blums) arewell-to-do Jewish people, and he’s in busi-ness. And all around them are these crisesand these attacks upon Jews in the streets.Kristall Nacht had come and all that. Andthey’re sitting at their table at the end of thismovie, I remember. They are not leavingGermany, because I remember they were sit-ting at their nice dining room table having atoast at the end of the evening and lookingat each other and saying “We shall stay be-cause it can’t happen in Germany.” It wasone of the more powerful films that I’ve everseen. I’ve never seen it referred to since. Itwas a great film.

Can I just interject here and ask how much ofyour writing at this time would you consider tohave been political? I mean your poetry and thestories you’re writing at this point.

Oh, it probably was not. But I think thestory that I did on Mexico, “SepeyanoOrozco”, was in a sense political, like my let-ters from Mexico later, you know, recognizingand praising the strength of another culture,as against modernization. Social, at least.Political—I wrote a couple of poems whichwere political, but I was ashamed of them,because they were not too clear. [laughter]They were far from PC. But political, no.More social and having to do with humanrelations and problems of class, things of thatkind. But not overtly political.

Not overtly anti-war, for instance, or . . . ?

Not yet. That came just about this time.I was pretty much involved in academic,intellectual, literary . . . .

And is that what drew you to UC in the firstplace? The intellectual . . . ?

No. I just wanted to get away to the bigcity, and Berkeley was the mecca. Berkeleywas the place where every . . . .

To live?

When you were from the rural sticks ofSan Joaquin Valley, Berkeley was the place,not necessarily to live, but to go. I mean, thatwas the big city. That was the place whereeverything was happening. And it was theeasiest place to go to. I mean tuition wastwelve dollars a semester, and rent eight dol-lars a month or something, you know! It wascheap if you were a Californian. [laughter]

So you weren’t necessarily aware at the time thatit was the academic and literary figures that youwere drawn to, or . . . ?

Yes, in a way. But I don’t think that wasvery clear in my mind. After going to Fresnoand with Earl Lyon as a mentor, I came down.And there were two or three people in theEnglish Department who were doing somewriting; I don’t remember. But, no, I saw it[Berkeley] as the place where you could getexposure to some of the more powerful ideasthat were going on, and it was true. It was aCalifornia center.

Everything was happening, and it stimu-lated you to do things. I was becomingpolitical. I was talking about films and things.I saw a Russian film called The Gypsies, whichwas again one of the more beautiful films I’dever seen, about the Soviet attempts to movethe gypsies onto farms to become agricul-turalists. I had thought it extremelyperceptive—whether it was or not, I’m notsure what I would think now. I thought itwas done with tremendous understanding ofthe meaning of gypsy life.


Now, I gather that it wasn’t quite as niceas this. But nevertheless, the film gave theimpression of this marvelously aware culturein the Soviet Union, and aware intellectu-ally and in terms of the literature and of theculture of ethnic groups. And, of course, thatwas the old problem of nationalities and eth-nic groups in the Soviet Union and how todeal with wandering people, the gypsies, thepeople of the steppes and all that. How toruralize them, how to bring them into theland.

And it was, to me, so beautiful. It was agreat film—propaganda or not, it was mag-nificent. Like Potemkin, you know, one of thegreat films of all time [the famous Soviet filmBattleship Potemkin, 1925]. And I was alsotaken by The Gypsies; it made me drunk forweeks—the beauty of that film and the wayit ended. It ended in one of the great scenesof all movies, as far as I am concerned. Wherethis one man and his wife and kids do settleafter a great deal of difficulty. They don’t wantto; they like to wander; they like to do whatthey wanted to do. And they finally have—with the help of some of their comrades andthe village commune—a field of wheat, andyou see them at harvest time with this greathigh wheat going for a long distance away.And they’re standing, looking at it, andyou’re looking at their backs. And then thatwonderful troika goes on [hums tune]: da, da,da, hum-da-hum, da-da, da, da, hum-hum,num, ba-dum-dum-dum, dum. I’ll never for-get that one. And as that is being played withthe Red Army Chorus at full blast, they gopushing the wheat aside and walking intotheir wheat. Wow! What a film! I’ll neverforget it! [laughter]

And I had some friends who were get-ting to be very left, sort of intellectual left,quasi-Marxist and all that. Or anarchists orTrotskyites and whatever. It was quite a stew

in that period. And I wasn’t discriminatingbetween one or another. There was a placecalled the Twentieth Century Bookstore, two,three blocks from the campus. It was the “red”bookstore.

Was this on Telegraph or . . . ?

It was right off Telegraph. I forget whatstreet it might have been. But it was aboutthree blocks down from Sather Gate and justoff Telegraph. The Twentieth Century Book-store had all kinds of things that I had neverseen before. It had booklets on the SpanishCivil War. When I was seventeen or eigh-teen I thought should have done that; Ishould have gone, but I couldn’t have donethat any more than fly. And so, you know, Ireally read into the history of the SpanishCivil War. And I got records called Songs ofthe Spanish Civil War that had these wonder-ful German and Russian and English songsthat were sung by the Lincoln Brigade . . .that’s it—Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, is thename, which I still have. Marvelous songs.

Now, what’s the Lincoln Brigade?

The Lincoln Brigade was the group offoreign Europeans and Americans who wentto aid the Loyalists in Spain.

And why was it called the Lincoln Brigade?

That was the American version of it. TheAmerican group that had gone to fightagainst Franco.

Was it a name referencing back to AbrahamLincoln?

Yes, it was the American contingent, andI’m not sure that it didn’t cover others as well.


And then later I knew seamen, people in theunion like Bill Bailey, who had been in theLincoln Brigade.

And so anyway I began to get very, veryinterested in kind of a rarefied political viewof things. I also came upon Stravinsky. Therewas a Soviet edition of about ten records inan album of 78’s, of his chorale, Les Noces,the wedding, which was to me a wild andprimitive thing. He had taken the singingstyle and the themes from rural Russian lifeand used them, as only Stravinsky could do—these wonderful Slavic women’s voices—LesNoces. I bought that; I spent my last . . . Ithink probably eight dollars for that album.

And the Songs of John Doe—they blew mymind. The Almanac Singers—did you everhear of them? This was an early folk group,and they were very left. And the Songs of JohnDoe were songs of the Dust Bowl, songs ofearly labor movement. Things like I used tosing all the time to my friends. [sings] “It’s Cfor conscription, and it’s C for Capitol Hill.And it’s C for the Congress that passed thatg-d- bill!” [laughter]

[laughter] That’s great! The Almanac Singers?

The Almanac Singers. I still have them.Songs of John Doe. Well, they were very popu-lar with that set of people I knew at that time.The Twentieth Century Bookshop, you’dhear those all the time on the wind-upVictrola.

And what were some of the others? Oh,[sings] “Franklin Roosevelt told the peoplehow he felt.” (This was before the war.) “Wedamn near believed what he said. He said, ‘Ihate war, and so does Eleanor, but we won’tbe safe till everybody’s dead.’” [laughter] Well,those were really anarchistic, wild, left, anti-war. And they were wonderful, and they blewme away.

“But we won’t be safe till everyone is dead”![laughter]

Most folk music and what is now calledcountry music, no one that I knew really lis-tened to it. But these songs came in at justthe time, when we were starting to thinkabout these problems. Here were witty, sharp,satirical critiques of American life andthought. Of course, these songs were also . . .songs that the Communist Party promotedbecause this was prior to the rapprochementof the Soviet Union with the United Statesbefore the war. There was a great deal of anti-war feeling and hands-off Russia views on partof the Left. And the Russian-German pact,the idea of not joining Germany against theSoviet Union. I have to check my chronol-ogy there, but it [the anti-war feeling] wasreally aimed at defending the Soviet Unionand keeping us out of the war. And then, ofcourse, a little later, the Left was all for thewar, because the Soviet Union had beenattacked by Germany. [laughter]

So it was in that very tumultuous periodthat those songs had resonance. And thenafter . . . .

This is really, really interesting. There wasn’t afeeling among the political Left at the time thatthere was some sense of responsibility for fight-ing fascism? I mean it’s sort of interesting thatyou were very drawn to the idea of helping toliberate the Spanish, but . . . .

Anti-fascism was a principle, but not go-ing to war for it. There was a lot of anti-warfeeling. I would say that the feeling of thepacifist . . . .

So the Spanish Civil War was great becausepeople volunteered who wanted to go?


Well, yes, but not everybody agreed withthem. Most of those who went over there hada sort of a left ideology. The Lincoln Brigadeweren’t heroes to most Americans who werekind of mixed up about who Franco wasand . . . .

No, I was trying to get at how you were sortingthat out for yourself, not the mainstream.

Well, yes. Oh, the Phillipsborns had a lotto do with this. It was through them that Igot a picture of what was going on inGermany in 1939 and 1940.

But did you feel ambivalent? I mean, did youthink we should go to war to stop Hitler?

I was a pacifist. I was planning to be aconscientious objector. In fact, that was oneof my struggles a little later. At the same timeI had very strong feelings about fascism and—with my relationship with Phillipsborns—about what was being done in Germany. So,yes, I was very ambivalent on this.

Well, I was just interested because you’ve saidtwice now that you had feelings you should havegone with the Lincoln Brigade.

Yes. Well, that’s because I felt that wasvery heroic,

and I was anti-Franco, and I had the feel-ing that Franco was a ruthless dictator whohad done terrible things. Like Mussolini, youknow. This wasn’t a very developed politicalview, or orientation, just a feeling about val-ues and what was wrong with what was goingon there. So, no, I can’t give myself creditfor any kind of developed political views,though I had a couple of friends who werevery ideologically sophisticated.

One, I think, was probably a communistat the time, and led me to The CommunistManifesto, and thought it was a great docu-ment. I loved its courageous denunciation ofabout everything that everybody stood for![laughter] With great clarity, and speaking fora class, you know, the down-trodden of theearth. “What have you got to lose but yourchains?” kind of attitude. That appealed tome; I loved that and still do! [laughter] I meanI think it’s a beautiful literary and politicaldocument, and social document. It has ascriptural quality to me.

So, anyway, I was listening and readingstuff of this kind, and that little bookstorewas the place where I met some people—Imean, had conversations with a lot these left-wing types that were around Berkeley at thetime. I wasn’t particularly attracted to them,but I did like the atmosphere of the place. Itwas a rebellious atmosphere, and now that Iknow it, a lot of them were members of theCommunist Party. And just like that restau-rant that I went to in Mexico City, peoplewere constantly coming in and out, withpamphlets and leaflets and things of that sort.And I liked that. I thought that was good;that was activity; people were expressing theirviews.

I also went over to San Francisco. Therewas a record library over there. You could goin, and for, I don’t know, five cents an houror something like that, you could get anyrecord that they had and play it in littlerooms. I listened to all kinds of music. And Igot hooked on Delius and Debussy, Mozart,and everything there. You could, if you couldafford to, buy records, or you could rent them.It was a rental library. So I had a little wind-up Victrola in my room—this was my lastsemester where I had a room of my own,twelve dollars a month. I was really swinging


high. Way up on Ridge Road above the uni-versity. And I would go up and play theserecords. In fact, you see that crayon washthere? [Points to art on wall of study] Take alook at it. There’s a seaman sitting on thedeck playing records on deck in the moon-light. Well, that’s mine. And that’s the sameVictrola I had at Cal. That’s where I wouldplay these records. And in my mind I’m play-ing Debussy’s La Mer. [laughter] And I did. Iactually took it to sea.

And I’d sit on a deck all by myself, be-cause none of my crew mates could stand thesound of that music. I would play La Mer withthe wind blowing and the waves splashing.Quite wonderful. There’s my work. [Gesturesto art]

So all that was going on in the space of ayear. When I think of it, it’s enormous. Enor-mous. And I think it happens to people atcertain points of their life. This was a periodin which, I don’t know, there was that fertil-izer being injected into the soil that I was in,and everything was happening. And I wasmoving in ten different directions at once.

And you feel this wonderful sense ofpower, like you’re absorbing up all this won-derful information. The world’s your oyster;you can do anything if you really wanted to.And putting out a magazine at the same time,and meeting all these wonderful new people,and yes, it was a great time.

Oh, during that semester at Cal, myfriend Clyde Moller, who had been our neigh-bor in Alameda when I was very young . . . .He had visited us many times in Modesto,because he’d come up when we were just kidsafter we’d left Alameda. He’d come up andvisit us in the summertime. He and I and Donwould go camping, and we’d go hiking to-gether and all that sort of thing. He was a

rangy, funny kind of kid. I don’t want to saynot very smart, but not very interested in thekind of stuff I was interested in, but he wasan old friend. And we used to have a lot offun together, swimming and hiking. So Ihadn’t seen him for two or three years, andsuddenly he visits me in Berkeley. The lasttime I’d seen him, he’d come to Modesto, andhe was in the navy. He and a friend of hiswere in the navy, and they came in their navygarb. This was about 1937, 1938, and I re-member feeling so jealous I could hardlythink. [laughter] Here he was in his sailor’suniform with his friend, and the two of themwere talking about all kinds of racy things Ididn’t know anything about. I couldn’t enterin. Places they’d been in and gone to and thevarious ports they’d been in, and I rememberthis awful feeling of true envy. I can remem-ber that. I mean the kind of envy that gnawsand eats, eats you up, you know. [laughter] Ihad to cope with it and handle it and still bea host to these two guys, and I really wantedto kill them and get them out of there.

So when Clyde came to visit me in ourrooms at Cal, here he was now out of uniformand about to get married and looking verytired and old to me. He couldn’t have beenany older than I was, but my impression washe was no longer that adventuresome, glori-ous figure who had come in uniform who wasdoing all these wonderful things. Here he wasjust a dowdy, ordinary civilian. [laughter] Ofcourse, this would be the counter phobicreaction to jealousy—I remember feelingsorry for him. I thought I would put that inas a psychological point. One feels sorry forpeople that are no longer your competitors.It makes one feel good. Fortunately, I under-stood that early and fought that particularemotion.

15THE MEXICO TRIP

HRONOLOGICALLY, that first yearat Cal preceded my going to Fresnoin the spring of 1941. It was after

I just told my folks and went. Oh, I triedto get my friend Pierce to go with me. Andhe said yes he would, and then at the lastminute he backed out. And I felt, “What asellout artist.”

But anyway, I took off on a Greyhoundbus and went down to Los Angeles first,where I saw the sister of a friend of mine,Watson Lacey from junior college. I stayedwith her for one or two nights and then witha friend who was a poet at Cal. This had tohave been a little later—1939—that I didthis.

Anyway, Amy Semple McPherson’stemple was downtown, and my grandparentshad begged me to go see her. I thought theone thing I could do for them was to go seeher, so I remember going into town and go-ing to this very large—what would you callit?—like a theater. It reminded me of the earlytemple, or tabernacle, in Salt Lake City.

I went inside, and it was very crowdedwith a great number of seats and a stage downat the bottom. I remember sitting down, andpeople were singing hymns and all that. Then

Cmy first year at Cal that I worked all summerat a theater in Modesto with the idea that Iwas going to go to Mexico. The fall of 1940,I had not gotten enough money together togo. I just took a semester off. But it wasn’t tillOctober of that year that I went to Mexicofor three weeks. It took me those months toearn the seventy-five dollars that I neededto go to Mexico. [laughter]

Oh, that’s a fortune! [laughter] Because you’vegot to live, too. [laughter]

After my first experience at Cal, I wasdetermined to take a trip to get out of thecountry, to go to some other country, to dosomething. I’d failed at going to sea; I couldn’tget on a ship, so I worked all summer at thetheater, at twenty-five cents an hour, andsaved seventy-five dollars. For me, it was re-markable I saved anything. I was alwaysspending money.


suddenly, the lights went down, the stagelights went on, and the curtain went up, andAmy Semple McPherson came on in a whiteflowing, gold-striped gown with a goldenBible in her hands.

She walked out on the stage while thewhole audience breathed great sighs of appre-ciation and awe, and she came to a goldenpodium, and she laid this book on thepodium. She started preaching, and peoplewere enthralled. I don’t remember what shesaid, but she was quite an orator. Then theysang hymns, and she said, “Now we shall seewhat the Tabernacle has for us.” The curtainwent down behind her and she left. And thenup rose the curtain and chorus girls came outdressed as milk-maids with their beautiful legsshowing and their fluffy milk maid costumes.[laughter] It was a chorus! There were, I’dsay, ten, fifteen chorus girls. I’ll never forgetpart of the song. “Fishing for Jesus” was thesong.

They were milk maids or farm girls, andthey had fishing poles. And they came outdancing in a real chorus line like theRockettes. “Fishing, fishing for sinners,” wasit, “Fishing for Jesus.” And then they wouldcome upstage and toss their lines into theaudience, and the audience would tie moneyon, and they would reel in the money. Therewere wires across the ceiling with baskets, andat the climax of all this, with all these danc-ing cuties, you know, the baskets would comefrom in back of us down over the audience’sheads for more money to be thrown into.[laughter] And the girls called, “Just thegreen, the green.” So you were expected totoss in bills, not coins! And boy, when theyreached the climax of that song, the orgas-mic climax of fishing for sinners, people werethrowing money in there. There must havebeen thousands of dollars. [laughter] ThenAmy came out again in her gown and backed

the girls up in the name of Jesus and all that.And I remember being absolutely not onlyenthralled, but overwhelmed by what I wasgoing to report to my grandparents. How wasI going to explain this to them? [laughter]

So, how did you explain it to them?

Well, I remember, eventually I would justsay, “Oh, it was a great show. She put on a”—I would use that word “show”—“she put on agreat show. And she was dressed in these kindof gowns,” and they were nodding apprecia-tively, “Oh, yes, Amy is, you know, she’s agreat preacher. She’s a wonderful preacher forthe Lord.” They knew.

Was she on the radio?

Oh, yes. She was the darling of the air-waves. She traveled too. And then she hadthis wonderful abduction. [laughter] Thesedays she would have been abducted by aliens,but then she was abducted by mysteriousstrangers who took her into the desert. I hap-pen to believe that she was just having a wild,wild old time.

There were rumors that she was a heavydrinker and all that sort of thing, but I don’tcare. Who knows? A great scandal, it was.All I know is that she put on a great show,and she made lots of money.

So, that’s how I stopped off at LosAngeles. Then I went over to El Paso on thebus, and from El Paso I took the train fromJuarez—the most decrepit train one can imag-ine. I was third class, and it was just packedwith village people and their animals, trav-eling down through the state of Chihuahuaon wooden benches. I think I was two and ahalf days on that train. It was hot, and dustpoured in from the desert.

123THE MEXICO TRIP

I was sitting across from two very beauti-ful, young Mexican girls. There was aMexican kid coming from Los Angeles. Wegot talking, and the four of us made a kind ofa group. I was next to the window, and thegirls talked only in Spanish, and this guywould act as my interpreter. We had lots ofwonderful conversations, and I had this feel-ing, “I’m in Mexico, I’m there.” The smell ofthe desert and these little towns where you’deat right out the window—tamales and allkinds of things. Lord knows what I was eat-ing. All I know is that I’d get whatever theygot and then bottled juices.

All the way down, we ate out. The johnwas impossible, because everyone was stand-ing, holding on. You had to go in the busheswhen the train stopped or just wait.

Where were you going?

To Mexico City, to the heart of Mexico.So, that lasted about two and a half days. Butthose girls kept laughing. They were lookingat me, and they were laughing, giggling. I wasthinking, “Oh, they’re just thinking of me asa gringo.” We’d talk, and then they’d look ateach other and giggle and laugh at me.

So, I got to Mexico City. This guy hadrecommended El Globo Hotel, an inexpen-sive little hotel. We each got a room. He hadto get himself ready, because he was seeingrelatives outside of town and he had to cleanup. I went into my room, and when I lookedin the mirror I saw what they were laughingat. I had been sitting next to the window,and one half of my face was black—I mean,literally, just black, like one of those min-strels. It was surreal. [laughter] That’s whythey were laughing. I hadn’t been able towash. There was no water for two days—nomirror!

I took a bath at the hotel and went outroving through Mexico City. I just had thisfeeling of marvelous freedom. You know, Iwas there. The smells, the wonderful smellsof corn and fires—cooking fires—and every-thing smelled different and looked different.Mexico City was relatively small at that timeand clean.

This would have been like 1939? Before the war?

Yes. And I remember going to the Zocalo,the great plaza, and watching the old womenon their hands and knees climbing into thecathedral, doing penance, you know. Andsometimes crippled people pushing them-selves with crutches along the pathways. AndI had this feeling, “Oh, I am in a differentworld. It is truly a different world.” Nothinglooked terrible; even these people at thecathedral were wonderful to me.

And you got along fine without the Spanish?

Yes. I had a little trouble but I was able toget along, and I picked up a few words. Oftenthere were people who were bilingual whowould help you. It didn’t worry me too muchas I remember.

Were there other gringos there?

Yes, but I didn’t know them. I was justwandering around. Oh, I finally met an oldguy from the Kellogg family. He was a trainwatcher, an absolute nut.

A train watcher?

Yes—his hobby! He kept records of all thetrains coming and going at different stations,and he had a whole book of his notations


about train times. He was obviously eccen-tric, from a wealthy family. [laughter]

A remittance man?

He helped me, at the train station onetime, find which train I was to take, and so, Iwent with him to Cuernavaca, but that wasa little later. First I went all around MexicoCity.

Were you always at the El Globo?

Yes. The El Globo was cheap. I think Ispent thirty or fifty cents a night, but moneywas going fast. There was a restaurant a fam-ily friend’s relatives were running, this ratherfamous Mexican restaurant in Mexico City.Sanborns, I think. That’s where that bit ofpottery on the coffee table comes from. I car-ried that back with me. The broken dishesfrom old haciendas were made into littleplanters and were cheap enough so I couldbuy one. That’s what I brought back.

Anyway, I went to that restaurant and gota free meal, twice. Good, but gringolizedMexican food. There was another place Iwent to that was near the hotel, which was avery mysterious place. It was a long, narrowplace with little tiny tables and mostly work-ing people eating there. But, oh, the tamales.The food was wonderful. And while I wasthere, these strange men were coming in, andthey’d go back and upstairs, and they’d keepgoing back and forth. It turned out that wasthe headquarters of the Communist Party. Iwas thrilled when I learned that.

Well, how’d you learn that?

Somebody told me. Someone, I think atthe hotel, said, “Oh, don’t go there. All thosecommunists are there,” or something like

that. “That’s their headquarters.” And, ofcourse, I ate there all the time. It was justwonderful.

Of course. [laughter] Well, did you know . . . ?

I didn’t know what a communist was,really. I knew that they were strange andwonderful. I mean, they caused a lot of con-sternation and that was enough for me. It wasone of my earliest contacts with even the ideaof communism. I don’t remember the word“communist” coming up in my family, but itmust have.

Well, you had spoken earlier of witnessing thereaction in Modesto when the longshore-men . . . .

Yes, of course. Everybody talked. Thepress talked about the notion that the com-munists were coming to town, but I don’tremember my parents being too concernedabout that. I don’t think we really knew whatcommunists were. I certainly didn’t, but Iknew they were people who caused troubleand made everybody very upset. [laughter]

And they did mysterious things? [laughter]

Yes, like these guys going to these myste-rious meetings upstairs in this restaurant.

Then from there, I knew I had to go be-yond Mexico City. Oh, I also went to theballet, to the Palacio de Belles Artes, I guessit was called. I saw the [Diego] Rivera muralsand a number of others. There was a placeoutside of town that had a number of Rivera’smurals, and at the Palacio, there were mu-rals by another artist—I think of Orozco? Iwent there to a ballet, La Paloma Azul: TheBlue Dove. I used to know the name of thecomposer. Oh yes, Carlos Chavez! Wonder-

125THE MEXICO TRIP

ful music. I loved it. I remember seeing thismagnificent, wild, foreign ballet by the BalletTroupe of Mexico.

Was it flamencoesque at all?

Well, in a way. Their movements werelike that, but this was a classical ballet withall of these Spanish and Mexican-Aztec ele-ments in it. The music was fabulous. It wasjust beautiful. La Paloma Azul, I think, wasprobably based on an old Aztec myth orsomething. I’m not sure.

So, it was relatively inexpensive?

Oh yes, I couldn’t afford anything, but Idon’t think that cost more than ten or fif-teen cents. I was up in the rafters.

So that was something that the common peoplecould do?

I’m not sure what the audience was like.I think it was more upscale, because it wasthe ballet.

Did you find some companions, or were youpretty much just on your own?

Pretty much on my own, except now andthen running across people I could talk to,like this old Kellogg guy, who offered to letme go along with him to Cuernavaca, be-cause I wanted to go there, because I hadheard about it. In those days, Cuernavaca wasa beautiful little village with a few old pal-aces on the hills, and one of the old haciendashad been turned into a hotel. For thirty-fiveto forty cents a day, I was able to stay andhave a veranda of my own looking over thevalleys of Cuernavaca. I felt like a god.

Were you attuned to or interested at all in thefact that you were on an old Aztec city? I mean,were you interested in the anthropology?

Later. That’s coming. Anyway, I had thisexperience in Cuernavaca. I went down intotown and wandered around and met twoyoung guys who had donkeys. They hardlyspoke a word of English, and I had no morethan a word of Spanish, but they showed mearound town. I remember spending like halfa day with them and then going down a longroad into a valley where their little houseswere. And they had some animals—chickensand I had some tortillas down there. Theygave me tortillas. Little things like that wouldhappen.

I went to Quatla which is, I think, thename of the town near Cuernavaca. where Istayed for a day or two in a little room thatopened up on the plaza. There was all kindsof music at night and promenades and thingsof that sort. But I kept pretty much to my-self, because without the language it was hard.But I was enjoying myself quite immenselyand feeling very good about being there.

So you weren’t lonely? You were just interested?

No. There were times when I wished Icould talk to and know more people, butwhen I couldn’t, it didn’t bother me toomuch, because there was so much that wasfascinating to me.

Then I went back to Mexico City andthen went down to Xochimilco and thePyramid of the Sun. That really got me.Xochimilco was the old lake system outsideof Mexico City where there used to be gar-dens. Well, there still are gardens to someextent from the Aztecs who planted littleisland-gardens in these lagoons. From there,


I went down to the Pyramid of the Sun andwalked through the area. It hadn’t been com-pletely excavated to the degree it is now.Now, you know, that whole plaza is openedup, and the buildings on each side have beenresurrected to a degree. But here was thisenormous pyramid, and I knew a little bitabout the Aztecs and the sacrifices and thegreat processions and Cortez and Montezuma.That was not very clear in my mind. All Iknew was I was looking at one of the mostmarvelous things I had ever seen.

I climbed to the top of the Pyramid ofthe Sun and looked out over the whole areawhere the Aztec had been. That was an ex-tremely profound experience for meemotionally. I just had a feeling I would haveloved to have been there. I wish I had beenable to see this, the way it was, and how luckyI was just to be there, just standing, and look-ing at this place. Then I came down, and Iwas walking down this long plaza that hadbeen the route of the processions before, andI found a little amulet, a little terra-cotta figu-rine. Today, they’re museum pieces. Theywere the amulets that people wore when theycame in obeisance to the temples. And hereI found one in the dirt that had just beenuncovered, a little one. I gave it to a girl-friend when I got back. I have alwaysregretted it, because she and I didn’t last verylong. [laughter] But that gave me a sense Ihad really found something wonderful, thisbit of archeology.

And this is before there were organized tours oranything?

I wasn’t on one. There may have beensome, but there were very few tourists aroundat that time.

So had an acquaintance or somebody told youthat maybe you should do this when you weredown there, or had it been a destination?

No, I knew about it. I had done a littlereading, just scanned some reading. And inMexico City at El Globo, they told me.

You told me—and I know it was in goodhumor—that sometimes the people that you’dread about or authors that you admired wouldturn out to be a little bit of a disappointment, butit sounds like your first travel to another countrywas not in any way a disappointment.

It was marvelous. It was marvelous. Imean, I had the feeling I was doing what Iwanted to do.

So, did you just stay until you ran out of money?

Well, that didn’t take long, seventy-fivebucks. [laughter] But imagine, I was threeweeks in Mexico on seventy-five dollars, in-cluding the trip down and stopping off in LosAngeles. I had to be very careful, which washard for me. But I managed to put in the twoand a half weeks in Mexico itself, wanderaround a lot, feeling that at last I had escapedmy own world and was in another one.

I went back to Mexico City afterXochimilco and the Pyramid of the Sun andthen took the train back up, a long, dusty,horrible trip again to Juarez. I loved those littlevillages, though, in the desert. Those old,sprawled out villages that the train used to gothrough; people with their two or three cattleand some sheep and pigs and little huts, andthe food. I loved the food, because I was hun-gry, I guess. And I didn’t get sick, you know.I ate everything.

127THE MEXICO TRIP

When I got to Juarez, I stayed two nightsin a wonderful little hotel because I didn’twant to go back over the border. I didn’t wantto get back to the states, but I was gettingbroke. I was down to five dollars or some-thing like that. I stayed at this place for fiftycents a night. It had a little courtyard withrooms along the sides, a really old Mexican-type of hacienda hotel. Every night there’dbe these wandering minstrels who’d come byand beautiful women dancing. I stayed prettymuch to myself, because, again, the languagewas a problem. Then I went to El Paso andstayed at a really grungy room, because I wasgetting broke, and it was more expensivethere. I was hungry as hell, and I didn’t haveenough really to eat, so I had to write . . . no,not write. Did I call? I forget. I sent a tele-gram or something home and asked for fifteendollars to get home. And I felt, now I’m backin my own country, and I feel awful. Lookwhat I’m doing. I had started borrowingagain. I had wanted this to be entirely myown. And the money came with very tersewords like, “Well, please get home as soon asyou can.”

And I got on the bus, and I came up acrossthe country into San Joaquin Valley, and Istopped at my friend Pierce’s house inMerced. He had bailed out, and I stayed over-night with him and his folks, lording it overhim. I just felt wonderful.

Well, you’re probably tan and dirty and . . .

Well, and skinny and foreign lookingwith all my marvelous stories. And that wasa great moment for me. But poor Pierce, Ihad really put him down. Then he drove meback to Modesto. I got home, and everybodywas glad that I was home, but nobody wasvery excited about what I had done. That was

the kind of a family I had. “Oh, well, so, that’sinteresting.”

Maybe it was a little threatening if they showedtoo much interest. Too encouraging.

Could be, but all I know is that I didn’thave a feeling that the conquering hero hadreturned. It was just this guy who’s alwaysdoing weird things is home. And, “Now, whatare you going to do?”

And I said, “Well, I’m going back toschool.”

Don’t you find that true a lot when you’ve gone—including this recent trip to Liberia—that whenyou come back, there may be two people youcan even talk to about your trip?

There were two people who asked meabout it. That’s all. Nobody else brought itup at all. I felt it was because they thoughtthat I’d had such a terrible experience theydidn’t want to disturb me. But the more Ithink of about it, it has to do with the factthat they don’t want to be disturbed by hear-ing about it. [laughter]

People do sometimes feel that you don’twant to talk about it. I think that might havebeen true about the Liberian trip for example.[In 1997, d’Azevedo joined a team sponsoredby the Friends of Liberia to observe LiberianNational Elections.] Other people, I think,couldn’t believe I had done it. You know,“How did you manage?” I’m such an old guy,and in some cases, I think they’re a littlemystified that I would do such a foolish thingsas to go over at my age. Because a couplepeople said, “But do you think you should doit?” before I went. “Do you think you should?”You know, that sort of thing. And then inother cases, I think it’s because they don’t


want to hear about it as a challenge to them-selves. There are all these possibilities. But Idon’t think there’s more than two or threepeople even asked me about what happenedon my trip, and then when I’d start to tell,change the subject.

So when you got back from Mexico, was it thesame? What about your brother? Could you talkto your brother?

My brother. My brother was always a littleaskance at me, because he really did the rightthing within the family, worked very hard toaccommodate. But, actually, he and I wereclose enough so that he did ask me to talkabout it and was curious. But again, there isno framework to put that kind of informa-tion into. Once you’ve heard the person wentand they did that and that and they cameback, that’s all there is to it. And my folks, Ithink, they didn’t want to encourage me todo anything like that again by getting excitedabout it.

But then they did tell you about this contact? Iwas just intrigued by the idea that there was afamily connection to a restaurant there?

It was a very remote connection. Some-body my mother or father knew was relatedto the people who ran Sanborn’s restaurantin Mexico City.

Kd: Which was the restaurant in MexicoCity at that time.

When they heard I was going to Mexico,somebody told my folks, “Have him go toSanborn’s and see so and so.” And I did. Ihad two free meals there. Excellent, the best,the only real meals I had while I was downthere, except what I got on the streets.

I find now that I did have a much richerexperience in Mexico than I suggested ear-lier because I’d forgotten a lot. But I nowdiscovered just by accident some letters thatI wrote home to my parents while I was inMexico. And the thing that sticks out, in thefirst place, is the sense I had of environmentand atmosphere that I mentioned earlier, butI see in the letters that that’s mainly what itwas, and that I did meet a lot more peoplethan I had remembered.

My letters indicate that I had madefriends—people, I suppose, I’d had a chanceto talk to and get to know and who were help-ful. A lot of them were Indians in the villageswhen I’d get off the trains, and we’d be twoor three hours waiting for the train to con-tinue on going down to Mexico City. I hadin my letters how I would sit and try to talkwith people in the villages, and now and thenone of them might be able to work thingsout with me in English, and then everybodywould stand around, and these wonderfullycurious and beautiful people . . . . I thoughtthey were absolutely beautiful; they were sodifferent than anybody that I had known.And the food that I had—I ate everything,and I never got sick, and I don’t know whypeople were saying that people get sick inMexico. [laughter]

And I would wander out into the littlefarmlands in these peasant villages withsomebody who would show me the milpaswhere the corn was growing and their cattle.I have one section when I talk about peoplecaring for their cattle with heavy brushes andpicking the ticks off of them with greatwarmth. They were tender toward theircattle, and that impressed me. And they wererelatively quiet. They were quiet and easy-going and tolerant people, and they treatedme with great goodwill.

129THE MEXICO TRIP

Then later, when I was in Mexico City, Iwrote a letter. I have to read a section fromtwo little letters here. I suppose it is the firstindication I have of distancing myself frommy own culture and a feeling that I reallywasn’t a member of my culture and that Iwanted to be a member of another and that Iwas very irritated by Americans that I met.“The Americans who come here are as awhole a rowdy bunch. They spend moneyriotously and make general fools of them-selves. The Mexicans take them for all theyhave and think them asses.”

Some friend of my parents in Modestohad said I should meet Mr. Gray, who wouldbe very helpful to me. So I said, “Mr. Grayand Mr. Sanborn,” who had had this restau-rant I mentioned earlier, “have been verykind to me. I like Sanborn; he is a culturedman and knows everyone. His establishmentis the most beautiful and modern store inMexico City and quite reasonable. Mr. Gray,however, is a loud man and does nothing butplay dominos and cuss like a schoolboy—quite foul mouthed. He hangs around theAmerican Club, and they all argue politicsmadly. Americans in foreign countries arequite disgusting creatures. I had lunch withhim (Gray) today. He told me what night-clubs to visit and what girls to leave alone.He knows nothing about Mexico!” [laughter]

And then here’s another in the same day.This, obviously, was very much on my mind.I’m defending the Mexicans from the kindof scurrilous information I received before Ileft, when people were advising me to be care-ful about this, be careful about that. Don’tdo this; don’t do that.

I’m writing here from Taxco, which I amterribly taken by, and I say, “I’m staying atthe Hotel Victoria, an old castle made overinto a hotel. You eat in the patio, which looksdown two thousand feet over the gorge and

the village. Well, I had beautiful food. I hadbreakfast—that is, sweet lime juice, wild rasp-berries, and chocolate a la mexicana, andpapaya with lime. The people were leavingfor the fields. Burro caravans wound aroundthe mountainous trails; goat herds call to oneanother and sing strange songs while theywander about the hillside. Everything is greenand moist, and every now and then the greatbrass chimes of the cathedral peal out thequarter hour. The sunrise was almost unbe-lievable. The air was sweet and exhilaratingand filled with early morning sounds of chick-ens, braying burros, the clip-clip-clop ofhorses, and the pat-pat of tortilla making.

“The hotel furnished horses, and I tooklong rides down the ravine with a youngIndian called Chu-Chu. He speaks justenough English so that with a few signs wegot along. We rode all day along the streamsand bought lunch at a little hacienda farm-house for five centavos. That’s about one anda half cents, I believe. We had chicken tacos,big red bananas, and gigantic sweet greenoranges. All we could eat. I spent twenty-four pesos for three days, includingtransportation to and from Taxco by bus.About five pesos a day at the hotel—room,laundry, meals, guide, horses, and rub-downsat the hot springs. They cost about four pesosto travel a hundred miles, about sixty centseach way. This was really paradise. I am cer-tainly coming back here again and stay for along, long time.

“There are no tourists this time of theyear. [laughter] Taxco would be the perfectplace for you,” I told my parents. “I certainlyhave a lot of contempt for those people whowarned me about Mexico. I think it’s all pro-paganda or something. That’s what they sayhere, anyway. Everyone eats everything![laughter] Water in most hotels and restau-rants is a special spring water. The water in


the faucets is only for washing. And as for itbeing dangerous, that’s a lot of bunk. Accord-ing to most people I met here, they say thatif anyone goes home with talk of fights andbeing chased up dark alleys, it’s either becausethey got their noses very dirty in otherpeople’s business, or they come to Mexico todo things they couldn’t do at home. It is assafe as anywhere I have been or as anywherein California, at least. But just as you wouldstay out of the rowdiest places in San Fran-cisco, so should you here.” To me, that’s myearly little touch of relativism, you see, al-though I think I already had it, naivelyenough.

“I have walked around Mexico City atall hours and also in little villages alone, andeverywhere I was always met with nothingbut courtesy. The Mexicans and Indians areextremely well mannered and generous, eventhe lowest classes. Only once or twice have Ibeen overcharged, and that was so little thatI wouldn’t bargain.

“How terrible American tourists mustseem to the people here. They will fight overten centavos—that’s two cents American—as if it were a fortune. When you think howmuch cheaper you’re living here and howpoor most of the people are, I can’t see howthey can be so small. I am so disgusted withthe majority of spindly legged Americanwomen and blustering men I have seencrouching and gaping around the streets ofMexico, that I am almost ashamed to admitthat I came from the same place. They seemto be waiting to be cheated. Everything isunpleasant to them; nothing is as good as athome. The trains are all uncomfortable; thefood is badly cooked; the hotels are dirty; thepeople are crooked. In reality most of themhave never lived better in their lives and aresloppier and dirtier than even the lowest peonin Mexico! This isn’t exaggeration, either.

These people here are extremely clean intheir personal lives. And considering theirprimitive living conditions, sanitation is sur-prisingly well ordered. Of course, there are alot of unusual odors and sights, but we haveas many that we are just merely used to.”

I kind of love those little sections, becausein a way they wrap up for me the way I wasreacting to Mexico at that time. It was a greatexperience, a moment of escape from my ownculture. And that’s a distancing very muchlike I had done with my parents and family.Slowly distancing, getting some kind of ob-jectivity, being able to criticize and to becritical, feeling that I was different, that I wasaway, outside that world. And a lot of myrelationships with friends, I think, really werestimulated by that kind of interest and drive.Oh, I suppose this business of distancing fromfamily, distancing from one’s own culture inorder to fully appreciate in one’s own wayanother is a part of growing up.

I was also really struck by a comment you madeearlier when you were talking about your returnfrom your trip to Mexico, and you’d said thatthat really was your first experience with cultureshock. I think people usually think that you haveculture shock when you go to exotic culture, butyou had it when you came back.

Reverse culture shock is when you comeback after being gone and find your own cul-ture strange. Well, to me it was pallid, thatwas the main thing. I mean, they’re so dull,and, “Is this where I grew up? Is this myworld?”

Well, your description of your trip is so colorful,and deals with the senses. The other thing I waswondering about is since you didn’t have the lan-guage and you weren’t communicating on thatlevel, do you get the sense that you were more

131THE MEXICO TRIP

susceptible to all the other impressions that werethere?

Maybe. I remember that. You see, I’vealways known, and I admit it freely, that Ijust am not a linguist, and I didn’t get thetraining in linguistics. All through my field-work, I fortunately found places where I couldwork mainly in English or with interpreters.Actually learning to speak a language, learn-ing to converse in it and inquire in it, wasmore difficult for me than I would strugglewith. I should have, but I didn’t. But I don’tremember feeling that I was in any wayimpaired. I felt so much involved in what Iwas seeing. I felt I understood what washappening.

I remember on the trip to Mexico I hadwritten notes where some women were talk-ing in a square. I guess it was in Cuatla, inone of the little towns. I knew what they weresaying. I just could tell, because they were soexpressive. I could see their faces. And theywere talking to one another. And I felt I couldhave entered right in and talked with them,but they didn’t know English, and I didn’tknow Spanish. But I understood what theywere talking about, because I had that senseall through. I didn’t feel any impairment.

Sometimes it was difficult finding my way,finding out how to take a bus or a train orwhere to go to eat or something, but I alwaysfound a way. And I always had help. Peoplealways were anxious to help. I had a lot offun sort of playing with language and words,and I learned a few words in Spanish and Iwould use them and everybody would laugh.We would have a lot of fun, and I rememberit just being glorious.

I didn’t feel that anything was missing atall. The whole thing was musical to me—the images, the smells, the sounds, allmeaningful. Of course, you can’t rely on thatlater to do fieldwork. You can’t just rely onyour impressions, because your impressionscan be very wrong, but it didn’t bother methen. In fact it energized me.

There were many other places I wantedto go. South Seas was one of them, and I didwant to go to Europe, and to Rome. I didwant to go to Athens. I wanted to go to theLevantine. Oh, Africa—north Africa. Iwanted to go to Egypt. You know, all the clas-sical places. Or Tibet. Oh, god, yes, Lhasa. IfI could get on a little donkey and climb upthe mountains to Lhasa, to Shangri-la, noone, nothing could stop me, you see. But yes,all that was there.

16FRESNO STATE

ND SO WENT the Mexico experi-ence, and when I came back fromMexico, I thought about going to

Coward—highly stylized comedy. He wouldwrite plays. Oh, what else? Any stylized lit-erature he was interested in, but he alsohad . . . .

Satire?

Yes, and satire. And he had a remarkablememory. He could recite whole sections ofShakespeare. But a very prim guy, and some-how or other he always fit well into any groupbecause he was raconteur of a high order. Hebecame a school teacher in Turlock, of allplaces, near Modesto.

He was something of the monastic fig-ure, and he never married. I don’t recall thathe even had any sex life at all. He had girl-friends, but mostly that was platonic,intellectual. In the group he sort of stood foran old man well before his time.

He looked older, and he acted older, buthe was extremely articulate and eloquent inhis speech. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, heliked to write these cynical, ironic plays verymuch like Sheridan and some of the earlierEnglish playwrights, and very much out of

AFresno State. I had itchy feet. I don’t think Ifelt too good about my first semester at Cal. Idecided I was going to go to Fresno State.

Of course, my parents by this time werejust giving up. “Now, he wants to go toFresno,” kind of thing. “What’s he going therefor?” The reason I was going there is my friendPershing Olsen was there. He was a friend oflong standing. Kathy just loved him. He wasa very prim kind of a guy but wonderfully elo-quent. His vocabulary was magnificent, andhe talked with great elegance and flourish.

Now where, how did you meet him?

At junior college in Modesto, and he wasvery much interested in English literature andpoetry and the arts, and so he was part of ourlittle circle of eggheads. He was a very staidguy, but a magnificent sense of humor. Whathe was really into was nineteenth century andeighteenth century British plays and litera-ture, particularly. You know, Wilde, Shaw,


date. But that was his world, and he stoodfor something among us.

He loved to travel, and he traveled morethan anybody I ever knew. He was somethingof a typical high school teacher when hestarted teaching in Turlock. Every summerhe was off to some distant place in the world,some group tour of some kind, and he lovedthis. He would send us postcards and lettersabout the dinners he had aboard ships andthe ports that he stopped in, and, of course,we enjoyed that, thought it was quite won-derful.

At the same time he lived a very reclu-sive sort of a life. I couldn’t imagine somebodywith that kind of a head and those kind ofinterests teaching in a small high school in asmall, rural town, as he did in Turlock, whichwas near Modesto, my hometown. I used towonder about that, what his life must be like,but he seemed very satisfied with it. He hadmany students, and he slowly upgraded tobecome a kind of a assistant dean. The thingthat was said about him was that he gave allof his classes themes. Now, anybody who hastaught, they know what it means to haveessays and themes by the hundred in a se-mester and having to read them. He readthem, and he thought over them, and he talkedto the students about them. He gave guid-ance not only on basic grammar but writingstyle and turned them on to reading.

When he died, there was a great ceremonyfor him—all his ex-students. He was a classicexample of the English teacher who stays onfor years and years and who people learn tolove, because he was so helpful. He correctedthemes and taught people how to write. Hewas exciting in his lectures and had so manyinteresting experiences, because every sum-mer he’d take trips and come back and tellhis class. We went down to his funeral andthere were hundreds of people, ex-students

and colleagues. And I thought, my god, hehad a successful life.

I used to think, “How can he bury him-self . . . ?”

And how many minds he must have turned.

Switched on in some way. And that’swhat people say about him. “I began to thinkwhen I took his courses.” So he was the clas-sic small-town teacher.

The ceremony was really a remarkableexperience for us, because people were tell-ing us, when they heard that we knew him,“Oh, you are the friends from Reno that hewould talk about.” And we then would hearthese paeans of praise about what he had donefor them personally, how they had read andwrote and studied because of their connec-tion with this man. Well, I had some ideathat he was a good teacher, but then I real-ized that he was more than that. He wasexemplary. He was the paragon of high schoolteachers. [laughter]

And he enjoyed it. That would make hima good teacher, I suppose. In the first place,he was profoundly involved in the subjectmatter, and he loved English literature. Hehad read everything, and it all had resonanceinside of him. I’m sure he projected that tohis classes. And on top of that, a love ofteaching, which not all of us have.

I know many people who teach who don’tlove teaching. They do it as part of their job,and they might get some secondary benefitsfrom it and some feedback that they enjoy,but it’s not necessarily a glorious experience.I’ve only had a few classes at a few places inmy lifetime where I felt that to me it was agreat experience, a marvelous experience,and that I felt that I was gaining a great deal.But he seemed to have that all the time. Everyyear, every semester, he was being fed by his

135FRESNO STATE

relationship with students and his excitementabout his work. So I consider that’s one ofthe factors that make a good teacher.

So there’s a real interchange in dialog that takesplace between the teacher and the student.

That was his concern. He could talkabout life; he could philosophize about themeaning of things when he was dealing withliterature. I don’t think that spread much overinto other elements of his life, but he wasvery acute about the relationship of litera-ture to the way the people he met in the worldacted and behaved. It was a kind of a modelfor him of human behavior.

You know, there are limitations to that.At the same time it’s an extremely potenttool when you’re a teacher in a high school,where most of these kids in this rural areahad never been exposed to ideas, the outsideworld, to what literature stood for, and whatvarious plays and poems and important per-sonages in literature stood for. To suddenlyhave that world open up to them by this com-mitted, dedicated person who could be verywitty . . . . He was very acute in his observa-tions, inventive. He had the makings of aplaywright and a writer but had narrowedhimself down to this focus that he ended upwith in his life.

So to find him at the end of his life, hav-ing gotten this kind of memorial from allthose students . . . . I remember telling someof my friends about it, and my colleagues, thatany of us, I think, would be very happy tohave this kind of reaction from any studentsfrom the past. Most people probably wouldnever remember us.

So you really went to school in Fresno becausehe was going to school there?

Well, we were both students at that time.He was going there. And he had written us—Pierce and I—about Earl Lyon, a greatteacher, who had a dozen disciples up there.Students who stayed on or came back.

This is in English?

He was in English and Semantics. Whowere some of the semanticians at that time?Korzybski and Hayakawa—oh, there wereothers that he had worked with. And he wason the new wave. He was avant-garde in theteaching of English and writing and all that,so I figured I had to see this guy. I had to doit.

Now, Pershing Olsen was one of the students inthe Earl Lyon group?

He was one of Earl Lyon’s students, andhe was editor of the Caravan while I wasthere, which was the college literary maga-zine, pretty good, in fact. And I was theassistant editor while I was there. In fact, Iwas the assistant editor after I left. I was do-ing some editing and choosing of materialsfor the next semester while I was in absentia.

When I went to Fresno, my folks cut outmy fifteen-dollar-a-month allowance. Theysaid, “It’s time for you to figure out whatyou’re going to do with your life. We’re notgoing to subsidize this knocking around.”

So, I went down on the bus with all mystuff. In those days it went in two little bags.And the first thing I did was go to a theaterand get a job as an usher, because I had hadexperience in Modesto, and that’s all I knew.I mean, I wasn’t going to go out and work inthe canneries anymore. It was hard work, andI wasn’t good at it. I got this theater job thatwas walking distance from the college. I was


getting twenty-five cents an hour, which wasquite a bit, or maybe by then I was gettingthirty-five cents. I don’t know. I was a uni-formed usher for the whole time I was downthere and was able to pay my rent and eatsomewhat and now and then beg for tenbucks or so from the folks.

Now, were you still rooming with Pierce?

No, I had a place above a garage. A verynice family had this tar-paper garage with alittle room above, with a little stove and bath-room, right on the tracks. It was ten feet fromthe railroad tracks. So when the freightswould go by, everything shook, things fell offthe tables and everything. And I’d open thedoor, and I could see these trains going by,and I could have almost reached out. Therewere hobos on it, and I could almost reachout and touch one. [laughter] And I loved it.That was a great place. I loved the place.

So I was holed up there. What did I pay?I think I paid six dollars a month for thatplace. It was probably too much. And I hadto do my washing and all that and cooking.Oh, that’s where Pershing would come overfrom his place, and we took turns cooking.With Pershing, it worked, because Pershingwas a meticulous guy, and he could cook. Healso washed dishes. [laughter] That’s where Ireally got to know Pershing. He was, ofcourse, a top student and all that sort of thing,and I learned a lot from him.

Oh, that’s where I started smoking. Afterwe’d eat, I would watch Pershing blow hissmoke. He was having such satisfaction. He’dsay, “You want to try this? It’s very good.” Ialways kidded him about that, a very primguy, and I kidded him about being my pusher.[laughter] And so, I would start having a ciga-rette after dinner.

I was nineteen, I guess, by this time, andit wasn’t two or three months before I washooked, and I was smoking. [laughter] Iblamed Pershing for that. Always after din-ner we would have our smoke and talk aboutclasses and all that.

So there was Earl Lyon. In fact, that’s allI think I took, was his classes. On semantics.English literature. American literature. Writ-ing, creative writing. Not just creativewriting. It was English grammar. I don’t knowmuch about grammar, but what little I knew,I got from him—at least style. And he wasremarkable. He was a charismatic teacher.

He was a young guy. I guess he was in histhirties, early thirties at that time, or maybeeven younger. And there were about sevenor eight young guys who just hung aroundhim and took all of his classes. There was akind of—what would you call it—a salon. Wewould meet once or twice a week at his placeand talk over literature, and it was fabulous,just wonderful. And I did a lot of writingthere. In fact, I had two or three stories pub-lished in the Caravan, which was the collegejournal. And Pershing was the editor; lateron, John Hultberg, the artist, who became avery well-known artist in New York. Andevery issue had something of mine in it, apoem or a story. My story “Sepeyano Orozco”based on my Mexican trip was published inthat. And it was a good story, excepting mytrouble with the language. I spelled my maincharacter’s name as “Sepeyano Orozco.” Well,there’s no such thing as Sepeyano, you know,s-e-p-u-. I was trying to write Cipriano, yousee. I had heard “Sepeyano.”

This has been with me the rest of my life,you know, not to trust my non-linguistic ears.[laughter] Kathy has a better ear for languagethan I have. But, you know, I keep thinkingback to my shame. Nobody ever brought that

137FRESNO STATE

to my attention. They just said, “That’s anunusual name.” And I learned to say, “Yes, itis.” But it was Cipriano that I was trying towrite. Anyway, that was one semester.

And what were you reading at that time?

Oh, god, let me see, what kind of things?Oh, that’s where I was reading Thomas Wolfeand some American writers, oh, and I re-readSteinbeck. I think Saroyan, Dreiser, O’Neill,and others. Saroyan was writing at that time.But Wolfe, I was very much involved with.

Kd: Dos Passos?

I probably did, but I don’t recall that. Iundoubtedly did. But I was also reading a lotof English literature. I was reading plays, earlyEnglish plays.

Was Hemingway writing at this time?

I read Hemingway in retrospect later, be-cause I knew that he was a major figure. Idon’t remember reading him then. But I wasreading a lot of English novels. The Brontësisters, and Jonathan Swift, Henry Fieldingand . . . . I loved Jonathan Swift. There werea couple of other satirical writers like thatthat I was reading. A lot of that was due toLyon but also this group that we were in.Everybody was reading everything.

I think I was reading more ThomasMann. That really got me, because, I mean,Mann really touched me. Jean-Christophe, andoh, Tonio Kröger. That wonderful story aboutan artist writer, a tragedy that rich and pow-erful, you know, the hero’s life kind of thing.By god, how did that come back into myhead?

But the Kreutzer Sonata, was that one?The Kreutzer Sonata? No, I don’t think so.

That’s a title of a strange novel, by Tolstoy. Iwas reading stuff like that, a lot of it. I prob-ably did more reading in those two or threeyears than the whole rest of my life exceptwhat I was a gung-ho student in anthropol-ogy. But more free range reading of all kinds.

Well, how wonderful to have found a group ofpeers that you could really . . . .

Oh, it was a wonderful group—Stout,Englander, John Hultberg, and Steinbergbecame a psychiatrist. They went on to dovery good work. We were just young kidsaround eighteen, nineteen years old.

And Lyon, I wrote a number of papersfor him. I have one of them still. One of thepapers was primarily concerned with unrav-eling the “assassination” of Walter Krivitsky,head of the Soviet secret police, supposedlyby the Bolsheviks. And to compare other usesof the word “assassination” with “murder,”“killing,” “bump off,” whatever the otherterms were. Trying to place in context or give“frame of reference” to the uses of a particu-lar word like “assassination,” rather than theother alternatives.

I can’t recall now what my other paperswere, excepting that I was totally involvedin them for weeks at a time. I spent hours inthe library searching through the newspaperfiles and asking people what they thought,how they would use the terms. I was prima-rily involved in historical context, what wasgoing on at the time these reports were madeabout either murders or assassinations. I re-member that the feeling of discovery wasmagnificent. I had a sense that I was reallyexploring untrodden turf, that I was intosomething that was very, very important.

That kind of approach is commonplacenow, but at the time it really wasn’t, and EarlLyon turned us on to the idea, that it was so


important to understand “the word.” He usedto say, “The word is the beginning”—not inthe scriptural sense, but in terms of the real-ity. And you can’t understand the word unlessyou understand when, how, and under whatcircumstances it was used. And that stuckwith me a long time.

Now, I have not mentioned that one ofthe members of that class was KyoshiHamanaka, who was a very close friend of allof us in that group. I had great admirationfor him. He was a hard-working, young fel-low. He wanted to go on, I believe, either inmedicine or one of the health fields, and hewas terribly bright. He probably was one ofthe most receptive and quick students in thatclass. I remember him because just shortlyafter that, when I had left Fresno State, itwas obvious the war was coming on in Europeand that our relations with Japan were get-ting more and more difficult. I have someearly letters that he wrote me when he wasleaving Fresno. He saw the draft coming on,and he saw his position as an American-Japanese, a nisei, as very precarious.

He was one of the first people, at leastthat I knew, who was aware of that kind of aproblem. He was a profoundly dedicatedChristian on a philosophical level and spiri-tual level, and he was a conscientiousobjector. And he wrote me letters about try-ing in Fresno to get conscientious objectorstatus.

Was he an American citizen?

He was an American citizen. Oh, yes, itmade no difference at that time. But he feltthe pressure of discrimination occurring al-ready, and he was advised to get out ofCalifornia by some of his Japanese friends.So he went east to Chicago and into somecamp for C.O.’s [conscientious objectors],

where regardless of his intended status, he wasgiven military training and put into what wasessentially a concentration camp setting inIllinois. I’m not clear on just what was goingon at that time, what the American policywas with regard to Japanese, but as a C.O.and a Japanese, of course, he was in a veryserious situation.

But one of the things he wrote me aboutwas that while in Chicago he had gone tovisit Hayakawa because of the relationshipwith Earl Lyon as a student in Fresno. Andhe found Hayakawa an utterly charming man,who, he said, was so much like Earl Lyon thathe saw them as two twins. He had hours andhours of discussions with Hayakawa and wassort of taken into his family, became a kindof a family member and met his daughters.

Is this in Chicago?

This was in Chicago. That was the endof the letters—that last letter in which hewas so happy about finding someone he coulddiscuss his nisei status with, Hayakawa tell-ing him that although it’s important toremember your heritage, it’s also importantto remember that you had two, and, secondly,that that’s a hard row to hoe! [laughter]

Now was Hayakawa in any kind of internment?

I don’t know—maybe so. I’d have to lookinto that. I don’t recall. He was being criti-cized. He’d written a book which was accusedof being anti-American, because he had madesome critical comments about the British. Hewas attacked by Westbrook Pegler, that infa-mous journalist. He was reported to the FBIand all that. So something must have hap-pened to him, and I don’t happen to recallwhat that was.

139FRESNO STATE

Now, Westbrook Pegler . . . ?

He was a predatory McCarthy columnistsearching the world for communists, and Ithink he was in New York. He had a syndi-cated column, and he was very well known.Westbrook Pegler, what a freak of the times!He had attacked Hayakawa. I vaguely recallwhen that that was going on, but I don’t re-call what happened to Hayakawa and whathis trajectory was after that. But I do recallthat the Kyoshi was terribly happy about hav-ing made the connection. I also don’t knowwhat happened to Kyoshi. After this I losttrack of him, and lord knows what went onin his life, because he was gone when thatgreat move against the Japanese in Californiatook place in 1941 and 1942.

But you do think he was in some kind of camp inChicago?

He was in a camp for a while.

Do you think he was in the camp because he wasa conscientious objector or Japanese-Americanor both?

My vague recollection is that it was acamp for Japanese who were not necessarilyconsidered a danger. This was just beforePearl Harbor. That’s when I was getting let-ters from him, just before Pearl Harbor.Apparently it was a camp where he andothers were being given some kind of mili-tary and patriotic training. I don’t know whothe others were. This is something I wouldlike to look up and find out more about. ButI lost track of him.

At the same time, and why this comes tomind at all, is that I had for about a year beencorresponding with a pen pal, FrancisMotofuji in Hawaii. This was going on even

before I knew Kyoshi Hamanaka, and so therewas a kind of thin connection with theJapanese community and, of course, my ad-miration for the young woman who had beenmy assistant editor on the Broadcast when Iwas editor at high school. Somehow here andthere these Japanese friends and acquain-tances sort of came forward. And KyoshiHamanaka in Fresno was one of those.

One thing that you said that’s intrigued me aboutLyon’s class and group was that it was taughtlike a seminar?

Yes, there were about twelve to fifteenpeople, as I remember.

Wasn’t that unusually small for an undergradu-ate class?

Well, it was in a classroom, but when Ithink of it, it was more a colloquium. Well,that’s not so unusual. It isn’t so unusual inuniversities, and it depends on its rigor andthe subject matter. And I don’t think Lyoncould have taught any other way. He’d comeout of the University of California, and hesaw a classroom, really, as a forum. And hewould lecture, but at the same time he wasalways open to interrupting any lecture toallow discussion, or sometimes whole class-room periods were given over to somebody’swork, to their papers and what they weredoing. I remember I had two sessions withmy essay on “assassination”. [laughter] And,yes, it was more of a colloquium and a forum.But he was such an exciting individual, anexciting mind, quick, alert, and aware ofwhere we were at at any time, what we wereworking with. He introduced us to what wasthen very new stuff such as—Korzybski, thesemantician, and Hayakawa, who were atthat point beginning to be known.


And he was at the University of Chicago?

Yes, he probably was at Chicago, and avery controversial figure. Even semantics wascontroversial at that time. So anyway, thatto me was a very rich semester I spent there.

At Fresno I took English Literature again,because I always had a major in literature andalways a minor in anthro until later. (Iswitched to anthro when I got back to Cal.)History of Drama, History of English Drama,and Mythology; a course in Mythology. I re-member now reading Frazer for the first time,The Golden Bough at that time, and a num-ber of other things. So, again, the content ofthat course other than Frazer, I don’t recall.This was at Fresno. And then Earl Lyon’scourse, which I mentioned before, mainly in“semantics”. And then World Literature.And I took Educational Psychology for somereason or other; maybe it was a requirement.

Now, you went to Fresno purposely because ofthis Earl Lyon, right?

Because I’d heard about Earl Lyon, andtwo of my friends, Pierce Young and PershingOlsen, had spoken so highly of him and whata terrific character he was. And by this time,my parents, my folks were at their wit’s endabout me. When was I ever going to decideon what to do? And they decided they weren’tgoing to subsidize me anymore—fifteen dol-lars a month—and that I’d have to go on myown. So when I got to Fresno, I got an usher’sjob, and that put me through the semester atFresno State. And then at the end of that, Iwent to summer school, and back to Cal inthe fall of 1941.

Now, that’s a whole new era. I put outanother issue of New Rejections and was car-rying out a lot of the other activity that I’vebeen talking about. But things were heating

up in terms of the imminence of war; all sortsof things were going on. And, of course, thatwas the year of Pearl Harbor and our enter-ing the war at the end of that semester.

Something I haven’t mentioned was thetime in Fresno, while I was working at thetheater as an usher and going to school there,the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo camethrough the area. It was a very exciting eventfor me and some of my friends. This littletown with that entourage arriving on a train;they had about five or six cars. And this mar-velous ballet circus got off the train and cameinto the theater and set it up for performance.And I was there, of course, and also my friendPierce Young who was in the area, and wesaw an acquaintance of mine, JimmyStarbuck, who was one of the dancers of theBallet Russe. We had a chance to see Jimmy,and they wanted us to fill in as extras in theballet orchestra. We weren’t to dance; justsit there pretending to play instruments.

But I couldn’t do it because I was work-ing, but a couple of my friends did. Anyway,it was during that exciting little interlude inthis rural town of Fresno at that time, the bigcity and Europe had come through town. Itwas kind of a scroungy ballet company at thatpoint, when I look back. Their costumes wereold and worn, and it wasn’t making too muchmoney.

But they had that marvelous dancer whonow is rather aged, “Donilova” [Warren andKathy do not remember this person and sug-gest using quotes to show this was “as spokenat the time”]. I remember going back stageand seeing her sitting, taking off her balletslippers at the end of the performance, sweat-ing; her dress looked as though it was almosttorn off her, and she had gray circles underher eyes and mascara dripping. The poorlady—she must have been well in advancedage at that time, but she was dancing mag-

141FRESNO STATE

nificently. She was an amazing person. Butseeing that sort of crumpled ballet dancer—you know, like Degás may have drawnsomebody like her—gave me a sense of greatsadness.

And there were a couple of the maledancers who were quite old as well. I remem-ber seeing one of them on the street, and hewalked splay-footed, the way ballet dancersdo. He walked down the street with his toesturned out, and he looked very spindly andwas dressed in a kind of bizarre European waywith a beret and a cloak. He was walkingdown the streets of downtown Fresno. I re-member thinking, “What a marvelous andwild moment this is to see these dancers offthe stage, where they are magnificent andbeautiful in the lights and with the music.”

Gaiety Pariseanne was the name of thatballet that my friends participated in. JimmyStarbuck had a major role in that. Anyway, Iremember we went to a bar afterwards andsat and talked to a number of the dancers andJimmy.

It was through Jimmy that I heard moreabout Kathleen, whom I later was to get toknow. And I knew who she was, and I hadmet her, but she was on tour with a ballettroupe. She had been to Mexico, and theywere touring all over the country. And hegave me reports of this magnificent womanwhom I had met. And I stowed away that bitof information, as I remember. [laughter] Hername came up, of course, in this glorious

moment of seeing the Ballet Russe de MonteCarlo in all of its splendor and in all of itsugliness as well! [laughter]

I remember we went to see them off onthe train where they were all packing, justlike circus performers, into a few compart-ments in the three or four or five cars thatthey had, with all of their . . . well, they hadto take care of their costumes and their equip-ment, and they were piled in like sardines,and it smelled. [laughter] And it was hot, andthey were all very, very irritable and yellingat one another. I just thought, “Here is . . .this is art. This is the way it is. Out of all ofthis madness and confusion come these mar-velous moments on the stage, you know!”[laughter]

How many performances did you see?

They had about four or five performanceswhile I was there. And I forget what the otherballets were. But the Ballet Russe de MonteCarlo, which had split off years earlier fromthe Diaghilev group in Paris, had done fairlywell for a while. But I think it was sort ofgetting on the skids about the time I sawthem. The dancers were old; they were poorlypaid; there weren’t many performances; butI thought it was magnificent. I thought it waswonderful. And then as I say, I had word ofKathleen Addison [later d’Azevedo], who wasthis dancer that I had met and later was toknow more of.

17POLITICAL RUMBLINGS

HAD MENTIONED receiving lettersfrom my friend, Kyoshi Hamanaka, theconscientious objector who had left

side.” And there was the large sector ofstaunchly racist groups who saw this as anopportunity to separate the United Statesfrom the undesirable peoples of the world.There was a great range of types of isola-tionism, and the country was generallyisolationist. When Roosevelt tried to pushhis policy of lend-lease and aid to England,he received enormous, very active, opposi-tion from within the country.

Now, as for Roosevelt, I made comments,you know, like the John Doe songs and thingsof that kind. We were very ambivalent—Iremember I was. In the first place, Rooseveltwas the only president that I had known. Imean through all my life that I can remem-ber, Roosevelt was the president. Before himwas Hoover whom we all thought was a veryfunny man, and glad to get rid of. And so aDemocratic administration under Rooseveltwas the political world we knew in theUnited States.

However, the war in Europe began to heatup there was this pressure for the UnitedStates to become involved: Germany wassinking our ships, and there was a tremen-

IFresno to go east. So, anyway, you asked aboutwhat were my political views at that time,and I must say I’m rather dim on them, be-cause I don’t think I was political. But I didhave some political reactions and was awareof what was going on.

This was the period when Germany wasbeginning to invade. The invasion of Polandhad taken place, and Germany was one byone invading the eastern European countries.And Italy, under the fascist regime ofMussolini, had gone into Ethiopia. All thesethings registered on me and the people Iknew, and we looked upon it as alarming, butdistant. We didn’t feel that it was immedi-ately affecting us.

Most of the country in that period wasisolationist for one reason or another. Thereare many kinds of isolationism. There wasreligious isolation. There’s political isola-tion—the right-wing, conservatives—“letthe earth take care of itself, and let’s closeour boundaries to all the troubles from out-


dous amount of anti-German feeling. But alsoanti-Japanese feeling, because for years theJapanese invasion of China and southeastAsia had been progressing rapidly. And therewas this underlying feeling that we were . . .the whole world was going to pot, and theUnited States had to defend itself against allthat.

And the isolationist view was just thathere we were, surrounded by two bigoceans—stay out of it and take care of our-selves. And so the Roosevelt policy of aidingEngland—in particular his rapprochementwith Churchill and the role of EleanorRoosevelt, who was very much in the picturecalling for mobilization of citizens for defenseand for the development of industry andwork—all of this was strongly opposed bylarge segments of people in the United States.

As for my feelings about the Rooseveltadministration, I remember the positive feel-ings my parents and people that I knew whenI was younger had about the New Deal, andthe positive changes that were taking placeduring the early Roosevelt administrationwith regard to the Depression. There was afeeling that he was the kind of leader thatwas needed in a time of crisis, and that hewas a progressive, et cetera. And I had thosefeelings, too.

At the same time I was sucked along bythe very radicalized view that the UnitedStates not only should stay out of the war,but that all the efforts that were going on inWashington by Roosevelt and his groupwithin the administration were really lead-ing us to war, and that he was setting us upfor war. There was that aspect of my feelings,as well as of some of the others that I knew.

It was a very ambivalent, mixed up, andvery tumultuous period in the late 1930s andearly 1940s. Because things were advancingin Europe toward not only war—the war was

going on—but really horrendous kinds ofevents taking place. And then I knew peoplelike the Phillipsborns, who knew about theJews of Europe under Hitler, and things thatweren’t talked about very much in our press.Somehow or other the American peopleweren’t so concerned about that. They didn’thear much about it; it wasn’t talked aboutvery much. I don’t know if that was suppres-sion so much as just disbelief and . . . .

Well, were you aware of an anti-Semitic factorin the American social scene or . . . ?

There was the endemic anti-Semitismthat was always there. Jews were alwayslooked upon or used as a kind of scapegoatfor everything. This was, you know, the sameas in Europe because . . . .

It’s almost on a level of folk . . . .

Yes, it’s almost a folk level of anti-Semitism that was sort of spread throughoutthe culture. That was there. And overt anti-Semitism was being expressed by pro-Nazigroups in the United States, and that was adifferent kind. It was a highly polemical,direct assault upon Jews that became verymuch in evidence toward the end of the1930s and the early 1940s.

Was it in evidence in the Berkeley?

Not among people that I knew. I wouldsay the intellectual, academic set seemed notto . . . . As usual, they seemed to be a littlebit abstracted, a little bit distanced from suchviews. I don’t remember it came up verymuch, except in my relations with people likethe Phillipsborns and certain left-wing peoplethat I would run across who were stronglyaware of anti-Semitism and also the similar


role of the Negro. I was beginning to thinkin those terms at that point.

Oh, yes. I suppose my first contact withovert racism and anti-Semitism was from anold philosophy professor when I was atModesto Junior College. His name wasStickle, Professor Stickle. I had a very, verynegative reaction to him; so did my brother,[Donald] in fact, who later took a course fromhim. He would attribute all the ills of our civi-lization to not only race mixture and theeffect of not maintaining a pure tradition anda pure genealogy, but to Jews.

And my brother tells the story how onetime he was on campus talking to somefriends of his and waving his arms while hewas talking, and Mr. Stickle came up to himand said, “Are you a Jew? The way you arewaving your arms?” Well, this is such grossanti-Semitism and racism, and I rememberin classes he would reiterate this. However,none of the people that I went to school withwere aware enough or sensitized enough atthat time to object—this was back in the mid-1930s—we were just uncomfortable and feltthat he was silly and foolish.

It didn’t occur to us how viciously stupidthis old man—he was not an old man but amiddle-aged man—was with his pontificaldiscussions of Plato and the New Republicas ideal society. [laughter] And in fact, now Iremember one of my later feelings in readingPlato, was the possibility of interpreting in ita kind of an innate fascism or national so-cialism! [laughter] The New Republicbecame something that I felt, and others thatI knew felt, was an example of how societyshould not be ruled and run. So it goes allthe way back to old Professor Stickle. But thatkind of endemic racism was there through-out the society, of course. There were a lot ofpeople who thought in that way, just as thereare now. But somehow or other it didn’t reg-

ister on us as anything that required a greatdeal of thought. It was just something welooked upon as ridiculous and silly and stupid.

Was there in retrospect maybe some awareness,then, that he was misusing his position and . . . ?

No, because he had a right. I mean inthose days you felt that somebody who was ateacher, unless they were absolutely incom-petent, had a right to do what they wantedto do.

And express their opinions?

Yes, excepting you just groused about itand you told anecdotes about it, and the per-son got a name. And old Stickle had a name.People would have to take his classes—it wasone of the required classes, as many were injunior college. And they’d go in and sit readyto snicker and write epithets in their note-books and tell tales outside. We would grouseabout it, “Why is he teaching? He’s such asilly, old man,” and all. But he had a certainpower, and he had tenure, I think. God helpus! [laughter]

But I just mention that because it goesback to the level of political consciousnessthat many of us had. However, toward theend of the 1930s and in the early 1940s, wewere forced to think about these things; veryserious things were happening; very horren-dous things were happening in the world, andthey were impinging on the United States.So my feelings about the Roosevelt adminis-tration and Franklin Roosevelt wereambivalent. They were mixed between thesenew kind of radical views that I was devel-oping, and particularly with my connectionwith the Twentieth Century Bookstore andsome of the people I met there, and . . . .


Well, you said earlier that the radical identifica-tion in those years was fundamentally anti-war.I mean pacifism, was very . . . .

At that juncture. That was during theperiod of the Munich Agreement [1938], theappeasement of Hitler and Mussolini byChamberlain. A lot of people that I knewfelt Chamberlain had done the right thing—trying to make some kind of a accommoda-tion to Hitler. Only later do I rememberthinking how awful that was, what a terriblebetrayal that was. I think when it happened,we just looked upon it as, “Well, England istrying to accommodate.” Of course, thenright after it happened, Hitler makes his nextgreat moves, and within a few monthsEngland is at war; England and France are atwar with Germany. And that, I remember.Nineteen thirty-nine, yes. Right after Polandand the Munich Agreement had taken place.

But, you see, there was this sort of under-standing between the United States andEngland to leave the Soviet Union out of thetreaty it developed around the MunichAgreement. The Soviet Union felt isolatedand that we were conniving with Germanyto leave them out there as a sitting duck forGerman aggression. I think what was hap-pening right after England and Franceentered the war, and the post-MunichAgreement, when the Germans went intoPoland, was the Soviets were worried thatGermany was going to be moving too closeto its own border so they moved into easternPoland, as I remember. So that’s where thedivided Poland came in. It was during thatperiod that the Left and I imagine theCommunist Party in the United States andin Europe didn’t want England and theUnited States to go directly into war withGermany, because there had not been some

kind of accommodation for the SovietUnion.

The Soviet Union was feeling very iso-lated, and it had to maintain its own defensesand feared a conspiracy that we would allowGermany to go into the Soviet Union. Thereis good reason to think that this was what wewere doing.

And it really wasn’t until 1941 when . . .oh, that’s right, there was the Soviet-Germanpact of nonaggression, and it was during thatperiod, the Left was supporting a no-warstance on the part of the United States. Butas soon as Germany attacked Russia—invaded Russia I think in 1941, after itentered Yugoslavia, and then it attackedRussia directly and almost without warning—it was at that point then the American Left,particularly the far Left of the CommunistParty, made a great switch in its propaganda.The idea was, “We should go to war to de-fend Europe and to defend the Soviet Union,and we should fight fascism in Germany.” Sothere was this famous switch that was usedagainst the Left for years afterwards.

I wasn’t following all this very closely atthe time, because I hadn’t yet become thatinterested in the ideology and the politics ofit. But when I look back, it doesn’t surpriseme at all. I mean, the countries are out todefend themselves and to play all kinds ofhanky-panky games to do so. And the SovietUnion was defending itself against what itthought to be a concerted effort on the partof the West to undermine it and maybe playHitler’s game if we could, to bring about acomplete change in the Soviet Union, whichhas finally happened now many, many yearslater—decades later! [laughter] But I don’tthink I was thinking in those terms. I beganto get interested in these matters about 1941,about the time when the Soviet Union was


suddenly our ally and our friend. And Stalinwas Uncle Joe. In the press—“Uncle Joe,”the benign and wonderful figure, who was ourally and helping us defeat fascism inGermany, and Italy, and throughout the sec-tions of the world they conquered, as well asJapan, which by this time had pretty welloccupied a good part of the East.

And I remember Boodberg, this Profes-sor Boodberg, this man that I had so muchrespect for; a good part of his courses weredirected to the problem of Japan and Chinaand how little we were concerned aboutthat—that we had not done much about it,and that China was being devastated by theJapanese. Then there was the Manchukoperiod. The Japanese set up a puppet state,from which the Japanese controlled a goodpart of China.

Owen Lattimore, who had been the men-tor of Boodberg, and Boodberg himself, verysubtly (they had to be very careful) about howthey talked about the people’s rebellion inChina—and they really meant the commu-nists out in the western part of China—whowere trying to oust Chiang Kai-shek, who wasactually in league with England and also theUnited States, and was making deals withJapan, et cetera, et cetera, while he was fight-ing Japan. He really wasn’t so interested ingetting Japan out of China as he was of get-ting the communists out. And I rememberthat Boodberg kept playing with this theme,but he was very careful about it. So those arethe kinds of ideas that I had begun to developat that time.

Chiang Kai-shek and Madame ChiangKai-shek had come to the United States andbeen treated like royalty, great celebrities.Madame Chiang Kai-shek became suddenlythis beautiful Asian woman, this graciousChinese woman. All the women’s magazineshad articles about her. I remember my par-

ents, and my mother in particular, talkingabout Madame Chiang Kai-shek, this won-derful woman. The people who had hated theAsians, suddenly began to love the ChiangKai-sheks. [laughter] They did a great propa-ganda job of turning American interest to thedefense of China—the China of theKuomintang and the Chiang Kai-sheks. Andall the while, of course, Chiang Kai-shek wasspending most of the funds for armaments andaid in the fight against the communists anda number of east Asian groups that were strug-gling against the Japanese.

So, again, this ambivalence. I mean, Iremember feeling, that Chiang Kai-shek andthe Kuomintang were terrible betrayers oftheir own culture. In 1939 and the 1940s, Iremember thinking that I had been com-pletely misled. And part of that was comingfrom left literature I was reading and frompeople like my mentors—Boodberg andothers—who had painted this rather full anddetailed picture of Chinese culture, allthrough literature, and then wove in thethread of the Japanese—the Japanese whohad done the destruction of Chinese culture.And the role of the right wing—I don’t knowthe terms that he used—the role of the con-servatives, the Kuomintang, and others, andthe peasant uprisings were coming. So, youknow, it was a very roiling period for ideasand thought. And I don’t remember . . . Iwasn’t very politicalized.

When was the first time you voted? I meanwho . . . ?

Oh, my god, Penny, I don’t rememberwhen I first voted. I probably voted as earlyas I could.

Yes, it would have been at age 21, which is . . . .


I don’t think I started voting until I gotmarried and had a family—had some kind ofa domicile . . . . [laughter]

Well, you know, you turned twenty-one in 1941.That’s when you went in . . . .

I don’t think I even thought about vot-ing while going to sea and during the war. Idon’t know if anybody I know would know.[laughter] Or whether any of them were vot-ing.

The FBI might know. [The d’Azevedos laterwere to learn that they, like many liberals of theirgeneration, were under surveillance by the FBI]

Yes, they might. I don’t know of anybodythat I knew voting at the time.

I was just curious because it seems like the main-stream political theme, like between the partiesand Roosevelt, wasn’t really an issue that wasvery engaging to you or relevant, because if youwere interested in radical politics, then by defini-tion it was separate?

Well, my parents voted, but, see, Iwouldn’t have been voting until the war. Andthen . . . well, gosh, I’m trying to think whatkind of elections were going on that onewould have voted for? I’m quite sure that afterRoosevelt’s death I began voting.

Along with any political interests I mayhave been developing at the time, I was alsomaintaining this strong feeling about Asianthought and philosophy. And I remember Iwas very much taken with Mahatma Gandhi.And that was the period, I think, when hewas calling for passive resistance against someof the large Indian states and calling fordemocratic reform, et cetera, and was jailed.He was one of my heroes, as well as Nehru—

Jawaharlal Nehru—and his writings. So allthese things were going on, and politics wasonly one of many things that I felt, along witheverybody that I knew at the university, andothers, a slowly impinging threat, you know,the coming storm kind of thing that was there.We kept feeling it and probably denying it.

Now, in that last semester at Cal with thatsummer session and last semester of 1941, Iwas taking three anthropology courses. One,“Races of Man—Anthropometry,” which Ivaguely recall as one of the more disturbingcourses that I had ever taken. Because thatwas the period, really, when racial theory wasvery much the standard in anthropology. Andwe went through hundreds of races and sub-races and quasi-races throughout the world,I mean, the world was one map of these ra-cial groups, and we had to memorize them.And cranial sizes and dentition, length offemurs, the cranial index, and all that sort ofthing! [laughter] Things that nobody later evertalked about again were one of the majorthings that you had to learn. And I have for-gotten most of it, but I do recall the intenseboredom that I had in that course because Ijust felt that it was highly formalized andelaborate theory that nobody could really puttheir finger on. I remember it changed—every time somebody would talk about racialtypes, the types would change; you’d have adifferent set of types. And this was just be-fore the new genetics, the new physicalanthropology. Later I had a course fromSherwood L. Washburn, when I came backafter going to sea. The whole scene hadchanged. Nobody dealt with anthropometry,only seven, eight years later.

Do you mean measurements?

Measurement, yes, yes. Those intricatephysical measurements, and thousands of


studies about the minutiae of the brain size,and the . . . .

Did you have a sense of it as pseudo-science then?

No. I just thought this is somethinganthropology does, and one has to learnsomething about it. But I thought it was oneof the dullest . . . a dead end for me. How-ever, I didn’t have enough knowledge tocritique it. But I just remember the man whotaught it was a racist. As I remember, bigbrains were very . . . I wish I could remem-ber his name. He became a cause célèbrebecause he would walk along the front rowand brush the knees of the young girls. Andthey would talk about it later, how his handswould rub against their knees. And so we usedto talk about was he really an anthropometristof first order. He was just testing the size ofthe knees. [laughter]

So what was his name? Well, just as wellnot to remember. But, anyway, he alwaysmade the point about Caucasian superiorityand sizes of things, bones, height; even in-telligence quotients came in there to somedegree. And I remember reacting against thatand thought that it was just his personalpredilection. But, nevertheless, the anthro-pometry part, I supposed to be important.Even Boas had done some of this work.

So I had that, and I took an extra course,the “Semitics of Ancient Mythology,” fromold man Lutz, because I found him so myste-rious and marvelous. [laughter]

So that was the second course you had from him?

Yes. A gnomish little man up there ontop of Wheeler Hall. And I used to enjoy justclimbing the stairs and going up there withthese few students who would sit and listento him. Then I had reading courses in anthro-pology and a course in primitive invention. Ihave no idea who taught that.

“Primitive invention”. It may have beenKroeber; I’m not sure. And “CultureGrowth,” which was an early term for cul-ture change, I guess, or evolution. [laughter]And then I wanted to take a course from aProfessor Lessing. I don’t remember his firstname, but he was a very well-known scholarof Asian literature and Asian culture, andparticularly on Buddhism. He was giving acourse on the influence of Buddhism in theFar East. I didn’t get to take it, but I havewritten down in my early notes that I wantedto take that course. So there’s where my headwas in that last semester.

I was also putting out an edition of ourfamous magazine, New Rejections. And I wasvery much involved socially with thePhillipsborn daughters and the family, andwith a number of others, and poets and writ-ers, early ones in the Bay Area. And I wasgoing over to San Francisco frequently toreadings and events; and visiting JosephineMiles, whom I had a great respect for—thepoetess—and seeing her sometimes fre-quently. We’d go over, and three or four of uswould sit and talk to her. We read RobinsonJeffers, the California poet. We read every-thing that he wrote—the dark, romantic poetof the West Coast.

PART TWO

18REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR

REMEMBER in the fall, in December of1941, I was on campus—I forget what Iwas doing, but I was on campus near

you know what happened? Pearl Harbor hasbeen bombed!”

They stopped a minute and looked up atme and said, “Oh,” and went back to work![laughter] I’ll never forget that! It was justabsolutely marvelous because they were sointent upon what they were doing. “Oh,really?”

Earl was saying, “Oh, well, that’s terrible,”and went back to work. [laughter]

I went out and tried to find some of myother friends, and we sat around talking aboutit. But I consider that a turning point in thelives of everybody I knew at the time. Thiswas the critical moment and nothing was thesame after that. In fact, within hours, therewere reports of Japanese bombing SanFrancisco, that subversives and “Japs” werespying and preparing to subvert industry.Everybody knew that there were submarinesright off the coast patrolling. In fact, EleanorRoosevelt was coming up with somebody elseon a plane from Los Angeles and was told bythe pilot that San Francisco was beingbombed. [laughter] I mean it was hysteria. It

IWheeler Hall—and suddenly it was just likeeverything was electrified. People were run-ning around. And the newspaper boys bySather Gate were shouting. And I asked whatwas going on. Somebody said, “The Japanesehave . . . the Japs have bombed PearlHarbor!” And there was a tremendous under-current of excitement everywhere. Peoplewere running around and trying to get infor-mation.

Then I saw a headline. So I went toWheeler Hall where I knew my friends, thethree of them—Leon Kirschner, Earl Kim,and Len Ralston—were composing. Theywere working on a chorale which Leonardhad written around a Whitman poem. Theywere working at the two pianos, and theywere terribly intent. Earl was a Korean whohad lived in Japan and in Honolulu. And Iremember walking into the Wheeler Hallauditorium, and they were way out at the end,this little group playing the pianos. I said, “Do


was an amazing thing, because every time thepapers came out, there’d be a new wild storyof this kind.

And then the anti-Asian feeling, anti-Japanese feeling, became intensive withindays. The “dirty Japs.” Some of the epithetswere unbelievable.

Did you know any Japanese people at this time?

Oh, yes, there was my friend from Fresno(Kyoshi Hamanaka). I didn’t know any atBerkeley. There weren’t many, and I didn’tknow any. But I was also corresponding withmy pen pal, Francis Motofuji in Honolulu butdidn’t hear from him for a long time after.We regularly corresponded, and suddenly itstopped after Pearl Harbor. I later found thathe just thought that I didn’t want to talk tohim. But in Honolulu, the Japanese theremanaged to maintain themselves.

Have you ever thought it was possible that hemight have known some major event was goingto take place and that he wanted to get out ofCalifornia?

No. It’s just that for two or three yearsthere had been a growing anti-foreign feel-ing. The Germans were treated very wellcompared to the Japanese. Later on, theGerman camps were palaces compared to theJapanese camps. But there was a lot of anti-German feeling developing, as well aspro-German feeling—that was part of thiswhole pre-war gestation.

But somehow pro-German feeling was more per-missible socially on some level than anypro-Japanese sentiment, would you say?

Oh, yes, there wasn’t that much interac-tion, social interaction, between Japanese

and . . . in fact, in California, they were com-petitors in the produce and farm market. Infact, I saw figures that the Japanese were re-sponsible for 40 to 50 percent of the fruit andvegetable production in California in thoseyears. With their small farms they were terri-bly effective farmers, so this also created alot of animosity and jealousy for non-Asiansand whites who saw them as competitors.

They were effective, and they were prettymuch to themselves. I suppose they felt theyhad to. So there was all of that preliminarysetting for attitudes about them. And I thinkin the early 1940s something else was goingon. It may have been some kind of registra-tion that had to be done about conscientiousobjectors.

It would make sense.

And that’s how Kyoshi, my friend inFresno who had applied for C.O. status, gotpicked up and taken east. But the idea thatthe Japanese saw what was coming andshould have moved eastward as Hayakawasaid—I think that was probably a general feel-ing among them.

“We should get out of here because ifanything happens, it’s going to be very diffi-cult here in California.”

And it was. It began just hours after PearlHarbor. There were attacks upon Japanesefarms and households; the people were yelledat; there were the riots about them. Some ofthem were driven from their houses and theirfarms. It was a real vigilante kind of an at-mosphere. And I remember the idea that SanFrancisco at any moment was going to bebombed; that we immediately went intolights-out at night, and the whole city wasblacked out, because the Japanese were . . . .

How long did that last?


That lasted all through the war—black-outs—in the coastal cities. Through most ofthe war, the night blackouts. They may havebeen lifted at some point. I don’t recall when,but as far as I know, blackouts were commonin the city. Dim outs, at least; there were dimouts and blackouts. Oh, and that happenedalmost immediately after 1941. Scurryingaround and all sorts of little vigilante groupsand neighborhood defense groups searchingout subversives, saboteurs. It was wild.

Well, as I remember, on campus, it waslike living in never-never land. Suddenly, allof us living in our intellectual ivory towerswere faced with the reality of an entirelytransformed society, a militarizing societyaround us. Whereas weeks before, it was fash-ionable to be anti-military, it now becamenot only unfashionable but dangerous to beanti-military. I mean, “My god! What kindof a patriot are you”? And “Who do you thinkyou are”? And “What kind of a life have youled where you think that you can live like aparasite off of our society”? And on and on.[laughter] Oh, there was some rough stuffgoing on. I remember it really hit the cam-pus hard, because almost immediatelypeople . . . young men were signing up; stu-dents were signing up for the armed forcesthen.

Did any of your friends or people you knew signup?

Not immediately. Oh, yes, Watson Laceydid, but he wasn’t at Cal; he was at San Jose.And, yes, he did; he volunteered. He was alot more conservative than I was—wonder-ful guy, terribly intelligent. But he felt thatit’s his duty. And I began then this fewmonths of struggle about what it meant tome. I remember feeling that the whole cam-pus and everything that I had been

doing—and others felt this—was an anach-ronism.

What kind of world do we think we’reliving in? What was the meaning of anythingthat we were doing there? There were othersorts of things we should be doing. And I re-member reflecting back on the LincolnBrigade, you know, that, “I wish I had donethat; I should have done that,” because thatat least was a noble cause.

I wasn’t sure that this war was a noblecause, though the fact that Pearl Harbor hadoccurred, Japanese had attacked first, madeit very difficult to be opposed to the defen-sive posture of the United States. Of course,there were right-wingers and isolationists say-ing that Roosevelt had actually engineeredPearl Harbor in order to get us into the warso that he could help England—you know,this kind of thing.

So that idea had currency then?

Oh, I remember hearing it. I don’t knowhow general it was. I mean these things wouldcome up, and much more later during reflec-tions on the war, you’d hear that. But yes, Iremember that Roosevelt seemed happy, youknow, when he gave that famous speech onthe eighth of December, “This is a day thatwill live in infamy.”

And I remember some sort of sarcasticstatements like, “And he’s happy as a lark,”you know. [laughter]

This is almost a total non-sequitur, but I’m justcurious if anyone was aware how debilitatedFranklin Roosevelt was during that time frompolio.

To an extent, but the main idea was whata heroic figure he was. There was great ad-miration for him generally. When anybody


tried to speak against him he was immedi-ately put down because, you know, “Whatwould you do? How could you do somethinglike . . . ?” I remember my mother thoughtwhat a courageous, heroic person he was. Andhe was, you know.

And there was also ambivalence. I mean,my gosh, you can see what was happening.All of a sudden, you know, the world waschanging, going through this great internaltransformation. And ugliness. Suddenly ev-erything was military.

Uniforms began to appear on campus,and I remember the revulsion I felt and I amsure some others did, “What is going onwhere we now have the army stationed onthe campus, and former students are now inuniform?” There were mixed feelings aboutthis that you felt, “Well, maybe I should,”and yet on the other hand, “No.”

Well, were you in contact with your parents?

Yes, but I don’t recall what was going onbetween them. I was so involved in this downwhere I was.

But there was nothing . . . you don’t rememberany exchange with them about what you shoulddo?

No. Later, when I was really up againstthat problem, yes. But, no, not at the time. Iwas doing it pretty much on my own. Then Iremember there was a draft. They had theconscription process on campus. And thewhole gym—now the Phoebe Hearst gym—that enormous gym was turned over toconscription. I remember the strange and pe-culiar way that it was done. Hundreds andhundreds of us—not women, of course, onlymen—would go in at one end and strip, andyou had to leave your clothes there. Then

stark naked, you’d stand for an hour in theselong, long lines going through various physi-cal exams, that seemed to me to be very inept.And with long lines of others, like a kind ofaudience standing by watching, you know,and commenting on us as we went through.I mean I remember that as one of the more . . .I was more angry about that than almost any-thing else. [laughter]

“What a demeaning, dehumanizingthing,” I was thinking. “What are they doingto us in putting us through this?” But I wentthrough and got my draft status, which was2-A. But there was one where you didn’t haveto be drafted.

As a student?

Well, you could get out of it for variousreasons if you had . . . .

Student deferment was 2-A during Vietnam.

No, but there was a 2-A and there was2-B. And I don’t know what it was, but 2-For 4F, [laughter] whatever it was you were notrequired to go into service. Well, of course, Iwas the best, you know. [laughter] And sohere I was facing draft.

OK. So you knew you were going to get drafted?

I knew that something was going to hap-pen of that sort. But how long was not clear.Because it was a matter of your numbers be-ing called. That was a period in the nextmonth or two of tremendous soul searching.

Did your brother also get . . . ?

Oh, he was younger, and it was a littlelater and was a little more orderly. In fact, hevolunteered for the air force.


So he wasn’t someone you were in contact withwhen you were doing your soul searching.

Not at that time. Later on when he wasdeciding what to do. And he went into theair force at a rather glorious time during thewar—an air force navigator. He was thecream of the crop.

Flying over his brother. [laughter]

Yes, with his long silk scarves flying inthe wind, you know. [laughter] So I think itwas a little later. No, I don’t recall havingany direct contact about this with my family.I surely did, but I don’t recall.

Because it seems like such a huge thing.

Yes, well, there was a large crowd ofpeople who were as confused as I was, andwe spent a lot of time with each other.

Were you in contact with the Phillipsborns at thistime, too?

Yes, yes. And a lot of those friends . . .many of them were just leaving, leaving town,because they were drafted and going hometo see their families, or volunteering. It was abreakup of a society, really, of campus soci-ety. And an awful lot of propaganda oncampus and a lot of patriotic parades and flagwaving and then a lot of anti-foreign feelingand anti-Asian feeling.

Do you remember the Christmas after that? Didyou go home?

I probably did. I probably did go home.But I don’t recall that. I have a feeling that Iwas pretty much involved down there inBerkeley on the campus with what I was

going to do. I know that I was desperatelytrying to decide what was best for me to do.Was I going to declare a conscientious ob-jector status? That was one of the main thingson my mind.

Did you have to research that yourself, or was itpretty easy to find out about it?

Oh, no, you had to do certain things. Youhad to get declarations that you . . . .

So how did you find out about that? I mean, hadyou known all along about those alternatives?

Well, because, other people had done it.I mean Kyoshi had done it earlier. It wasn’tsomething that they would tell you you coulddo.

Nobody was propagandizing you to be-come one. But I do recall that I knew aboutit, and my main feeling was—just like Kyoshihad originally done—“I’m just going to sayno. I’m just going to refuse. And then I willbe arrested.” But actually then I found outthat it was very important to have some kindof background, this was not just a way to getout of your draft status, but was somethingthat you had as an orientation a good part ofyour life, or at least for a few years, which Ithink I went about doing.

I think I asked my folks to do this for me.I think I asked them. I think my father waswilling to, but he thought I was silly to dothis, that it was going to get me into a lot oftrouble. On the other hand, they couldn’treally argue; this is something they can’t ar-gue against. [laughter] This is their way oflooking at the world. On the other hand,there was this real thing of the threat to theUnited States from Germany and from Japan.And that was the hanger. I mean, how didyou resolve that?


So I remember I got actually sick think-ing about this. I mean I didn’t eat; I wasfeeling terribly lost and deeply troubled. Itwas one of the more tortured periods of mylife. I wasn’t afraid of war. I wasn’t afraid ofthe army or the navy. I just felt that my ownintegrity was involved, that these are thethings I believed in, and how was I going tohandle that?

And if you can’t live and actualize your beliefs,then what good are your beliefs?

Yes, and at that age you feel terriblystrongly about these things. You’re willing todie. And I wasn’t alone. I remember a num-ber of people that I knew were going throughreal trauma about this.

Were you actually enrolled in classes?

Yes, I was enrolled. I didn’t go. I meanthis is early 1942. I think I was enrolled inGreek and Latin, German, because I had toget my language requirements. But I justdidn’t go. I think the university practicallyclosed down; people weren’t going to class. Irecall just living around the campus, tryingto get my bearings.

And one thing I’d heard about was theambulance service. This was a period whenthe British were being attacked in North

Africa. The Germans, I think, had practicallytaken over North Africa. I’m not surewhether this was the Rommel period or what.Nevertheless, there were ambulance servicessending ambulances and personnel indepen-dently to north Africa (and I don’t thinkelsewhere). Well, I went to the office—therewas one little office in the university—to signup. You know I was noncombatant, and thiswas the way I’d do service.

My idea was I certainly didn’t want toavoid danger—in fact, the adventure was oneof the appeals of it—but that I would not bea combatant.

So I went to sign up, and I got a kind of aconsultation with two or three people, andthey were taking a sample of blood from me.I remember just getting dizzier and dizzier anddizzier, and fell over; and crawling out thedoor. They did some blood tests on me andsaid I was anemic, that I was terribly sick,and that I should eat and see a doctor, andall that sort of thing. And I probably didweigh less than I’d ever weighed in my life atthat point, because I was not happy and ter-ribly troubled. So I couldn’t get into theAmbulance Corps because of that. And therewas an indication of mononucleosis.

So, anyway, that finished the AmbulanceCorps thing. And I kept searching aroundfor things like this.

19THE MERCHANT MARINE

REMEMBER at one point I saw a poster.If the military wonders if the contentsof their posters are effective, in situations

Maybe my father, I think, would rather Ihad gotten into one of the regular services sohe could tell his friends that I was in the regu-lar armed forces. But at that time thismerchant marine cadet training was thearmed services; it was Naval Reserve. It wassort of an adjunct to the regular navy. Andso I signed up, and I think within weeks Iwas on Treasure Island.

Now, just to clarify for me, this is explicitly anoncombatant branch.

No, no, they would never say that. I sawit as noncombatant, because I was not sup-posed to . . . I didn’t think I was going to getmilitary training, or be in situations of directarmed conflict as part of an army or navysituation.

This was a little bit naive on my part be-cause the minute I got to Treasure Island . . .oh, wait a second. Just during this period I’dalso gone to a union hall, the Sailor’s Unionof the Pacific, to see if I could just ship out, ifI could ship out, because the merchantmarine was begging for people to go to sea.

Ilike this, when people are desperate, they areeffective! [laughter] And I saw this posterwith Uncle Sam pointing and saying, “Weneed you! Merchant Marine Cadet CorpsTraining, U.S. Naval Reserve.”

And I thought, “There is shipping. Thereis noncombatant status.”

I must have done this in January orFebruary. I went to the recruiting office andgot papers for the Naval Reserve cadets andsigned up. I had to get some letters frompeople in Modesto who knew me, and therewas an acquaintance of my father who hadbeen in the Naval Reserve, and he wrote aglowing letter about me, and I think I signedup as Azevedo rather than d’Azevedo.

I must have been conferring with my folksat that time, too, because I was in Modestogetting these papers. As I remember, I thinkthat they felt that this was a good idea.

They were probably relieved then.


The trouble was, we didn’t have enoughships, and there was this great worry that theUnited States had not kept its merchant fleetup. All the building and the liberty ships fol-lowed during the first few years of thewar—thousands of ships were made. But,anyway, there was a great drive on to getmerchant seamen. And they were assured,you know, they would be part of the armedforces, that they were being considered asdoing their duty. In fact, if you went to sea,your draft status was OK, you see. So I triedto do that, but there was just no way for meto get in quickly at that time.

Because of the shortage of ships?

A shortage of ships, and it was just at thetime the transition was taking place. If I hadwaited long enough, if I’d hung around,maybe I could have gotten in within a fewweeks. But there was a lot of pressure on todo something quickly, as I remember.

I think there was a kind of a deadline; Ihad been called and all that sort of thing. Ihad to declare a C.O. status now—and I hadthought about that seriously. At the sametime I felt, “I’m an anti-fascist.” I had thebeginning of this kind of political view ofwhat was happening in the world and whatthe meaning of the war was. Even with myfeeling of dissent from American policy, Inevertheless felt this was a legitimate war, ifever a war was. And yet I was a pacifist, andI wanted to be a noncombatant.

Very difficult position to hold because atthat time, to be a conscientious objector, youhad to declare a very strong, specific religiousposition, which I couldn’t honestly do. I wasjust a pacifist, you know! [laughter] And itwas not until later on that you were able todo something like that—during the VietnamWar. The definition was a little more fuzzy.

So, anyway, I had this attempt to go tosea, and I even went to a little seamen’sschool, run by this sailors’ union. Over aperiod of three or four weeks, I would go overtwo or three times a week to learn rope knottying and . . . .

Now, where was this?

This was over on the docks in San Fran-cisco. The sailors’ union had this little schoolfor people who wanted to go to sea, but thewaiting for ordinary seamen was quite long.This was the end of the Depression, and therewere still a lot of guys who wanted to go tosea. The situation was beginning to look goodbecause not only were there jobs, but therewas going to be a little raise in the pay andall that sort of thing. For some reason or otherI couldn’t get on right away.

And then I got accepted in this merchantmarine cadet training at Treasure Island. Idon’t have the dates handy in mind, but itmust have been April or May. Suddenly I wason Treasure Island in uniform! [laughter]

With your hair cut?

With my hair cut and taking basic train-ing, involving marching and handling a gunbut not shooting. So in a sense I could feelthat it was noncombatant because there wasno pressure about handling arms, but a lot ofmilitary discipline. It was intense discipline.And then the classes and training in seaman-ship—which wasn’t very good, because whenI first went to sea, I was the dumbest ordi-nary seaman that ever appeared. So for anumber of weeks, we were there getting thisbasic training. In fact, I got top in the classas a signalman.

Was that literally flags?


Yes. I was pretty good at flags, and dot-dash Morse code. I was fairly good at it—Iforgot it very quickly. [laughter] But I mean Iwas good at it at the time, and I was a row-boat man, got a certificate lifeguard androwboat man.

I began to feel kind of good that I wasgetting along, but I didn’t like the militarydiscipline. Actually it was a very mild kindof military discipline, and we had a conge-nial bunch of guys.

Was there anybody you knew?

Not in the same unit. I was in a com-pletely other world. But I could go back andforth to Berkeley. In fact, I even put out anissue of New Rejections while going back andforth from Treasure Island to Berkeley. [laugh-ter] And, you know, I saw a few people whowere still left around. San Francisco wasnearby, and whenever I had leave, I’d go overto Chinatown for Chinese food and theChinese opera. [laughter]

Oh, I knew a little bit about seamanshipbefore all this, because the Mollers had athirty-foot yacht, and I would sail on the baywith them frequently. I was their sailor actu-ally, and they were going to take a trip aroundthe world on this yacht.

It was just before Pearl Harbor, and hereI was going out on weekends, and my friend,George Leite, as well. He was with a groupthat had a small yacht, and he’d been on theseyachts before. And so here we were sailingon the bay and going to these yachting re-gattas, where all these drunken yacht owners,small yacht owners, would go out to AngelIsland.

There was a sort of a resort area there,and I remember one night, a big bash of hun-dreds of drunken people—absolutely sloshingdrunk—with their boats all anchored outside

with guys like me to keep the boats frombumping into each other and all that.

But George and I had gone in, and hegot terribly drunk, and I said, “You better getback to the Carlita” (our yacht). And Georgecouldn’t move but he had to go back to hisyacht. So I had to carry him out, and then hestarted a fight with some people on the docks,some guys, and about five of them jumpedon him. They were beating him up and al-most beat his head to a pulp. I was fighting,too, trying to fight them off, and finally theyleft, and I dragged the drunken, batteredGeorge onto the boat that went out to theyachts, and took him home. [laughter] So Ilearned something about seamanship!

Not how to tie knots! [laughter]

How to not get too drunk, so I could takecare of the drunks. Nevertheless, I did havea little experience, but it wasn’t enough. So,anyway, that four or five weeks at TreasureIsland was the prelude to be put on a mer-chant ship as a cadet, an officer-in-trainingcadet. This bothered me. I didn’t like thatrole. I didn’t like the funny caps . . . .

I just have to interject here because I don’tunderstand the relationship at this point betweenthe merchant marines, the merchant seamen thatyou’d initially wanted to ship out with, and themilitary merchant marines.

Good question. It was a wartime thing.There was merchant marine, which was basedupon either union or non-union labor, thatcarried the merchant trade throughout theworld and United States. And that was stillthere.

But this was private enterprise.


Well, the ship owners, yes. The war ship-ping administration took over a lot of shipsfrom companies and gave them great subsi-dies. But there was a lot of political conflictabout what the role of the unions would be.

In Congress, they wanted to militarize theseamen, and that had nothing to do with thisCadet Corps. Their idea was to create a mer-chant marine corps, a seamen’s corpsconnected with the navy to run the merchantships. Well, the unions put up enough of astruggle to stop it.

Nevertheless, that was always there, thattension between the old working class unionsof seamen and the navy. There’d always beenthat tension with them, you know—the ideathat the navy was going to take over mer-chant ships. Well, by that time the CIO andthe NMU [National Maritime Union] werepretty active.

They had taken a position in Congress.“You are going to destroy the American mer-chant marine if you do this, because theyknow how to run the ships, and the navy can’trun our kind of ships, and we can do ten timesmore work.” Oh, that wonderful line we usedto have, looking at a navy ship near us whenwe were docked, where there were ten guyspulling on one line, and our ship had one!And we’d be pulling on a line and saying,“Hey, you guys! How about sending a few ofyours over here!” [laughter]

But the Naval Reserve marine trainingprogram was for officers on merchant shipsduring the war. They needed more officers.There weren’t enough officers—Masters,Mates and Pilots. We used to call them “mas-turbating pilots.” [laughter] So their unionwas overwhelmed by the demands of newshipping and things that had to be done inthe war.

But prior to the war, had there been naval officerson merchant ships?

No, but a lot of naval officers in retire-ment went into the merchant marine. But itwasn’t a formal relationship, no. There werea lot of people who had been in the navy inthe merchant marines.

So World War II kind of . . . I mean this is anew thing you were . . . .

A new thing altogether. The idea was totrain officers for merchant ships because youhad to have trained people running theseships. The unions weren’t doing it. TheMasters, Mates and Pilots couldn’t do it all.They were even for this program because theycouldn’t supply enough men for the ships.

So that’s what I got in to begin with, wasthis cadet training program. It actually was agood period, because I got acclimated to thewhole milieu of the war and what washappening.

And yet I was able to maintain some con-nections with the people I knew and the lifethat I had known.

As part of your boot camp, was there politicalindoctrination or sort of an attitude check on yourpatriotism?

Not at that point. Well, I think we hadto take oaths of allegiance and all that sortof thing, but I don’t recall that there werevery many of these things. Right there at thattime, the idea was get people in and trained,and get them out of here, you see.

You had to be a Japanese or something tobe really looked upon with suspicion. No, Ididn’t have any trouble of that kind then.


That came after I left the outfit and wentinto a union.

20ON THE BRET HARTE

ITHIN A FEW weeks—and I’mnot sure just what the dates are—I got my marching orders, as did

and the two of us had a fo’c’s’le together, anofficer’s fo’c’s’le. And he was a very, dutiful,hard-working, serious guy. He had learned tonavigate and do engine room work veryquickly, and in fact . . . .

What’s a fo’c’s’le?

A fo’c’s’le is a forecastle. The officers hadstaterooms. It’s a little room that you live in.That’s your bunk. [laughter] It used to be inthe forecastle area of a ship. The fo’c’s’le wasone of the places you lived in. You went toyour fo’c’s’le.

So I went up there. It was a nice, little, avery small six-by-eight room with two bunksand desk and all that, and quite new, spank-ing-new. It just seemed to me like, “Is thiswhere I’m going to live now?”

But that was awful. I didn’t meet anybody,and the crew was looking askance, crew downthere working on deck, and looking up at me,“Oh, here’s another one of those gazooniescoming aboard.” I had this feeling of beingin the wrong camp, you know, that I shouldbe down there learning what they’re doing.

Wall the others of that particular contingent.We were assigned to various ships up alongthe coast, or in fact, all over the country, andwe were to go in as junior officer cadets, thelowest of the low.

For my first assignment, I was sent withmy shipping orders to the Bret Harte andCaptain Rogenes, that wonderful old man.He was a real fatherly captain.

The Bret Harte was a new liberty ship. Afew had already been turned out. They cameout so fast, like popping out of ovens.

Anyway, I remember going out, extremelytimid and worried about what I would find,to what seemed to me an enormous ship, abrand-new, sleek, and shiny liberty ship. Theyweren’t really very well built, but they didtheir job. And I went aboard. I had my firsttaste at sea as a junior officer. I was shown upto the room I was going to stay in. I had asidekick—an American-German guy. Whatwas his name? [Schuller] Big, heavy-set guywho was sent up with me. He came up later,


With my seabag opened up, I got settledin this room and then was told to go see thecaptain. And I met this marvelous old man,Captain Rogenes—a small, sweet-faced,calm, quiet, little man. And he greeted me;it was like Santa Claus! [laughter] He greetedme, didn’t tell me to sit down, let me stand,told me what my duties would be—that I’dhave to go with the first mate in the morn-ing, certainly when we left dock I would bein the wheel house, and watching what’s go-ing on, and I’d go out with the second mateand take some sightings as we left the dock.

Sightings of what?

Well, for position. And if the sky wasclear enough, navigation with a sextant; yougo out with a sextant. I never did learn toadequately navigate with a sextant.

Oh, you didn’t?

I tried. I learned to do it, but I never coulddo it well.

You didn’t trust your own . . . ?

Well, it’s not that. I could never get thefigures right! [laughter] I didn’t apply myselfthat much. Then I was to go with the matedown on deck and watch the men work whilehe gave orders, and I was to meet the bosun,and all that. That was one of the more embar-rassing, humiliating experiences in my life,to go down on deck in my little monkey suitand my hat, with these hard-working seamen.

And doing the job of overseeing, whilethey wonder, “Who is this character? What’she up to?” Then I was told that at variouspoints along the way I was to put on my dun-garees and go down with the crew where thebosun would put me to work with the crew

just so I could learn. [laughter] Oh, my god,it was so awful! I mean when I look back, theterror and humiliation of it, because whenI . . . I cannot stand even to look back. I re-member the day that we left, I was to put onmy dungarees and go down and work withthe men. And the bosun was a big, hefty,brawling kind of Irishman. Well, he didn’ttreat me badly, but he treated me with a kindof contempt. [laughter]

That you probably felt you deserved . . . .[laughter]

It’s like, “What am I going to do with thischaracter? What can I do with him?”

“That was one of the more embarrassing, humiliat-ing experiences in my life, to go down on deck andbe in my little monkey suit and my hat, with thesehard-working seamen.” Warren in his cadet uni-form.

167ON THE BRET HARTE

The rigging totally confounded me. Youknow, the booms would be out, and you hadto bring them in and purchase them, get themsecured for sea. You had to put the hatch cov-ers on and then put the canvas on, and allthese long steel girders that you had to belayin with the wood. Well, I would watch thisprocess, and I would try to get in, but they’djust kick me out of the way. I was just like alump of clay being pushed from one place tothe other.

I felt utterly useless, and I was, with thebosun yelling at me, “Hey! Hey, Daz!” (That’swhere I began to be called “Daz,”—insteadof d’Azevedo, “Daz” or “Whitey” sometimes.)“Hey, hey! Just stand over there!”

It was just awful the first few days I spentlike that. Rather than up in the wheel houseor in the chart room doing the job I was sup-posed to be learning up there, I began tospend my time down in the mess room withthe crew and on deck watching and learn-ing. There’s where I felt the challenge. I feltI had to conquer that.

By the time that trip was over, I was apretty good ordinary seaman. I knew my wayaround deck; I knew where to stow the lines;and I knew how to handle purchase; and Icould climb the rigging, and even do look-out. That’s what I wanted to do.

So did these liberty ships have sails?

No, but you’ve got booms because you’reloading cargo. You’ve got all these purchaselines out. You know, the booms had to go overthe side onto the dock, and you got winchesthat bring the cargo up and take it back. It’sa pretty complicated bunch of material thatyou work with, and so you learn it. It’s a spiderweb; you have no idea where you are some-times.

But were you doing what you were supposed todo?

Well, I was doing a little more of thatthan I was supposed to be doing. On the otherhand, nobody stopped me because the offi-cers didn’t give a damn; they didn’t carewhether I’d pass my exams when I got backto port or not. Their view was as long as Iwas doing something that was useful, it wasall right.

I got very friendly with the crew. I remem-ber when we took off—that horrible two orthree days I was getting acclimated—I wasout on the bridge with the first and secondmates as we’re leaving the dock, and I waswatching the whole process. That fascinatedme—leaving the docks and letting the linesgo, watching the way lines were rolled up andmade fast for sea, and how all of those boomshad to be in and in their cradles and tight-ened, made secure for sea. That was what Iwas watching all the time I was supposed tobe watching the first and second mates dotheir duty, so that I could take over. [laugh-ter] Somehow that just didn’t interest me. Ialso was very interested in being able tohandle the wheel in the wheel house, like agood seaman is supposed to do, because allseamen took turns there.

I always thought the officer . . . .

Oh, no. Officers never touched thewheel. [laughter] You went up on your watch.You put in your four-hour watch, you put inan hour or an hour and a half at the wheel.

So you actually handled the wheel?

Actually steered the damn ship.

Oh, that’s great! I didn’t know that!


Oh, yes! That’s part of your duties as aseaman, as a naval seaman. And even theordinary seamen had to learn that. You takeorders; the mates, the skipper are yellingorders at you—a hard right or three degreesleft, that sort of thing. But you do it. Oh, thatpart fascinated me, too. But all the businessof cargo, and stowing cargo in the hold, allof the records that had to go into the logabout this or that and the other thing—I didsome of that, but I wish I had done more.

Where were you going?

Well, we didn’t know. Nobody told youanything. You were way out at sea before youknew where you were going, and we werethree or four days out before we learned thatwe were going to Australia. And that was myfirst trip, down to Aussie land.

Were you excited about going to Australia?

Oh! I was excited about being at sea. Oh,yes. In fact, we also went to the South Seasand everything, but the fact that we weregoing to Australia, yes, I had never intendedto go there, but, my god, you know, Australia!

And, of course, we were on sub alert assoon as we got out of Seattle. We were con-voyed for a short distance, about two days.The convoy was going further east, and wewent part ways with them.

That was an escort of military ships?

Well, also other ships, and some werenavy, but groups of ships. And then we wereon our own.

Also, all liberty ships at that time had guncrews. We had a navy gun crew—that is, agun aft and a gun fore. What were they?Thirty millimeter, fifty millimeter? There was

a gun crew of about twenty guys on almostevery ship during the war.

So we were on our own as we left thisconvoy, and I had to put in my time in theprogram like everybody else, and I liked that.I liked anything that made me feel like partof that group down below. That was terriblyimportant. I had a peculiar bias. [laughter]

I was ashamed of being an officer. Strangething. That’s a strange business, where thatcame from. After the first two or three days,I began to feel a little less humiliated by myineptitude.

Did you get seasick at all?

Never.

Was it ever very rough?

Well, I was on the verge of it, but I learnedvery early by being on a small boat, what youdo about seasickness. I knew how to holdmyself, and I never would eat for the first dayout. I never would eat a damn thing.

That’s a good idea.

Yes. Well, it was told to me by people whowere supposed to know. [laughter] And al-ways to be alert about the position of yourbody in relation to the ship—that you wouldnever go with the ship. You never sit andallow yourself to move with the ship. But youalways had to move . . . if the ship’s goingthis way, you move that way. [opposite] Youalways keep yourself erect in relation to grav-ity, and that process somehow keeps you fromthat nauseating feeling of swimming and ver-tigo.

Oh, did you ever learn to swim? I mean as partof your training?


Yes. I always was a swimmer. But, yes, theyhad swimming training at Treasure Island,and life boat drill.

I also wanted to ask you what books you took inyour seabag?

I don’t know if I took any on that firsttrip, but every trip thereafter I had one bagthat had tons of books. If I can rememberwhat they were. [laughter]

No, that first trip I was too involved injust getting along, and not knowing what wasexpected that I should have with me on aship and all that. I took only what I was told,and just bare necessities in one seabag. Butthen later on, I was taking two or threeseabags.

So you were told to take only one seabag?

No, but whatever it was, it was sort ofthe standard equipment that you keep withyou. I might have had a few other things thatI don’t remember. I know I had writing pads;I did a lot of writing on that trip and a jour-nal.

Yes, you weren’t taking your [music] records yet?

No. I had a journal on that trip. A verynaive journal I wrote on that one. I was verypatriotic and very much the doing-the-right-thing kind of guy, which I didn’t feel. I feltit, but it wasn’t deep. It was something thatwas part of the patina of the whole thing,the excitement of going to sea. However, itwasn’t the way I wanted to do it, you know.But, nevertheless, I was there. And beforethat trip was over, I was not only a seaman,but I knew exactly what kind of seaman Iwanted to be, and I was getting along verywell with crew.

The Bret Harte, was a liberty ship, one ofthose early liberty ships. In fact, it was one ofthe first that had been built. And we wereheading south. And now I recall that whenthe ship was in San Francisco, it’d come downfrom Seattle and Portland. In fact, as I re-member now, I and my fellow cadet, Schuller,had missed the ship in Portland. We weresent up to Portland. It wasn’t our fault. Theship had left earlier than our papers had toldus, and then we had to come back and getthe ship in San Francisco. The ship loadedat a couple of docks in San Francisco, thenwent over to Oakland and loaded on somemore materials. As a cadet—I was the deckcadet, and Schuller was the engine cadet—Ihad to help the mates, the first mate in par-ticular, work on the cargo inventory.

And it’s there that I got a hint of wherewe might be going, because many of the crateswere labeled “Sydney” and “Melbourne,” etcetera. And, therefore, it was quite clear thatthat’s where we were heading. However, therewere supposed to be very strict rules duringthat period about knowing anything aboutyour cargo or where you were going. I remem-ber myself and the mates being ratherdisturbed that we were allowed to see wherethe material was going and that it had beenso plainly marked. Because at that time, ofcourse, everybody was very concerned aboutsubmarines; and there were daily reports ofsinkings in the Pacific.

In fact, San Francisco and the Bay Area,all the cities on the coast and all the inlandtowns, were practically in a state of siege atthat time, with the blackouts, and concernabout Japanese attacks. Rumors were horren-dous and fictional and highly exaggeratedabout the possibility of Japanese attack uponthe coast. Sightings of submarines off of thecoast were made all the time by people whoeither lived on the coast or were driving along


the highways, and suddenly—it was like fly-ing saucers—they saw a submarine and theywould report it and everybody would get veryexcited.

Nevertheless, for people like ourselvesgoing to sea, and me for the first time, it wasa real source of worry about how far out ofthe Golden Gate could we get before we sawa sub or were attacked by one. And, also, thatwonderful slogan, “Loose lips sink ships,” waspostered everywhere.

All of us were keyed to that and were veryconcerned about it. Watching the cargo be-ing loaded and seeing these marks ofMelbourne and Sydney, I remember the cap-tain expertly and judiciously saying, “Oh,well, that’s to deceive us. We’re not goingthere. We’re going somewhere else. Theywouldn’t do that.” And, of course, he knewall the time where we were going. [laughter]He was probably very upset that we had got-ten this hint. So he said, “No, I haven’tgotten my papers yet. I haven’t gotten mydirectives, and they wouldn’t do this. This isthe way they keep people guessing.”

So this is your first experience with misinforma-tion?

It was my first experience with the stu-pidity and the lack of organization going on![laughter] That awareness grew all during thewar. I was aware of, in the first place, theamazing amount of organization it took to dojust what was being done—across theAtlantic and across the Pacific in the war.The fact that anything was being done, con-sidering the lack of experience that peoplehad, on the one hand, was amazing and re-markable. But on the other hand, there weregoofs and problems in organization and direc-tives that in some cases made you feel that

you were in a position of great danger, andwe were.

But, anyway, we got loaded, and I didn’thave a chance to go ashore to say good-byeto people. That was the period, of course, thenewspapers were loaded with reports of thewar in Europe. I think that was the period inwhich the British were being driven back byRommel in North Africa. And in 1942 theBritish finally were able to drive the Germansback in North Africa. But, also, the Germanswere pushing on Stalingrad and had prettymuch overrun most of eastern Europe andwere pressing on France. For most people,that was a very upsetting period when a lotof Americans thought that we were really,for the first time, in jeopardy; that the UnitedStates, though not getting involved in a large-scale world war, was in danger of attack itself,which was an unusual experience, I think,for most Americans to think that was pos-sible. So the paranoia and hysteria wassometimes extreme, like on the West Coast,in particular, about Japanese submarines andJapanese attack.

Is that pretty credible? I mean did you personallyacknowledge or live with the idea that theJapanese could actually invade the West Coast?

I think most of us didn’t know. All youhad was the media and rumor. And at thesame time some of us felt there were a lot ofexaggerated reports and that we wanted tobe cool and not appear to be too worried. Sowe would always say, “Well, let’s wait andsee.” I think that somebody woke up earlyand saw some lights someplace in the oceanor saw an accidental light on a fishing boat,and that becomes a submarine. I rememberall these back and forth controversies. And,


of course, seamen and people in the armedservices were supposed to be very cool aboutthese things and not take too much too seri-ously. Nevertheless, that was the atmosphere.The atmosphere was one of being on theverge . . . .

And you also said that there was a lot in thepapers about the war with Europe.

Well, because that was the main one, inthe . . . .

But not in the Pacific.

Well, yes. The Pacific was just heatingup. Pearl Harbor had taken place, and, youknow, the Japanese had become a very seri-ous threat. But at the same time, the war inEurope got most of the attention, except onthe West Coast where what was happeningin the Pacific was important. Nevertheless,that was the period in which the UnitedStates and England and France were havinga great deal of difficulty with the Germans.The Germans were moving in all directions.It was very clear that they were planning toinvade the whole of Europe and evenEngland.

And then the fact that Russia was nowattacked put another level on it. We weresuddenly becoming friends with the SovietUnion. That registered on a lot of people. Iremember even my parents—not only myparents, but that world of people in whichmy parents lived and who were very conser-vative politically, and yet to some degreeknowledgeable—they had been very anti-Soviet. Suddenly there was this whole newpicture where we had to look upon them asallies. And it created confused atmosphereabout who were the good guys in world andwho were the bad guys? The Soviet Union

began to be among the good guys—“UncleJoe Stalin” and all that sort of thing was go-ing on. [laughter]

And, of course, for the Left, which Iwasn’t too involved in at that time it was amajor shift. I knew people in it, but I wasn’tmyself part of any movement and I hardlyknew what the Communist Party was, exceptthat it existed. I’d been reading on socialistrelations at the Twentieth Century Book-store, et cetera.

Nevertheless, I didn’t see it as part of myown orientation, excepting in a general, so-cial sense. I was very pro-socialist, pro-SovietUnion; angry when I’d hear people talk about“commies” and all that sort of thing. BecauseI felt that this was an extremely advanced,progressive orientation in the world.

When you say that your parents’ generation andthe world that they moved in were primarily prettyconservative up until this point during World WarII . . . .

By conservative, I mean they would rep-resent conservative American opinion,except they weren’t necessarily right wing.

Well, was conservative American opinion at thattime sympathetic to the overthrowing the czar andczarina? I mean was that part of it?

Oh, no. No, no. No, they weren’t sym-pathetic at all. The so-called Bolshevikrevolution was an anathema that had bredthe wave of communist influence around theworld.

Well, and bred anarchy and . . . .

Anarchism, and as I was beginning tolearn, the IWW and the great wave of strikesand movement among labor in the 1920s and


1930s—all this—created some division ofopinion in American society, and it remained;it’s still here, still with us. People took sides,and I would say most ordinary, averageAmerican people were anti-communist, anti-Soviet, and felt that our values and way oflife were threatened by these movements else-where in the world.

That would be up until the time whenGermany attacked the Soviet Union, and theSoviet Union became an ally of ours. Andthen, I would say rather quickly, people whohad been anti-communist, anti-Soviet, wereon the defensive. And that I found fascinat-ing, a very fascinating turn in American life.

Well, were you conscious of it at the time, or areyou talking about something you thought aboutin retrospect?

No, I was conscious of it happening, butI wasn’t particularly partisan, and I wasn’tpolitically oriented to the far Left. However,I felt sympathetic to those views. I felt thatthis was really the answer to fascism. I was,in a sense, a kind of unread and unskilledsocialist. I just felt that that was the way so-ciety was moving and should be—the onlyreally effective answer to fascism.

And, of course, a lot of the commentarywas that the far Left and the far Right reallymeet and are one, you know. But, oh, veryearly I knew that wasn’t so. The far Left, withall the mistakes it might make and all of theeffects of contemporary society upon them—that would be the Soviet Union and thesocialist-oriented countries—that they never-theless represented something opposed to thekind of atrocities, the kind of elite-centeredorganization of the fascists. National social-ism, to me, expressed it. National socialismmeant the control of society within quotes“socialism,” under the guidance of the

wealthy, under the guidance of great corpo-rations, of the elite of a society. Whereassocialism, ideally, was not that.

See, this was very important now when Ilook back. I hadn’t thought all this through.I just had as an emotional acceptance of theidea of socialism. I think I had a socialistorientation ingrained in me. I still am asocialist. I still believe something like thathas got to take place in the human condi-tion of this planet if we are to survive.

In the society.

Yes. And, you know, without that, thealternatives are horrendous and in a sensealmost predictable. [laughter] So I’ve alwaysfelt that way. And that wasn’t new for me atthe time, excepting what was happening inthe world confirmed certain assumptions Ialready had.

So I began to have this positive view ofthe Soviet Union as at least the standardbearer of a socialist orientation in society, andonly later became aware of how it had dete-riorated within. Nevertheless, that didn’tchange my view that that way of looking atthe world and that sort of social relationshipwas and is the most positive one that our so-ciety, the Western civilization, has known.

Is Chinese communism in the picture at this pointat all?

Not really yet. That was really a post-warphenomenon.

Nevertheless, things were going on thatwe didn’t know about, you know. [laughter]And then Japan had moved into China veryearly But somehow or other the resistance tothe Japanese and what was really going on inChinese society, I wasn’t aware of at the time.


Right. Well, I’m not sure anybody . . . . I don’tthink it was part the . . . .

Well, some people may have, but I didn’t.

Yes. But I mean it wasn’t in the papers like . . . .

It wasn’t a general concern. China wasthat great big, spacious, populous area of theworld that the Japanese were moving into andthreatening to take over. They also threat-ened to interfere with our trade and ouractivities in the Far East; and were making itvery difficult for us to develop a fully confi-dent strategy in the war.

Do you think even then, though, that peoplemight have had—and this might have been anunconscious trend in the general media—moreidentification with atrocities against Europeansbecause of our European orientation and thedominant political and social scene then, and thatthe Japanese were messing with the Chineseand . . . ?

That’s very true. Particularly in the areathat I grew up in on the West Coast. Youknow, the idea was, “A plague on all theirhouses.” On the other hand, there was a kindof a sympathy for the poor Chinese peasantswho were being overrun by these wickedJapanese.

My understanding and feelings about therole of the Japanese as Asians was affectedby my relationships with Japanese friends thatI had at school and what had happened tothem in the first stages of the war. So therewas in me a feeling of sympathy, not for theJapanese regime as it was developed duringthat period, and certainly not the militaryaspect of Japan, but certainly a feeling thatthe Japanese might have had some sort of jus-tification in the feeling that their need to

expand, their need to develop, was beingoverlooked by the Western world.

I was anti-the Japanese military and anti-the Japanese government, certainly whenthey made their alliance with Germany. Imean, this was a very serious thing for itmeant that they had joined in a fascist con-tract with Germany. But that wasn’t the onlything. Later on, when I actually got to Japanalmost at the very end of the war and after Ihad met my Japanese friends in Honolulu Iwas almost equally critical at that point ofthe United States and the West for its rolein Asia as I was of the Japanese. Then therewas Hiroshima! But no one could overlookthe kind of atrocities the Japanese and theJapanese military were involved in.

The kind of theocratic orientation of theJapanese government and the role of theemperor, et cetera, were things that I beganto think about more seriously later on. Butat this point, the Japanese were a threatdirectly in terms of ships being sunk in thePacific, as far as I was concerned, and to theseamen that I was with on the ships.

So we left San Francisco. As I’ve alreadysaid, we got through outside the GoldenGate, and there were a number of sightingsof what were thought to be submarines.When I was on the crow’s nest one day . . .and I remember that wonderful feeling ofswaying back and forth on a watch for two orthree hours.

Was it during the day?

It was day and night. As a cadet I didn’thave a regular crow’s nest watch, but some-times if there was something special for thecrew to do, I’d be asked to put in time on thecrow’s nest. And to me it was an absolutelyremarkable experience.


Did it bother you at all climbing it, or did youjust . . . ?

Yes, but I loved it. I took to climbing therigging very quickly. I didn’t do it very wellat first; I was a stumblebum at sea for at leastthat trip. I learned the hard way. But I re-member that day making a report to thebridge. You had a little buzzer that you couldreport to the bridge.

Oh, from the crow’s nest?

From the crow’s nest. I reported that I hadseen this object. It was early in the morn-ing—I guess it was dawn—and I’d seen thisobject skimming along some distance fromus that looked to me like the periscope of asub. I reported it, and I remember that theorder went around throughout the ship, “Notone light, not one match, and the portholesdown.” It was terrible at night because theships are very hot, and the engine room turnsout a great deal of heat. And when you havethe portholes down, particularly in thetropics, it can be deadly.

So my report called all the portholesdown. The guys had to be awakened and droptheir portholes shut, because even an acci-dental match—all that sort of thing mightattract a sub, or let them know exactly whereyou were. We never confirmed that sighting,but I was praised for reporting it, and the cap-tain had seen it. That was the good thing;otherwise, I’d have been up the proverbialcreek. The captain had seen something hethought probably was a porpoise even thoughthat wasn’t the area where you expect them.Or it might have been a whale. But we didn’tsee anything again till later. We got manysub reports later. And there were reports ofsinkings along the Northwest Coast up into

the Aleutians. And ships were being sunkaround Australia and the Solomon Islands.

Now at this point you’re not part of a convoy?

We were not convoyed this trip. Anotherthing that worried us: we were sent out allalone. [laughter] Lonely little ship, the BretHarte. And I remember Captain Rogenes,this fine, old man, saying on the bridge oneday, “Well,” he said, “all my friends,” (mean-ing his skipper friends on other ships) “are inconvoys. And here I am an old man, a lonely,old man, out on this new tin bucket libertyship and with no convoy.” He said, “Itwouldn’t take a bomb; a torpedo could get uswith just a good blow.”

It wasn’t because there just weren’tenough naval ships, and it depends on whereyou were going. Convoys had to be pulledtogether, and there had to be an organiza-tion of all the plans of the navy in the area.If there weren’t a few small destroyers avail-able, or other ships weren’t ready to go, youwent out alone.

Well, do you think, also, maybe whatever wasgoing to Australia wasn’t as high a priorityas . . . ?

It was fairly high priority because all ofthe materials, the cargoes, were being fun-neled through New Zealand and Australiaand the South Pacific islands for all the im-pending problems that we knew we werehaving in the Solomons. There were manyships going down. We just didn’t happen tobe at the time when enough ships were to-gether to go, and there were navy ships readyto patrol. There also was the view of somepeople that sometimes it’s better not to go inconvoy; you’re not as likely to be seen. Never-


theless, destroyers running around on theoutside like little guard dogs, sheep dogs, werenice to have. Well, one did have a sense ofsecurity later on when we were convoyed.You’re in a convoy, fifteen to twenty ships; Imean the feeling was sometimes, well, maybethey’ll get a couple of ships, but it won’t beyou.

Like a school of fish. [laughter]

Like a school of fish. Yes. One takes thehook, and the others get away, or any ani-mals that flock together. Deer and ungulates,crowding together and running, being chasedby carnivores, and only one of them is got.And they stop and look and watch and say,“Oh, it wasn’t me!” [laughter] So there wassomething of that feeling.

21POLITICS ON THE HIGH SEAS

HAT TRIP DOWN was my firstexperience being on a ship, and nowI think it’s rather important, as I

ports on the West Coast. And because thecrew that I first worked with was essentiallySUP, that was the seamen’s union to me. Iwasn’t really aware of the National MaritimeUnion, the CIO union. I was aware of it, butit was fairly new. It wasn’t until in the late1930s that the National Maritime Union hadcome forward as an important seamen’s unionand had a hall on the West Coast. But some-how or other the Sailors Union of the Pacificwas what I knew about. It was the older unionthat’d been there a long time.

The crew of the first ship I went on wasall white. The deck gang was all white. Thesteward’s gang was mostly black and someHispanic, some Filipino. The black gang wasmostly white; “black gang” is the engine crew.This was the old division of ethnic groupson ships and in the unions up to that time.

Only later did I learn, through the kindof literature that came aboard our ship or thatI saw in ports that the National MaritimeUnion was this new, progressive union thatwas calling for the end of discrimination andfor integration on their ships. It was thesource of a great deal of contention even the

Treflect on it, that when I’d gone into thismaritime cadet school at Treasure Island withthe idea that this was going to the merchantmarine, it really had not dawned on me thatI was in a kind of officers’ corps, an elite corps,and that when I got on the ships, I was goingto be with the officers. Well, I learned it thatfirst trip, and it had a great impact on me. Ireally was more interested in talking to andliving among the crew than I was with therather stuffy officers’ mess.

Was the crew generally more ethnically diverse?

The officers were not. The officers onmost of the ships that I was on were almostentirely Caucasian. But yes, the crew on thatfirst ship was white; and this is where I be-gan to learn about the difference betweenunions and a union orientation.

The crew that I was with was from theSailors Union of the Pacific, and the SailorsUnion of the Pacific had halls in most of the


first ship that I was on, in which the word“nigger” was commonly used. The idea of anykind of mixing of the crew was considered tobe against all of the values and the laws ofthe sea. [laughter] You know, “How could youbunk with a nigger?” and all that sort of thing.This bothered me a great deal, and had a greatimpact on me at that time, because I wasthinking about what this meant in terms ofthe war and the future. And I, of course—not at that time but a little later on otherships—was reading NMU literature, whichwas very left wing. The NMU was not led by,but had a great number of active membersof, the Communist Party. It was consideredthe “red” union.

Hot beds! [laughter]

It was a red-hot union. But it took me awhile to get fully aware of that. I mean, Iwasn’t that politically savvy at the time, butI was socially oriented in terms of learning alot about what was going on, not only in theworld, but just among average people. I spentall my spare time with the crew rather thanstudying and reading and doing my assign-ments for the cadet corps that I was supposedto do, in order to be elevated to the nextgrade—from cadet to something else. Whenwe got back to the States we were to have allof these lessons done on seamanship andnavigation and so on. Well, I sort of ignoredthose completely, and I spent most of my timewith the crew! I ate with them if I could.

I remember the captain and first mateadmonished me a few times, saying, “Youknow, ‘D’ . . . “ (I think I was known as “D”on that ship. There were a number of ships Iwas both “D” or “Dee”—“d’Azevedo”, no-body could say that—or “Daz.” [laughter]And also “Whitey.” For some reason or otherI was referred to as “Whitey.” I guess I was

blonder in those days.) But, nevertheless, Iremember the captain talking to me in a veryfatherly way . . . he was the only fatherlycaptain I sailed with. All the rest wereabsolute bastards. [laughter] No, not all—some—just most of them were. But he was avery kindly, old-time sea captain, who’d beento sea on sailing ships, very tolerant and veryeasy going, and he said, “You know, D, afterall you are a cadet, and you’re supposed to beup here with the officers. You’re supposed tobe learning the manners, behavior, and theknowledge of seamanship up here on thebridge. And your stateroom is not a fo’c’s’leup here.” [laughter] And this again was thatkind of rebelliousness that I had in those days;maybe still do in some ways.

I felt much more identified with the mot-ley bunch of the deck gang, the steward’sgang, which was mostly black, and the blackgang, the engine crew. And whenever I gotthe chance I would go down to the mess withthem or hang around the mess hall. I was fas-cinated because these were people of a kindthat I had seldom had any connections with.It was all new to me. I have notebooks,scribbled notebooks that I find I still have—almost unreadable. But these notebooks arejust loaded with observations about the thingsthey would say. To me, wonderfully fascinat-ing, eloquent cussing and scatology, whichto me was not necessarily new in content butnew in its marvelous inventiveness. I mean,I can still remember some of them, but I don’tthink it appropriate for me to repeat themhere. [laughter]

Anyway, to me it was beautiful language.I was interested in language; I was interestedin writing. And I remember telling a ship-mate of mine somewhere later in my sailing,that—he was also a person who was writing—“The language is Chaucerian, you know;[laughter] it’s marvelous; it’s classic. It’s a clas-


sic and wonderful language.” And I was takenup with this.

I remember writing notebooks full of ob-servations about not only what people saidand did in their lives, where they’d come fromand how they had gone to sea, and what theywere doing now—but their language, the waythey talked. And now all that’s old hat. Imean everybody would be familiar with someof the richly larded and brilliant observations,particularly of people, you know, a crew ofthirty, forty people over a period of weeks ormonths.

There’s a tremendous amount of inter-change and of openness about their lives.And the boredom stimulates one to create,to fictionalize, not only their own lives, butthe situation, to elaborate verbally on whatthey think and do. To me that was a highlystimulating period.

Well, for example, I’m thinking of Sparks.Sparks would be the name we always gavethe radio operators on the ships. The Sparkswere usually, in all the ships I was on, strangeguys. They were the intellectuals, or at leastthey were the technicians. They knew some-thing very, very special, like how to run aship’s radio and how to communicate. Andthey’re the ones you got news from, becausethey could pick up short wave, and they’dtell us what was going on in the world. Andso we’d hang around the radio operator’s quar-ters—the “radio shack,” is how we referredto it.

Was that common parlance? I mean, the “radioshack”?

Oh, the radio shack? Oh, yes, “the shack”,“up in the shack”, and “Sparks works in theshack”, yes.

I remember the Sparks on this first shipthat I was on. One time in the mess room he

blew up at one of the seaman, one of theA.B.’s . . . I was just a cadet. And as I say, Ialways felt I wanted to be an A.B., an ableseaman, working on deck, not a guy who wentashore in the monkey suit I had to wear. Iwas ashamed of my uniform. But I should say,[laughter] I wore it with a certain pride whenI went home, because of my parents and theirset. People they knew were impressed by it,but I personally felt awkward in it. And par-ticularly at sea, I didn’t want to wear it. Andall I had other than that were dungarees thathad been issued me. And the dungarees iswhat I wanted to wear all the time! [laugh-ter] But when ashore, I was ordered to wearmy uniform, and that spoiled so much of myshore leave for me, to go ashore . . .

It was probably meant to! [laughter]

. . . to go ashore with a crew or to seethe crew ashore and to be wearing thisdamned outfit. I remember getting a hotelone time later in Melbourne and going andbuying an old pair of pants and shirt, wear-ing that ashore, but putting on my uniformto go back to the ship.

Nevertheless, as I said Sparks was downthere in the mess room, and the ship made atremendous roll; had been hit by a very largewave. I would say we tipped forty-five degrees,and when that happens, of course, everythingfalls off the tables and out of the racks. Themess room was a total mess, because the messmen had laid out some dishes and cups andthings like that, and everything crashed tothe floor. And one of these A.B.’s, an old guy,bursts out laughing. He thought it was thefunniest thing in the world. He was scream-ing with laughter and pounding the table.And Sparks yelled—a little guy. Sparks wasreally a little, skinny guy with a long hawknose and beady eyes, and intense and intel-


lectual. And he pounded the A.B. and yelled,“Shut up! Shut up! Goddamn it, you bastard!It’s people like you who are ruining the world!What’s funny about things that the humaningenuity and human effort has created be-ing destroyed!” And he gave a speech abouthow the world was going . . . “If this goes onand people like you are in the majority, theworld is going to hell! But it’s people likeme . . . the more of us there are, people likeyou will die off like weeds!” This wonderfulspeech! He pounded the table, and he wentback to the radio shack, and we were all veryimpressed! [laughter] We sat there quite im-pressed.

Well, do you think his status gave him a littlemore free reign; he could get away with that?

No, it wasn’t necessarily status. It was justthat he made a point, and we were impressedby it. There were a lot of these kind of people,constantly preaching and yelling to eachother and calling . . . .

And that was permitted? I mean it didn’t cause afight or . . . ?

It depends. Oh, it might, but it didn’t,because everybody felt that he was right![laughter] He was basically right! And it wasa mess. Everything was . . . .

Well, sometimes that makes people madder,though, the righter you are.

Well, somehow it came off; it came off.And he was such a funny little guy anywaythat nobody would want to hurt him. Andyou just listened. He had us all sort of backon our heels. Nobody wanted to laugh aboutthat anymore. In fact, it’s very much a partof a pattern. There were a lot of men on early

ships that I was on, particularly the SUPships, a lot of the older sailors who had beenWobblies, had been IWW members way backin the 1920s, or even earlier; some of themwere old enough to have been . . . .

Are Wobblies the term for IWW?

IWW, International Workers of theWorld. And they and the early SIU, Seamen’sInternational Union, were one of the firstnational seamen’s unions which eventuallybecame extremely conservative and reaction-ary. The CIO, in a sense, grew out of theNational Maritime Union, out of reactionagainst the Seamen’s International Union.But they had been, at an early stage, very radi-cal with an anarchistic orientation among theworkers of those unions. The Wobblies werein a sense anarchist. I guess they were anar-chists, against all big business, against allcentralized control. You know, everybodyshould be free and do what they please, andthe hell with the governments and all thebusiness. [laughter] And you’d hear these oldguys sounding off sometimes about this, thatthe ship owners, the bosses (all that languageof the early labor movement) had finks andstool pigeons everywhere, even on the shipsduring war. “We got government finks”; “Wegot ship-owner finks on this ship, and they’relistening to us.”

By the way, my notebooks were a prob-lem, because here is a guy taking down notes.“What are you writing, Whitey? What haveyou got there?” And I’d have to show them.I’d just say, “I’m just putting down ideas; I’mjust writing to my friends at home; I’m justwriting to my folks; I keep it as a diary.” Butthere were some old guys who just thoughtthere’s something suspicious about even writ-ing at all! [laughter]


One of the things that had gotten thisSparks earlier was that one of the old guys,who was known for when he’d get mad, he’dthrow tools over the side. A chisel, a chip-ping hammer, or if he was using a paint bucketand brush, and he’d get mad at the mate andhe’d throw everything over side! And thiswas, of course, an old Wobbly anarchist tech-nique of protest. You wreck the tools that theship owners need to earn their great evilwealth. The way to get back is to destroy thetools, you know! When Sparks heard aboutwhat this guy was doing that, he also flewinto a rage. “Here again, you see, these peoplehave no respect for human ingenuity. It takesthousands and millions of years for humanbeings to develop tools . . . .” (And by theway, with my early experience in anthropol-ogy, this made some sense. [laughter] I mean,“man the tool maker,” you know.) “Andhere’s this bastard—he’s destroying what thehuman mind was able to create and produce.And the people like that will end up bydestroying the world.”

And then, of course, there would be argu-ments about that: “Well, what do you mean?Are you going to let those guys suck yourblood and take everything that you got andthen give you a goddamn hammer and tellyou to take the rust off of a ship?, and thencomplain when you don’t do it exactly theway they want! The hell with it! Throw itall overboard!” [laughter] And there was alot of that kind of early Wobbly feeling, verystrong among some older guys.

On this first ship there were three or fourold guys—wonderful old men, tremendouslyskilled. They were good seaman, and theywere respected by the officers because theydid the job. But don’t get them mad. They’llthrow everything over the side! [laughter]

Right. And it’s kind of the ultimate protest be-cause you’re not getting it back! [laughter]

Yes, the ultimate protest. “Hey, Lars,where is that bucket of paint you had out hereyesterday?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess it’sdeep-six. It might be deep-six.” [laughter]

Well, those things registered on me. I hada tremendous interest and fascination withthese various kinds of people. There alsowere, because it was wartime, ex-profession-als—a lawyer, men in their thirties and fortieswho had gone to sea because they didn’t wantto be in the army. And a number of teachers.I remember on my first or second ship, therewas a teacher or two. Many kinds of peopletogether, so that the conversations and thedisagreements were wonderful, were rich.And I’m glad I have reference to some ofthem in my notebooks. They’re just magnifi-cent. That one of Sparks—I just lovethat—the speech.

Well, Sparks also—this same Sparks—was known by one of the guys that sailed withhim on another ship, and they’d stopped atLos Angeles where there was an earth pen-dulum, Foucault’s pendulum. I forget wherethis was, someplace in Los Angeles, a mu-seum or an observatory, and the crew hadgone out to look at it with Sparks. And oneof the crew had reached out and tried to grabthe line of this great metal ball that it’s swing-ing on. And Sparks blew his cork. This formershipmate of Sparks told me, “Yes, you shouldhave seen him when this guy tried to stopthat earth pendulum. He went crazy. He wentabsolutely crazy! He said, ‘Do you know whatyou’re doing? You’re interfering with one ofthe more brilliant, scientific inventions of ourtime? [laughter] It tells us about our planetand what’s happening in the earth around us?


And you—you little pip-squeak—reachingout . . . .’”

I can’t repeat . . . . I couldn’t believe whathe had said. A wonderfully eloquent sermon-izer. And then he made up this fiction, thatif you had stopped it, there would be a greatearthquake. And that was his way of . . . .The guy who was telling me about it said,“That got to everybody!” He said, “We didn’tbelieve it, but nobody wanted to take achance!” [laughter] So, anyway, that’s whatwas going on.

And also at the same time, I was learn-ing a lot about seamanship. I was very proudof myself; I had a great sense of accomplish-ment when I learned a new knot. I knew alittle about splicing, but when I could turnout a good eye-splice on half-inch to two-inch, to an inch and a half of manila rope. Iwas able to do those basic things: I was alsoable to chip paint, which I hated to do, andchip rust. Chipping rust had gotten passébefore the war. They had pneumatic ham-mers to chip the rust off of the bulkheads ofships. But during the war, apparently that wasnot allowed, because of the danger of thesound and the use of electricity. I’m not sure,it was something to do with the fact that youhad to do it by hand. And so we’d be outthere chipping with hammers, and these greatflakes of rust and old . . . .

Literally with a hammer against the metal, ordid you have a chisel?

Chisels and wire brushes. And you nevergot it clean because that rust was deep. Evenon this fairly new ship, the rust had alreadybegun, so that you’re always chipping. Some-body was always chipping—buck, buck,buck—somewhere on the ship. But I remem-ber feeling very productive doing thesethings. Later on, of course, I got like every-

body else. On later ships, the whole thingwas a terrible bore.

It never occurred to us that the red leadpaint was dangerous. We were breathing redlead and dust, and the rust from the ship; and,oh, my god, later, when I think of the oiltankers that I worked in with others. Thefumes and nobody ever worried about whatwas going to happen to us. They worriedabout what’s happening to the oil, to the ship,but not what was happening to us. But, any-way, here we were breathing all this red leadall the time. We were loaded with lead andprobably still are, but no adverse effects thatI know of.

Anyway, all that splicing . . . . I neverlearned to wire-splice, something I used towatch these old guys do.

You mean like cables?

Yes, very heavy wire cable. A lot of thesupports and the lines for the booms you hadto splice around an eye. And it was very hardwork and it took a lot of skill. And I used towatch these old guys, but I could never re-ally get the hang of it, because it took atremendous amount of skill to work thestrands of the wire. Firstly, it took a lot ofstrength to get them through and braid themproperly, and then they used a mallet to ham-mer them down so they were smooth. I nevercould get the hang of that. I always avoidedthat the rest of the time I was at sea, becauseI couldn’t do it right. And by the way, veryfew could do it, but these old guys could doit, and you better not get under their skins ifyou’re an officer, because they’ll take thatwhole spool of red cable and throw it overthe side. And all the tools would go with it![laughter]

I was very proud to get my first fid. I thinkI still have it. A fid is what you use to splice.


It’s a pointed, wood kind of a . . . what wouldbe the name for it, alternate name? Anyway,it was a pointed object that you pushedthrough the large, heavy line, to open it upin order to splice strands into it.

Oh, OK, so you’d sort of wedge it open?

Yes, a wedge. It really was a wedge, a verybeautifully polished wooden object, hardwood object. And I have one with my namescratched into it. It was given to me by oneof the seamen. I was so proud that I had myown fid, you know. [laughter] [Note: A fid ismore like an awl.] All those little thingsadded up that first trip that made me feelhighly identified with the crew.

I also was beginning to be aware of theseparation between the steward’s gang andthe deck gang—the steward’s gang doing allthe serving and the cooking and the clean-ing of the inside passages and all. We wereconcerned with the deck outside; steward’sdepartment did all the cleaning inside, pre-pared all the food and did all the serving.Though there were some Caucasians amongthem they were mostly black. There were noblacks among the deck gang. Any white whowas in the steward department was alwayslooked upon as somebody who was probablythe dregs of humanity, you know. So I be-came very aware of that distinction.

However, I was also aware that there wasa great deal of camaraderie on the ship. Neveroff the ship. I mean you never saw these guysoff the ship. There was some degree of cama-raderie, but not to the extent of . . . I meanthe guys would play cards together; theywould bullshit together and all that. But thesteward’s gang actually ate after we did, butthat just seemed to be understood; it wasn’tanything that anybody did anything about.However, you had to be careful with the

steward’s department, because if they didn’tlike you or like the officers, there’s no tellingwhat would be in the food or coffee.

I can remember just one mate—maybe itwas the next ship I was on—that was reallyhated by most of the crew, but particularlythe steward’s gang. He complained abouteverything that he got—food and everythingthat came to him. The coffee was bad, andeverything was bad. Sure, the coffee had tobe bad because it’d be pissed in as it went upto the bridge. [laughter]

Everybody would take turns.

It would have been pretty awful if he’d said,“Now, this is a good cup of coffee.” [laughter]

The joke was he liked it better that waythan not! So there were ways to get back atpeople. I mean it was always good to keep ongood terms with the steward’s gang.

Oh, yes, the name of the chief cook onthat [first] trip was Honeysuckle. A great big,very good-looking black man. He wasn’t asteward; the steward was white. Honeysucklewas in charge of the whole steward’s gang.He was the chief cook, a proud, dignifiedman. I had a lot of respect for him. He al-ways dealt with people with dignity, and hehandled difficult situations with great skill, aknowledgeable southern black. He knew hisway around.

Was he an older man?

I thought he was probably in his thirties,forties, but he just had style. I rememberhaving a great deal of admiration forHoneysuckle. And we’d all break out some-times when we liked the food; we all sang“Honeysuckle Rose,” you know. [laughter] Yethe was always very distant, very dignified.


Now, could you eat with the crews that youwanted to, or did you have to stay segregatedwith your own?

Well, I was supposed to eat with the of-ficers. But I wouldn’t; I would break awaysometimes, particularly if I had some dutieson deck, and eat with the crew. And theywould joke with me about that.

I felt this great uneasiness, that I didn’twant to be an officer; my goal became to be anable seaman, an A.B. I thought, “Well, I’vegot to go to sea as an ordinary seaman andbecome an able seaman,” which is the nextthing up, because you had to show certainskills to become an able seaman. And I re-member feeling very strongly about that, thatI was not doing what I wanted to do.

I had no trouble with the mates. I likedthis old captain very much, and I also learneda lot from him about the ship’s inventory andstowage. The second mate helped me learnto use a sextant. I couldn’t do it today, but Igot to like it; actually take a reading, and findposition. And I’d often make mistakes, but Iwas able to get the idea and do it. I learnedto handle the log, which is what you writeinto, like the ship’s diary. But I was told whatto put in it.

Oh, I see, there was a formula.

I often wrote out the log for the captainand the mates when they were on duty. AndI’d go into the chart room and make out thelog according to their specification. I learnedto read charts—all those things that I prob-ably couldn’t do very well now, but I got sothat I was able to cope with that sort of thing.And, oh, I was able to use my semaphoretraining. I had gotten a certificate as a sema-phore man, and I was able to signal otherships later on.

Now, what’s a semaphore?

The flags, where you where you actuallywork out the letters of the alphabet with flags.And I was fairly good at that. I was able to doit. I knew a little Morse code—not well, butI was able to do it if I had to. Oh, I knewsomething about the various flags and pen-nants that the ship used for signaling. I hadlearned something of that kind on the bridgeand as a cadet. I learned something aboutnavigation, though I must say that a lot of itwas beyond me, and I was not going to applymyself in learning some of it. But, neverthe-less, I picked up a lot in that one trip, withthe help of a very helpful mate.

But my heart was down there on the deck.And I used to watch them as they worked,because I wanted to learn so that I wouldn’tmake a complete fool out of myself like I haddone in San Francisco before we left.

I was worse than any ordinary seaman,even though I had been in cadet training.They hadn’t really shown us how to handlea ship or how to work on a ship. And, I’d hadthat brief stay in the Sailors Union of thePacific training school for a few weeks, whichwas helpful; so I had an idea of what the toolswere and what was around. But when I gotout on that deck the first night when we wereleaving San Francisco Bay, and I had to puton my dungarees, and I went down—as thecaptain said I should, to see what the crewdid, and to work with the crew. But I was inthe way.

I remember one of those old guys waspushing me aside and saying, “Get out of theway, move!” [laughter] Because all the spa-ghetti of lines, I just thought I was in a spiderweb of lines and ropes. I didn’t know whatwas happening to the booms, and I was in atotal, complete panic, in a fog. I was so em-barrassed and ashamed about that, I would


watch every time the crew went out on deck.Even if I wasn’t among them, I’d watch tosee how they handled things, what they did.And so little by little I was able to join themand be a little useful.

I was no worse than the average ordinaryseaman by the time I got off that trip. But I’llnever forget the shame, the utter humilia-tion, I had first worked among the group. Isuppose that really spurred me, my basic pre-dilection for wanting to be one of the gang,one of the work gang, to be worker, ratherthan an officer or a member of the elite.

That old problem I had about my back-ground, and this great yearning I had to beaccepted by a group of workers, you know,and to know what to do, to be able to handlemyself.

Were you writing letters at this time?

Oh, I was writing letters to send when Igot to port, and I wasn’t getting letters. Thiswas a period when the mails were very un-

certain. People writing you didn’t knowwhere you were.

When were you told where you were going?

When we got there. A day out [from theirdestination]. And we began to guess, and theword would start coming down from thebridge. I knew as a cadet—that was one ofthe few things I had to offer the crew—they’dask me what was going on up there? [laugh-ter] You know, “Where are we? How far arewe? What latitude and longitude are we?What are we near?” And I would know onthe charts, and so would others; I wasn’talone, but the word would sift around theship.

But on that trip, we didn’t really knowfor sure where we were going until we werereally past the equator. So I was writing a fewletters, just keeping them until I was able tosend them, and didn’t know from where; Ihad no idea where I was going to get to sendthem.

22KING NEPTUNE AND

THE ALBATROSS

HEN WE GOT to the equatorthere was this great extravaganza,which I later learned happens on

dent of being cadet or another member ofthe crew.

The ceremony of crossing the equator isrecognized on every ship, and even today hasbecome a tourist thing. Anybody crossing theequator on the Atlantic or the Pacific oceansgoes through a kind of a ceremony with KingNeptune and his queen. But, I’ll tell you, oncargo ships, they’re kind of marvelous, be-cause the scenarios vary from ship to ship.

Later, I remember on troop ships that Iwas on, you’d have a thousand men, raisinghell out in the middle of the ocean, all dressedin weird costumes and playing out the sce-nario of King Neptune giving orders andmaking slaves of everybody who has not beenacross—the “shell-backs” and “throw-backs”who have not been across the equator. Some-times the hazing would be very serious; therewere reports of people being accidentallythrown over side and lost at sea or being badlymaimed. I saw things that got close to that,particularly on crowded troop ships, whereyou had wild, lonely, mixed-up guys on theirway.

Wevery ship that crosses the equator or theinternational date line. There is this cere-mony of King Neptune and his queen andhis minions initiating all the slaves on theirfirst crossing. And the scenario was differenton every ship, depending on who was there.And I got all involved in this; I thought itwas just wonderful. And I remember I drew—I still have it—I drew a very nice line drawingof mermaids and porpoises that was used forthe celebration menu, and it was highlypraised. Especially with my very seductivemermaids.

In fact, I guess one of the things that Ifelt made a contribution, that was appreci-ated by the crew in general, was that I wouldmake drawings, for various events, like holi-day meals or crossing the equator. And I’dmake drawings and run them off on this gela-tin pad [a way of making reproductions thatpreceded the mimeograph machine]. I got acertain degree of prestige for that. I felt goodthat I was recognized as an artist, indepen-


No, on this ship it was a fairly sedatething. But Neptune had to be dressed up insome kind of a king’s outfit with a crown,and then his wife had to be chosen. And thatwas always a wonderful thing to the . . . .There was a young kid, who was in thefiremen’s gang, I think. And he was chosento be the queen. [laughter] Of course, thatwas a subject of much joking. And I remem-ber they put halved grapefruits on him, andsomehow or other constructed a brassiere, awoven brassiere, and gave him some kind ofa costume. And his hair was a mop. That wasvery common, using a mop as a wig.

How did they select Neptune?

Neptune? I’m not sure. I think in this caseit might have been the bosun, who was a big,heavy-set, ugly guy. And everybody thoughthe was very funny.

So it was sort of voted . . . agreed on?

Oh, yes, it was . . . . The whole idea isthat Neptune takes all these neophytes whohave not gone across the equator and teachesthem a lesson and initiates them into thisnew world of being one who has done this.And the hazing can be very rough. But usu-ally they’re just sent on errands, cleaning allthe johns with their hands, and not using anybrushes or anything. Sweeping up the decks,or kissing the queen! [laughter] Kissing herbreasts and all these kinds of wonderful cha-rades. I can’t remember all the details, but itreally was a quite marvelous, wild event. Andif there was any liquor aboard, it got drunkthen.

But was that pretty controlled, the drinking liquorand . . . ?

Well, because people would run out.[laughter] I mean there would be a few whowould stow away a couple of bottles and bringthem out on occasion or hide them and takea sip now and then. And I remember the cap-tain—he had four or five-fifths of liquor inhis cabinet, and now and then he’d break itout for the officers. But, no, people just ranout. And anybody who was addicted to alco-hol or even tobacco and hadn’t taken alongenough with them would get pretty shakybefore the trip was over. But if there was anyalcohol aboard, it was drunk during thesecelebrations, and there would be a fewdrunks. And, of course, people who acted outtheir strangest proclivities, and you’d learnwho was slightly weird, in those days, “queer,”you know, by how they behaved.

And often somebody was chosen . . .either a very young kid was chosen to bequeen, and that was a wonderful joke—aqueen, you know—or somebody who was notonly suspected, but gave every impression ofbeing either a homosexual or close to it. Andthis was an allowed time. This was wheneverybody celebrated. It was like the MardiGras, you know. I’m putting this togetherfrom a lot of different ships, because thathappened on different ships, not on this par-ticular ship. I think it was just a kid who wasvery embarrassed, but did very well. Stoodthere while he was being fondled, while hisgrapefruit were being fondled. [laughter]With his mop hair. OK, I went through it,too. I was one of the neophytes; I had to gothrough all of this.

What were your errands, do you remember?

My task was to . . . what was I supposedto do? Oh, oh. To move the slops. Youcouldn’t throw garbage over the side; it had

189KING NEPTUNE AND THE ALBATROSS

to be kept in barrels in the back, because ofsubmarines, not because you were pollutingthe sea, but because it could be detected.

So there would be these barrels of slops,they call it. I had to move slops from one bigbarrel to another, and bring some part of itto the king. I forget what it was—somethingI had to bring to King Neptune.

So you had to find it . . .

I had to find things.

. . . in the slop?

I forget what it was, but it was a messyjob. It stank. And maggots were just . . . amass of maggots. In fact, there must have beenthousands, just a solid mass of maggots insome of the barrels. And I had to bring backmaggots. Anyway, stuff like that was goingon.

Well, so what did you do with the slop? I meanlater.

Oh, it had to be done as you got close toshore. There were places where you coulddump. Not in harbors, but near harbors we’dthrow all that over and watch the sharks fol-low the ship. And it was all a great sight towatch not only sharks, but the dolphinswould apparently come to play around withthe garbage—the seagulls, albatross, all that.

That’s another thing: I’ll never forget, oh,before or just after the equator, seeing my firstgreat white albatrosses, that wonderfulmoment. I’ve even dreamed about it since—being in the crow’s nest and swaying backand forth on a beautiful day with the clouds,with these marvelous thin clouds scuddingby, a blue sky, and moving down and up anddown, back and forth like a great swing in

the crow’s nest, and having a feeling that Iwas being watched by something close to me.And looking out to my right, and seeing thisgreat white albatross just floating with thetip of its wing within about four feet of me.

It must have had a wing span of six toeight feet. It was very large and with a bighead, a beautifully white thing with thoseblack eyes, and just gliding—gliding next tothe ship, next to the crow’s nest—and look-ing at me!—[laughter] cocking its head andlooking into the little slit that we had to lookout through in the crow’s nest. And for aboutten or fifteen minutes, this damned bird hungthere, and finally it just sort of glided awayand went swooping out to sea. Well, themythology, of course, of the albatross reallygot to me. There were many, and they skimfor weeks without landing on the sea. Later,when I went to Midway, there were hundredsand hundreds of these great white albatross,and sea terns—those white sea terns withblack, forked tails. And when we saw those,often we’d see them as a kind of compassneedle. They’d fly in a V shape. And you’dsee them going by; they are very fast and fleetlittle birds. And sometimes they’d land onthe ship and perch, you know, and thenthey’d rest, and then go on. And gooneybirds. Those are the lower classes of thealbatross.

They have great big feet or something?

They have big feet. They’re kind of brownand black, and they waddle. You’d call some-body a “gooney bird,” at sea it meant he wasa clod.

Did they ever land on the ship?

Yes, well, one time one fell on the ship,landed and couldn’t get its bearings to take


off. It went waddling around on the deck fora while. We were all trying to help it get go-ing, take off, and it would just waddle aboutand squawk at us. A rather big bird. Eventu-ally it managed to get itself together and flyoff. They don’t seem to land, either. Andalbatross tend to skim the sea.

Right. Like you said, for days, sometimes . . . .

Oh, the big ones will feed at sea in someway. They can land on the water and takeoff, and they do fish from the sea. But I neversaw them do that. I always saw them in theair.

And then at the equator and below, webegan to see the lights in the ocean. That, tome, was fabulous—looking down and seeingthese great searchlight-like phosphorescentclouds turning on and turning off. Somecalled them “dishpan lights.” They were

either groups of jellyfish, or sometimes therewere enormous, large ones. They’d be underthe water ten, fifteen, twenty feet, and they’dturn on their bioluminescence. And whenyou had a crowd of those around the ship,hundreds of them going off and on, it wasone of the more fantastic sights that I hadever seen. You felt like you were sailing onair, because you could see these lights underyou, going on. And at other places you’d getthe small jellyfish that would float around inthousands, in clusters of thousands. And theywould twinkle and just go off and on underthe water. So the whole sea sometimes wasluminescent. And being in the crow’s nest,and seeing—as the ship went, it would ex-cite these bioluminescent creatures,—thewhole sea would be on fire around you. Sothose were all new experiences that I foundterribly meaningful and quite exciting to meat the time.

23HEADING TO AUSTRALIA

OING ON were arguments, politicalarguments on the ship. I rememberthe different views about trade

argue. You guys don’t know!” I was veryimpressed by this kind of . . . .

Well, were you generally impressed that work-ing conditions were pretty reasonable?

Well, I had nothing to compare it with,except what I was told.

Right. But I mean were you told that things werepretty reasonable?

Oh, yes! Oh, and when we complainedabout the food, I remember a couple of theold-timers would yell at Honeysuckle, thechief cook, “Hey, you belly robbers! Look atwhat you’re giving us!” And then after they’ddo it, they’d say, [in a low voice] “We neverate like this before.” The food was really notgood. It was wartime food.

Not on that ship, but we got served sheeptesticles. They were called mountain oysters.And that steward had a bunch of them inthe freezers, and he just served them. Andthey were like golf balls. [laughter] I mean

Gunions, and some of the old-timers so angryat the young guys because they didn’t knowanything about all the terrible times duringthe development of unions among seamenback to the early part of the century. The oldWobblies were particularly political aboutthis and the development of the Sailors In-ternational Union, SIU, and, you know, thegreat struggles that had taken place. Theywould argue and preach and berate us, be-cause we were so stupid and ignorant. Wedidn’t realize what it had taken to even havea union at all.

“What do you think they’d be doing withus during this war? We’d be slaves on theseships. They could do anything to us. Theycould throw us over the side; they could killus, and nobody would know the difference.They’d just put in the log ‘mutiny’ or ‘refus-ing to obey an order,’ and throw you over side.You had no rights at all; they could work youtwenty-four hours a day and you couldn’t


they were tough! And the crew raised hellon that ship about that, serving mountainoysters without telling them. You couldn’t cutthem. And he said, “They’re good for you!They make you strong; they make it standup,” you know. [laughter]

But, anyway, these old-timers would say,after they’d complain, it was just part of theirnature to complain. If you don’t complain,things will get worse. But they’d say theycould remember eating—this was five, tenyears earlier—meat with maggots in it, andeverything was rotten. The vegetables wouldbe rotten and full of bugs. And everythingstank. But you either ate it or you didn’t. Andthey’d say, “You guys can’t complain. Lookwhat you’re getting. You can even get a steakonce a week; you get that.” Yes, there was alot of that kind of talk.

And argument about the value of unions.There were always some right-wingersaboard. There’s always somebody, some con-servative, you know, “Well, what are theunions doing for us, anyway? I mean, really?What can they do? It’s wartime, anyway. Youcan’t complain about anything.”

And the others would say, “Well, if youdidn’t have the union, when you got home,you would have nothing. You would have noplace to complain. At least you got a patrol-man coming aboard. You can lay out yourbeefs and all that, and at least somebody willhear it.”

But then some old guy said, “If you raisedany complaints, you never got a ship again.You were blacklisted, in the shape-up linesin the ports, where you had to stand in lineand wait for a job. And the guy who was call-ing the shots could pick out the people hewanted and just send them to ships.”

We heard all of that, and it registered onme. I think I began to—I never was anti-union—feel a very positive sense of the role

of unions as a means of protest, a means ofmaking a statement, a political statement.

And then news was coming from Europeand the Japanese theater of war, about sub-marines and ships being sunk. By the timewe got close to New Zealand, we had passedthrough the Solomons, I guess. We camesouth near the Ellice Islands and then onsouth. By that time we had heard about atleast ten, fifteen ships being sunk, and thatJapanese subs were claimed to be all throughthe waters that we were going into. And infact, on one ship that was sunk, I knew thecadet that was aboard, and apparently it wassunk and everybody lost. That was just northof Australia. By the time we got within a dayor two of New Zealand, we knew where wewere going. We were going to, if possible, stopat Wellington, New Zealand, which we even-tually did. We didn’t really get ashore thattime. Then we went up to Auckland, whereI did get ashore. And that was wonderful.Auckland was magnificent.

And you said this was about a month at sea?

Oh, at least a month—a month and a halfgetting down, because we had to take around-about way. Let’s see, what did we do?After New Zealand, we went aroundTasmania. Oh, it took us a long time to getto our final destination. But we stopped atWellington briefly; I guess we unloaded andloaded some cargo.

I keep forgetting that we had a gun crewaboard. We had twelve navy men, who werein a sense part of the crew. They ate with usbut sometimes by themselves. And theymanned the two guns we had fore and aft—what are they? Thirty-, fifty- millimeter guns.Whenever there was an alert of any kind,they had to run up to the gun turrets.


You know, one thing that you haven’t really dwelton was the fear factor. I mean how many alertsdid you have?

Oh, we had an alert at least once or twicea day. They weren’t always serious. If any-body felt they saw something, nobody wasgoing to question them. So, you know, alertsand hatch-downs and all that sort of thingwere frequent. And then a serious one, onthe way down, I’d say five or six times.

We actually saw planes along the hori-zon sometime, and weren’t sure if they wereJapanese or ours. You couldn’t signal them.You couldn’t do anything. You just waited,and you’d see these planes. I saw them onlookout once—two planes skimming alongthe horizon at quite a distance. They un-doubtedly saw us. And, of course, then, forthe next day or two we were sure that thoseplanes could report you to submarines. Sothere was a lot of that kind of anxiety, but it’samazing how you get into a kind of a groovewhere you can’t think about that all the time.

Right, there’s no point.

You just go on doing your thing, and theship certainly has a life of its own. You getvery worried and frightened sometimes whenyou are expecting something to happen. Butyoung people are amazing, you know? Itdoesn’t last long. It’s part of the adventure,too, plus a sense of, “It’s the way it is,” and,“Ain’t we got fun?” kind of thing.

I remember Charlie, my co-cadet who waswith me, saying one time, “Would the peopleback home believe this if they could see ushere now? Wouldn’t they wish they werehere?” You know, we’d joke about that. “Hav-ing a great time, wish you were here,” and“Wouldn’t they love to see us right now sit-ting in this fo’c’s’le looking out at the sea?

Who could get a view like this?” Be a lot ofthat kind of joking. “Who could ever have avacation like this? I mean it’d cost you hun-dreds of dollars to do this!” [laughter] So therewas a lot of that kind of youthful good spiritsthat carried us through.

But there were a few times when we werescared as hell. I mean, when for hours or acouple of days we’d be waiting and looking—everybody was out watching the horizon andlooking at the ocean. The lookouts were notthe only lookout; everybody became a look-out. We were looking for any sign of aperiscope or a plane, because as we got closerto New Zealand and Australia, that’s whereit was happening.

By the time we got past the equator, wewere pretty sure where we were going; wewere going to go to New Zealand andAustralia. What ports, we weren’t sure, butwe knew that probably Auckland and Sydneywere among them. At Auckland, I wentashore, and I had a wonderful time. I got ona train on leave—I had two days off. And Igot on a train and went up to LakeRotorua . . . Whakarewarewa. I wanted tosee the Maori, you know. I had read aboutthem; they were mentioned in one of myclasses, and I had to see Whakarewarewa.And so as I was on this train going up to themountains, a middle-aged guy, a heavy-setNew Zealander, was sitting next to me, andwe got talking. And he said, “Well, you’regoing to stay with us tonight!” And he tookme to his ranch, which was near LakeRotorua. And he and his wife, you know, gaveme a room and told me to enjoy myself, andin the morning he drove me around, tookme to the lake. I saw the Maori settlement atthat time. It was not really a tourist thing, asit’s become. But beautifully carved buildingsor facades. And I remember I got some beau-tiful carved boxes at the shop that they had.


And beautiful people. I just remember think-ing what beautiful people they were. Andnow and then they’d do a dance. I guess therewas some, not tourism, but some kind of eth-nic center that they had at the time.

I forget the name of it. There was aschool, and there was a cultural center. Andthey would perform so that the young peoplecould learn dances and other things.

That’s really interesting for that time.

Oh, yes. But now I understand that yougo up to Lake Rotorua and Whakarewarewaregular tours, and they put on great displaysand sort of fake Maori dances and all thatsort of thing. [laughter] But I was really movedby that.

And then I remember this rancher, in themorning he got up at four or five o’clock, andcame back with six or seven enormous, beau-tiful trout from the stream right near hishouse.

And we had trout and scrambled eggs andfried potatoes. And I hadn’t had a meal likethat in months! And they were extremelynice people. They were very cordial andhappy about Americans and how wonderfulit was that we were coming to help and allthat sort of thing. While I was in Auckland,as well, I went to the university, and went tothe English Department and met one of theprofessors whose name eludes me right now,but somewhere in my notes I’m sure I haveit. He was a young guy who was teachingEnglish literature. And he told me all aboutAustralian literature.

One author was John Lawson . . . HarryLawson, something like that—sort of anAustralian outback writer, something like thewestern writers in the United States. He’dwritten some very popular stories and poems.He gave me that book, and then a book of

his own essays. It’s terrible, I don’t rememberhis name. He was very nice, showed mearound the university, and we talked litera-ture and art. And I went back to the ship.[laughter]

Now, did you seek him out specifically becauseyou were looking for things to read or did it justhappen?

No, I went to the university not becauseI was looking for things to read; I wanted toknow what was happening in those circlesthere—what the New Zealanders were do-ing and thinking, what was happening. Andbecause I had taken courses in English, Ithought I’d go to the English Department. Imet this guy who was extremely nice to me,and showed me around and talked to meabout New Zealand literature. And I used toknow a lot about it, but I’ve forgotten. I knewquite a bit about what was going on in NewZealand and Australia in the local literatureat the time.

Were there some things that were very differentthat you could characterize from what the scenewas that you were used to?

It was provincial. I mean, even this guy,as an English scholar, interested in classicalliterature, didn’t really have much of a hangof what was happening now. Later on, twoor three years later, one of my stories in amagazine that my friend, George Leite, putout, got banned in New Zealand andAustralia. But that was before I really wasthinking in those particular terms. But, no,when I say “provincial,” I mean that it wasan out-of-the-way area. But he was remark-ably intelligent and eloquent kind of a guy,well informed on classical literature. I wasvery interested in what was happening in


New Zealand and Australian literature, thewriting that was going on. And what struckme about that was it was very much likeWestern American writing of the early partof this century. A lot of the cowboys-and-outback kind of stories about men against theelements and all that sort of thing and kan-garoos, but surprisingly little about the localindigenous people.

I remember asking about the Maori—“Oh, aren’t they wonderful” kind of thing.But nobody knew a Maori—and more so inAustralia.

It was so brief, but was your impression thatmaybe somehow these people had literally disap-peared or been assimilated or . . . ?

No, they were there, but they were seg-regated. I don’t remember there being anyovert antagonism or anything; they just werethe native people. As I know now, in factthere were a number of Maoris who had goneon to higher education, who had importantpositions in government later on. But at thetime you had the feeling of segregation, ofseparation, and yet a very benign attitudeabout the Maori as a wonderful people, ex-cept “they’re lazy”—the old . . . the youngones . . . .

Well, you could be benign. There was no threat;I mean there was no . . . .

No, there weren’t really enough to be athreat as the abos [Australian Aborigines]later became in Australia. So, anyway, thenwe left Wellington and were ordered, as I re-member, to go back around the southern partof New Zealand and around the southern partof Tasmania. And I knew a little aboutTasmania from my earlier reading—the utterdestruction, the wiping out of the

Tasmanians. I remember having argumentson the ship about that. “We wiped them out,we wiped them out,” and somebody sayingabout them “What are you talking about?What use are they anyway? They weren’tdoing any good. They probably died out be-cause they weren’t strong enough to putup . . . .” There was a lot of that socialDarwinism attitude. [laughter]

The reports were that the Japanese sub-marines were thick in the northern part ofthe sea between New Zealand and Australiaand on the northern Australian coast. So wewere ordered way south. And I remember theofficers and our captain being very upset, andthe crew also, when we heard from Sparksthat the British in Australia had learnedthrough the wireless the report of our shipand of other ships. Where we were, watch-ing out for submarines, we thought it was themost ridiculous and horrible thing we’d everheard of. They named the ships exactly, toldanybody who was listening where we were,and then told us to watch out. So our cap-tain was furious. I’m not sure just exactly whatwas said by radio, but our position had prac-tically been given.

Broadcast?

Broadcast. So there was intensive look-out all through this whole trip down aroundTasmania to Melbourne.

Were you in sight of land going around?

We went way out and came back around,I suppose because subs were most likely to becloser to the coast. Then when we camedown under Tasmania, we were close enoughso I could actually see Tasmania. I’d at leastseen Tasmania!


Of course, we were now in the southernseas, remarkable, too, for sea lights. My god,loaded with phosphorescence and biolumines-cence. You couldn’t move in the ocean atnight without these great flares—these dish-pan jellyfish. And they’d go off and on likesearchlights. Great big things. And you’d lookdown, and you could actually see some of theinsides of these great creatures. And they’dgo flash, and then they’d go dark, and flash,and another one would be flashing nearby. Itwas really quite wonderful. And then, ofcourse, dolphins following the ship or lead-ing the ship toward land. And they werewonderful creatures. I saw lots of whales. Itwas to me a marvelous time when I think ofthose good things.

So we got to Melbourne. I don’t thinkwe stayed there very long. Probably just toget orders or something.

Were you unloading?

I don’t remember. We may have. We mayhave had something from Melbourne, but Idon’t recall Melbourne very well. We thenmoved on to Sydney, where we did spend aweek or so, and unloaded, and took on a loadof . . . what was it? I don’t recall. I was partlyin charge of it, and I can’t remember whatwe loaded. Something that was going acrossthe ocean when we left. Anyway, we dockedat Woolloomooloo—I love the name.Woolloomooloo was the sort of slum dockarea in Sydney, the kind of place that “youdo the things that you generally don’t do.”[laughter] One of the older seaman made upthat song after Gilbert and Sullivan. [laugh-ter] [sings] “Oh, Woolloomooloo is a placethat you do the things that you generallydon’t!”

And so, you know, there were a lot ofdrunken nights in Woolloomooloo, while

myself and two or three others—those crewmembers who were interested in suchthings—went to see Gilbert and Sullivan.

It was great. The D’Oyly Carte troupe wasdown there at the time. And they were won-derful, as I remember.

The D’Oyly Carte?

D’Oyly Carte, I think, was the name ofthe Gilbert and Sullivan opera troupe fromEngland. They were from London, it was afairly well-known troupe, and they were do-ing wartime tours and were in Australia. Wesaw The Pirates of Penzance, and a number ofothers I don’t recall now, but two or threeothers. And we hung around the bars inSydney; the Australians were so much likeAmericans, and yet so different. They werelike Western Americans in the nineteenthcentury; they gave you the impression of be-ing early westerners, pioneers; a very roughand tumble group.

And Sydney, which has a beautiful har-bor, a beautiful town, a small town in thosedays. Australians were extremely nice to us.Everybody was cordial—invited us to dinnerand invited us out. And we had girlfriendshanging around and inviting us to dances. Itwas a lively time.

Oh, yes. And I was very interested in theAborigines. I got in a number of argumentswith Australian soldiers and navy men in barsabout, “Where are the Aborigines? Whereare the tribes out there?”

“Oh, what do you care about them for?They’re out there; they’re doing all right.Leave them alone! Don’t bother them; theywon’t bother you!”—[laughter] that kind ofattitude. I didn’t see any, and I wanted to.And, “Ah, they’re way out there. They’re outthere in the bush. They’re out there in theoutback. Leave them alone! Don’t worry


about that. What about your niggers and yourIndians? What about them? Tell me aboutthem!” You know, there was a lot of that kindof banter going back and forth.

I remember that the black guys on theship didn’t go ashore very much. If they did,they would go with the white members of thecrew, they sort of went in, looked aroundduring the day, and came back. I don’t recallthem really hobnobbing around.

Well, weren’t Aborigines at that time calledniggers in Australia?

They may have; I don’t remember. Therewere all kinds of names: nignogs, wogs, andall those wonderful British terms, too, creptin. But I don’t recall the details about that. Ithink the word nigger was used throughoutthe world for the whites against any dark-skinned people.

I’m just wondering how the American blackswere treated on shore in Australia.

I don’t know. All I know is that they didnot go ashore much, and I didn’t pay muchattention. I wasn’t really that hung up onthose problems. But I recall that Honeysucklestayed on board all the time. “Yes, I don’t needshore leave. I got work to do here.” That kindof thing. And I don’t know if I really under-stood at the time how to interpret that. I don’tremember seeing him ashore.

And, oh, there were wild and woollytimes. I mean those bars in Sydney. Therewere ships from all over the world. Oh, mygod, there were British ships, all the NewZealand, and Australian; there were SouthAmerican ships, and there were British shipsfrom India and Indonesia with their crews—there were Asian crews. The place was justpacked with a wonderfully strange assortment

of people, having wild and exuberant, des-perate kinds of good times, mainly drinkingthemselves sick. That Australian gin washorrible.

And people were being dragged to theship, taking taxis—taxis with gas bags on topof the hood. Gasoline was almost impossibleto get, and they were using natural gas, ingreat big balloons. And you’d see these taxiscareening along with a balloon. And so thesetaxis would roll up to the ship to the gang-plank and just dump two or three guys outon the ground. And they would be slobber-ing all over; then we’d go down and pickthem up and bring them up. And that wasbefore we were taking off for lord knowswhere. And there was this great feeling ofdesperation and, “Do it while you can.”

But, also, just having a good time afterbeing hung up all that time. And I’m surethe prostitutes had a very busy time duringthat period. [laughter]

There was a lot of prostitution, I meanwhy wouldn’t there be? There were thousandsand thousands of new people in what hadbeen a rural town, pretty much, a small town.So then we took off and . . . .

Did you have a ship’s doctor? I don’t know whyprostitution makes me think of doctors, but itdoes. [laughter]

No. The third mate knew how to put onbandages, and give laxatives, and . . . .[laughter] Oh, yes! The third mate, Phillips,I forgot about him. A strange guy, who reallythought he was a doctor, a medical man. Hewasn’t anywhere near it, but one of the . . .who was it? It was the electrician—a youngguy, a very interesting young guy, very witty—got a swelling in his groin that wasundoubtedly venereal, and it was enormous.And as a cadet, I was supposed to help the


third mate do something for him. I remem-ber when I went into the third mate’s cabin,he had the electrician propped up like awoman about to give delivery on a chair withhis legs apart, and he had this enormous swell-ing in the groin—very red, painful. It lookedsomething like a hernia, but it was obviouslyan infection. And he had had gonorrhea ear-lier but thought it was over, and this couldvery well have been a later complication.And here was the third mate boiling up somelancets and knives, because the electricianjust said, “Look, it hurts so much—do some-thing.” And here is the third mate sweating,you know—sweat’s dripping down on hishands and onto the tools, and this poor guysplayed out.

I was supposed to hand him the instru-ments while he lanced it. And it was loadedwith pus. There must have been a cup thatcame rolling out and spraying all over every-thing. And I remember feeling very sick,terribly sick! And all I remember was thethird mate standing back and said, “Well, howdo you feel?” and the electrician saying, “Oh,that’s a relief!” [laughter] And, you know, thisterrible thing had happened to him. I wasthinking the guy’s going to die of an infec-tion; I thought this was just terrible. Leavehim alone. But the third mate loved it, andhe kept working on it, squeezing it and get-ting stuff out and dabbing peroxide, and theperoxide was foaming up, you know.

And the guy said, “Oh, that hurts, but,gee, it feels a lot better. Thanks. Thanks,Third. Thank you, Third.” [laughter] And asfar as I know, he healed. He hobbled aroundfor a few days, you know.

Kd: No antibiotics?

No, peroxide, and there may have beensome other things that were smeared on it,

but, no, nothing taken internally. Oh, that’sbefore antibiotics, 1942 . . . . When did thefirst . . . 1943, 1940?

Kd: Well, that began with the war.

Yes, but not on ships.

Kd: Probably not.

Penicillin was the early 1940s, wasn’t it?

Kd: Yes. We heard about this wonderfuldrug, but you couldn’t get it.

By 1944, 1945, it was common. In fact,everybody was using it for everything. Everytime you went into a commissary, you’d get apenicillin shot.

Kd: But even if it was just a cold, it wasused for anything.

For anything. But in the early 1940s, I’msure that even if it was available, it certainlywasn’t on our ship. And the third matewouldn’t have known what to do with it,anyway. He liked what he was doing. Heloved his old, sharp instruments and things,and he felt very, very wonderful that he hadmade the guy feel better. The electrician hada hard time getting out of there that day, be-cause the third mate was enjoying everymoment of this. [laughter] And the crew waslining up to watch, you know, smoking andcoughing, and the electrician was the . . .

It’s unbelievable.

. . . was the star of the afternoon. And Ifelt really nauseous about that, and worried.I mean I liked this guy; the electrician was anice guy. I remember he went hobbling, and


everyone was joking that he had just beenscrewed, you know. “Look at him,” you know,“Look at the way he’s walking. He’s really hadit, boy. The third mate’s given him a fulldose.”

And he went hobbling up on the deckand hobbled around on deck for a few daysand then began to feel fine and said that he

really was grateful to that third mate. “Theguy ought to become a real doctor, becausehe’s good,” you know. And when I think ofthat young mad man standing there with thatgleam in his eye! I mean, you felt that he wassort of a Hollywood villain, sweating and hiseyes glazed! [laughter]

24LATIN AMERICA

O, BACK ACROSS the ocean throughthe southern sea. The main thing isit’s a different kind of ocean when you

Well, that we were going east. [laughter]And then about halfway across, I rememberwe had three days in which the enginestopped. Something went wrong with thescrew and with the steam pressure. And theengine gang was in a real sweat to try findout what was wrong. We just rolled. We hadto put out a sea anchor to keep us going intothe current.

Now, that would be the black gang, right? Theengine crew?

Who were responsible for keeping theengine going, yes.

But I remember there were three days ofthe most strange and most awful silence, asense of remoteness and isolation. Everybodyfelt it. There was very little talk on the ship;the ship just rolled quietly. No, when you’rehearing engines for weeks at a time, there’ssomething reassuring about that thump,thump, thump, thump of the turning of thescrew and the prop. Then sudden silence, andyou’re just rolling. You’re at the mercy of

Sget down there close to the Antarctic. Andalthough we were far north of the Antarctic,there’s something about that absolutely spa-cious sea—very flat, very leaden looking. Thesun was a dark orange and gold; the skies kindof hazy. And you knew that you were a thou-sand miles from anything all the time. Lotsof albatross; lots of terns, when you were nearland. When we saw terns, we knew we werenear islands beyond the horizon. Polynesiawas just north of us, and I’d always think,“Oh! Why can’t we get there?” you know?

We were south of Tahiti, south of theTuamotu Archipelago and all that.

And at this point you don’t know where you’regoing?

We knew we were going to SouthAmerica.

Oh, you did know.


every wave. And so you put out a sea anchor,which is a long line in back with a kind ofa . . . oh, it’s the same principle as a para-chute. It’s a large, circular kind of a pan, thatgives a drag, so that the ship then faces intothe current rather than rolls with it. So thatwould stop that rolling, but before the seaanchor went out, you just rolled, and you feltthat any moment the ship was just going toroll over.

There’s something about even what ap-pears to be a quiet sea, those swells—the shipjust turns and rolls. And half the crew gotseasick. I didn’t. I’d get sick leaving port ifI’d eaten too much or drinking.

Were you totally dependent on that engine crewto fix it, because you couldn’t get help?

We would have been out of luck. We’dhave just been floating around and probablyended up either on the icebergs to the south,or . . . [laughter] I used to fantasize, “Maybewe’ll just float to an island.”

Yes, to Tahiti! [laughter]

Float to the Marquesas and somethingfantastic like that! [laughter] Or find a littleTuamotu island and wash up on the reef. But,no, I guess a signal could have gone out, butthat could have been sighted by a submarine.

We were far south of any of the sea routes.We were the only ones that we knew or thatSparks knew in that area.

So you’re still on your own? No convoy.

Oh, no, we didn’t have a convoy. We hada convoy going from New Zealand toWellington. And we had a convoy part ofthe way out after we left Auckland, but thenit left us going north to Solomon Islands,

because that’s when the Americans wereopening up the Solomon Islands, and so theconvoy went north, and we went on—ourlonely, little ship.

I remember not worrying about the deadengine until about the third day; then, “Thisis too long,” you know. It was kind of inter-esting up until then. Finally, they managedto rig up something, jury-rig something, andget that old screw going. And, boy, what afeeling when I could hear that “hrrrmmm,hrrrmmm”; the great big prop, the screwsfinally moving. And the engine crew—Icould hear screaming down below—lettingout a great cheer, there was a great yell goingup on the ship, and everybody was relieved.Certainly I remember the captain and themates, you know, they had been really wor-ried. The crew wasn’t so worried because theywere just eating and playing cards and sleep-ing; they weren’t concerned. But the officers,who were really thinking about where theywere going and what they had to do, werevery tense. And I remember feeling that way.And we were moving; we were being slowlyfloated south, I guess, which meant in over aweek or two we’d be in the Antarctic and invery bad weather. There were no big storms.We were quite lucky at that particular point,with a quiet, oily kind of sea all the way over.

We ended up in Antofagasta, Chile, andthat was a strange place. It was a little vil-lage, really, with a couple of great, rusting ironbuildings. It was the copper port, where cop-per was brought down in ingots, slabs ofcopper.

We had an empty hold; that’s right. Idon’t think we unloaded anything. We hadto have something for ballast—it was water.Nevertheless, we loaded all three holds withcopper ore. It was beautiful, these slabs ofcopper. I brought some home, but I gave itaway. They looked as though you had drizzled

203LATIN AMERICA

copper, molten copper, on the ground, andthen let it cool, and then lifted it up; likelacy slabs, really. And the holds were just fullof this copper.

Well, do you mean it looked like Swiss cheese,or was it full . . . ?

Yes, it was full of holes and lacy. While Iwas in Antofagasta—this was my first timein South America—I went around thisstrange, little village, this town ofAntofagasta, full of these workers from themines bringing the stuff down from themountains. The second day we were there, acouple of shipmates and myself, we decidedto go up-country, and there was a path thatwent up to the mountains—I can rememberthe appearance of it—up to the mountainsto the ore, to the mines. And we went upthere, and there were sheep all over, and itwas very much like the trip I made to SanJosé, Guatemala—same kind of going up theside of the mountains. But all around therewere steam vents coming out of the oceans.Chile was an extremely volcanic and activearea for geysers. So as we came toAntofagasta, we saw all this long line of gey-sers all along the coast, hot steam coming up,and earthquakes like every fifteen minutesthe ground shook, but nobody paid any at-tention to it. So we went up, and we lookedin one mine—there were many mines fur-ther back in. Here were all these veryrepressed-looking peasants and workers—women and men and children—bringingthese buckets of slabs out from the foundries.First the ore had gone from the mines intofoundries and then came out. They carriedthe slabs in buckets on their heads or by theirsides and put them on a little railroad thatwent down to the docks. So we went up and

saw that, and drank around the little bars,these little, horrible open-shed bars.

What was the food like?

I don’t remember eating ashore there. Itwas a pretty depressed-looking place. Therewere some buildings. I guess it did have some-thing of a town, but as I remember, there wasnothing there, nothing to do. [laughter] ButI was fascinated by it. And we’d go along thebeach and look out along where these ventswere coming out, and every now and thennot only the ground would shake, but the seawould shake, you know. It would get glassyand start to shake like Jell-O. [laughter] Andnobody thought that was very important—something that happened every day, I guess.

Sounds kind of hellish, really. I mean the steamand the earth shaking . . . .

Oh, yes, it was Dante’s Inferno. We wentnorth along the coast and saw these steamvents, these geysers and steam vents, all alongthe coast. And there were reports of realearthquakes and of villages being destroyed,even while we were there. It seems that ap-parently it was an ongoing thing in thatregion.

We went north up toward Panama, andwent ashore there. It was my first real im-pression of very, very volatile black life.

Did you go through the canal?

Yes, yes. Right. That was quite an expe-rience for people who hadn’t been throughit. The Panama Canal is a remarkable thing.And Panama City was a small town at thattime. But two or three times I went ashoreand wandered through the big black ghetto.


It was an enormous ghetto of not onlyIndians in some places, but of black SouthAmericans. And I remember at night therewould be sounds of this wonderful music.What would it be like? It was a mixture ofAmerican jazz and blues. It was a heavy kindof wild, early, not jazz, so much as SouthAmerican . . . I guess it would be rumba, andsome of the other South American music thatI had never heard?

Kd: Black flamenco, yes.

Yes, lots of drums and these wonderfullywild voices. I remember going up one nighton a third or fourth floor of a large building,and the lights were on, and something wasgoing on up there. I went up this stairway,and these black couples, very well dressed,were coming down. I’d never seen this—kindof really dressed to the hilt in glorious attire,and beautiful women, you know.

You mean satins and . . . ?

Yes. Yes, the works, but elaborate and veryoverdone—party stuff. And we were goingup the stairs, three flights, and coming intothis room with all this dancing. I came froman area where you never saw . . . you know,really marvelous and wild rumba and all thosevarious movements that later were going tobe African dance and South Americandance. I wish I remembered the names ofthese kinds of musics and steps. But it was awild, orgiastic kind of scene—the crowds,the . . . .

Was it really mixed, or is this all basically black?

Well, it seemed to me all black; theremight have been Indians there. But it wasblack Indian, whatever the Panamanian aver-

age class is. And a big band playing. Mainlythe drums got me, the big, heavy, loud drums,and guitars and singing, and all this dancinggoing on. It was a wild and wonderful scene.And I came down out of there, and I thoughtI had seen Panama! [laughter] I rememberthis night particularly, when I was walkingback along the main street, there was a horsepulling a buggy, like those Russian droshkies,you know—an open cart where people lierather than sit. There was one man in it, andI remember he was very white, very thin,emaciated looking.

I’ll never forget that sight. A young guyin his twenties or thirties, with an open shirt,well dressed, but very casually, with his armsdangling out on each side of this thing, be-ing carried through the streets. He wasfanning himself. He either had malaria orsomething, but he was obviously from a verywell-to-do, rich family. And he was out tak-ing the air. And he looked sickly and awful.And I remember the contrast of coming outof this wonderful wild and wooly party goingon with this music, and then seeing this whitekid taking the air in his carriage.

Yes. So were you ignored or acknowledged,or . . . ?

I don’t recall that anybody paid any at-tention to me. After all, I was, you know, atwenty-one, twenty-two-year-old kid, and Iwas dressed very casually, and I was wander-ing around, and I’m sure . . . “Here’s anotherroustabout; here’s an American wanderingaround.” When I was upstairs at this big party,nobody paid any attention to me at all.

Yes. Did you dance or . . . ?

No, no, I was too intimidated by thesights. At that time I don’t think I’d ever

205LATIN AMERICA

danced anything, you know. [laughter] Maybea waltz. And I’d never seen anything like this,not until I got to Africa years later.

Well, did you leave just when you’d absorbedenough, or . . . ?

When I felt that I might be in the way orabout to be noticed . . . . [laughter] I wasnever aggressive about those things when Iwas younger. But I observed, I watched, andI listened, and I appreciated.

So I went back to the ship and wentthrough the canal. The canal was to me agreat experience, too. And most people to-day haven’t seen it or gone through it, but itis pretty impressive.

Then we went up through the Caribbean,which was really frightening because therewere sub reports every hour or two the wholetime we went up through, past Cuba, in par-

ticular. I remember we were getting reportsall the time of German subs infesting the area.Apparently dozens of ships had been sunk justeast of Cuba and even along the Atlanticcoast of the United States. So we were inconvoy—thirty or forty ships with a numberof destroyers. We saw a ship sunk. There wasa big explosion way out on the edge of theconvoy, and the destroyers were zippingaround. There was a ship on fire and smokepouring from it. It had been hit by a torpedo.We weren’t able to stop; we just moved on,and apparently that ship was left behind, anda destroyer was looking for the submarinearound it. We never heard, never learnedlater what had happened. But the ship washit, and it was out on the edge of the convoy.We felt very safe; we were in the middle.[laughter] Everything was all right; we’re inthe middle of the “school of fish.” And thenwe arrived in New York.

25SUBS AND OTHER TERRORS

OMETHING that I didn’t mentionthat I just sort of take for granted, wasin coming down to New Zealand and

they had sighted a sub or felt they had sighteda sub. And sometimes they’d be far off onthe edge of the convoy, and, as I say, whenwe got to New Zealand, we had partial con-voys from there on around Tasmania toMelbourne. And sometimes an air convoy . . .air patrols would follow us and search around.So that gave you a feeling of safety. But whenthese depth charges go off, if they’re anywherenear you, like, say, a quarter of a mile, thesound was one of the most ominous and pecu-liar sounds that I can remember.

You’d be lying in your bunk or at work,and you’d feel something like an earthquake.You’d feel not only the ship shake and every-thing rattle in it, all the bulkheads seem tobe straining; it was a kind of a pounding, deepmoaning, pounding sound. And if theydropped off a number of charges, this wouldlast for minutes, this peculiar sense of beingon a volcano. And sometimes very loud, be-cause it would reverberate through the ship.All the metal in the ship seemed to respondto it.

And then later on in the war in theCaribbean, as I remember, two ships at dif-

SAustralia, in the area that was so richly in-fested with Japanese submarines, that we wereunescorted most of the time. We’d, as I hadmentioned, come alone, which I’ve been toldwas fairly unusual, but it really wasn’t unusual.I can remember a lot of ships were going offby themselves when convoys could not beassembled in time. And there was some no-tion that was bandied about that sometimesyou were safer as a single ship than as a con-voy. Of course, in a convoy you were like aschool of fish—it would appear more likelythat one would be enough to appease thecarnivore, and the rest would go off free.[laughter] But, nevertheless, those differencesof opinion did exist.

But one thing I do remember, was the firsttime I ever heard depth charges when wewere near New Zealand. And this went onall through the period that I sailed during thewar, the sound of depth charges from destroy-ers in convoys. And when you heard that,you knew that they had sighted something;


ferent times were torpedoed, and, of course,they were left behind with a destroyer or two.Some of the convoy would search out the sub.But the sound of a torpedo hitting a ship,blowing up a ship, if the ship, particularly,was carrying fuel or carrying combustibles ofthat kind, was a terrible thing to hear. Youjust knew that it was a ship being hit. Therewas something about that sound and thatblast out there at sea, where things were, ex-cept for the sound of the ship, relatively quiet.And that happened a number of times. Sothat although I was in this kind of adven-ture, this youthful frame of mind, andeverything being kind of wonderful and ro-mantic, I had forgotten in talking about it,that a lot of the time we were in this state oftension, working or sitting in the mess roomsor lying in our bunks, wondering if at anymoment, you were to hear that. And if youwere convoyed, in particular where there hadbeen some worry about the sighting of a subor a distant plane on the horizon, thinkingthat any moment your ship may be the onethat blows; and that you would have verylittle warning, if any, and suddenly therewould be this enormous explosion and con-flagration, through which you might live, butyou’d end up in the drink. That was night-marish.

But it wasn’t all the time. There were longperiods of voyages, particularly on merchantships, where things were very quiet and wenton like some sort of a vacation, in a way. Wewere working hard, but there was routine andyou had the sense of being safe and far awayat sea. But the moment you had any indica-tion of problem, then all these fantasies—they were terrible ones—would take hold ofyou for days at a time, wondering, “Is it go-ing to happen?” And you got so that youlearned to put those things aside. You learnedto think of other things, and it didn’t bother

you even when there was something to worryabout.

Do you think there was a code among the crewin general, just as a way of coping, of not dis-cussing fears and apprehensions?

Oh, well, yes, but the code wasn’t thatkind. There was a code of, of course, cool-ness. Not only Americans, but any group ofmen working under dangerous or difficultconditions, don’t show their fear. The idea isyou appear nonchalant, and you may talkabout other things. On the other hand, youmay tell horror stories. And I can remem-ber . . . . [laughter] And that’s a kind ofcounterphobic activity, you know, whenthings are very, very dicey, and you’re undera pall of concern. Some members of the crewwere stimulated to sit around telling theseterrible stories that they knew of other shipsthat had sunk. Oh, like, the ship that cameinto San Francisco; it had been a troop ship,and it limped back; it had been hit by a sub,but it barely limped back to San Francisco.And in the hull were hundreds of dead sol-diers floating in the bottom of the hulls. Andstories like this were told; old stories by oldseamen about people dying at sea and beingput in casks of rum to preserve them. Andthen the sailors who didn’t know that therewere bodies in the casks would go out at nightand drink the rum and get drunk. I meanthese wonderful stories. And one story wasabout a seaman who, when he heard whathe’d been drinking, jumped over the side andwent into Davy Jones’s locker. [laughter]And, yes, this kind of thing would go on. Thecode was, “Show your nonchalance by talk-ing sometimes about the worst horrors youcan think of.” And there were a lot of racon-teurs. A lot of these guys that you shippedwith, even though it was early in the war,


had been through some rough times . . . .One had been to Murmansk already, in theAtlantic sea, where all the ships were beingsunk.

Now, Murmansk had a particular aura about itof real danger. I mean wasn’t that one ofthe . . . ?

Well, that was the famous MurmanskRun across into the north Atlantic, aroundoccupied Norway, Denmark, and Finland, etcetera, and all the way around, way up to nearthe Arctic Circle, to Murmansk. A terriblydifficult run, and merchant seamen . . . hun-dreds were killed on that run. And it waslegendary. So later on you’d hear about theMurmansk Run frequently. I was only on partof that; I never really did much sailing onthe Atlantic—a little. I would have gone onthat run, but you never knew where you go-ing. Most of the East Coast seamen were theones taking the Murmansk Run.

I had forgotten that. I was sort of dealingwith the romance of sailing and the wonder-ful adventure, being off on my first trip andall that. But there were long periods of timewhich were terribly strained and difficult andnew. But just like everybody else, you get usedto it, and except for some things—some cri-sis that occurs suddenly, and is veryfrightening, like seeing a sub or somethingof that kind—there wasn’t much fear. I hadit at times, and others had it, but didn’t showit. You went about your work, or you tried toappear as though it wasn’t important.

One thing I was interested in when you weretalking about being on watch and reporting thatyou’d seen something, you just made the com-ment that no one ever questioned somebody else’ssighting.

Not when it happened. Later they mightsay, “That son of a bitch was half asleep, andhe was dreaming,” or something like that.[laughter] I mean if nothing happened, youalways had these wonderful stories about thecharacters who had reported. Nevertheless,nobody ever took lightly any report, no mat-ter how crazy the guy who reported it wasthought to be, or whether he was consideredto be drunk, or whatever. You took it seri-ously; it could very well be. Oh, yes, I meanlots of times, at night, particularly, in south-ern seas, you could see streaks of light on thewater, and, of course, that’s one of the thingsthat tells you about a sub with its periscopeout, going through luminescent water. Therewould be a streak, almost like fire. Well, manytimes streaks like that were reported, but theywere either dolphins or whales or flying fish.Schools of flying fish can make a tremendousfire in the sea. But you reported them, be-cause you didn’t know, for sure.

That accommodation with a certain amount ofbackground tension all the time . . . did youdevelop more or less of that through the war asyou went, on these ships?

Of detachment? Not right away. I meanyou tend to see it in others, and there wereother new people aboard, too. If any of thembegan to show a kind of . . . oh, what wouldyou call it, uncontrollable fear or terror, ortalk too much about it, or panic, nobody saidanything to them. They just ignored themand looked away and made them feel embar-rassed by really isolating them or paying noattention to them.

See, you know, any group of men, and Isuppose with women, too, where theyworked, develop a kind of understanding ofthings that are projected through group beha-viors that way, small-group behaviors. Where


there’s a way of telling somebody somethingwithout saying a word.

Well, it’s part acculturation, too, isn’t it?

Yes, yes. It’s an acculturation. And youcan be very embarrassed by the looks on thefaces of your shipmates if you said somethingthat would seem to be silly or childish or fear-ful. However, you could express fear in allkinds of ways: you could express it by tellinghorror stories, which some of the old-timerswere great at. And some during our worsttimes, sitting in the mess room, the guys play-ing cards in these hot, dank mess rooms withall the port holes down, and the engine roomodors coming up from below, and all the stinkof the galley and the garbage that you couldn’tput out. Then you get word that somethinghad been sighted, and sometimes an auto-matic alarm would go off. And everybody hadto run to their fo’c’s’les, pick up their lifejackets and get ready for some kind of alert.Under those conditions, walking hurriedlybut nonchalantly was extremely important.You did not run through these narrow pas-sageways, you moved with a sense of duty anda goal, and with awareness of others aroundyou. You helped them if necessary, and allthose little things. But there would alwaysbe somebody who was an absolute nut andwould run freaking and yelling through thepassageway or going up to the officers deckand asking, “What’s happening? What’s hap-pening? What’s happening?” They would justbe ignored, but everybody knew, and theywere talked about later, but seldom to theirfaces. The idea was, “It’s a small world we’reon, and everybody has to sort of get along.”

That’s something over the years I havelearned, and it becomes part of your natureafter a while. You know what to do; you knowhow to handle yourself. Working under those

conditions, if you were on watch out on deck,you were really aware of the ocean aroundyou, and you were looking. But you didn’tsay much about it. You just went about yourjob. You did your job. And that style of be-havior was acceptable by everybody. You werenot supposed to be distracted by these thingsfrom doing your job, because your job wasfirst. That had to be done, and particularlyduring a storm.

I mean some of these storms . . . some-times we’d welcome storms, because we knewa sub couldn’t do much in them. But I re-member going through storms where if youwere in your bunk, you could be thrown out,because the ship would heave to to such adegree, and sometimes poise on the edge.And you just felt, “Is it going to go on, or is itgoing to come back?” [laughter] Because aship can capsize, particularly if they get oneof those very large fifty-, sixty-foot waves. Ifa second one hits after the first one has keeledyou over, and a second one comes—wham!—it can capsize a ship, particularly if that shipisn’t well balanced. So, I mean sometimes Ican remember being in my bunk and think-ing, “Uh-oh! There is one.” Everything insidethe bunkhouses and the galley and everythingcrashing, and, you know, it was like goingupside down. And then slowly that ship—you’d hold your breath—would start to comeback, and you’d roll the other way. And ifyou were out on deck during a storm like that,you had to go out. You weren’t sent out un-less it was absolutely necessary—somethingis breaking loose, and you had to secure somebarrels or whatever it was that might be loose.That was sometimes the most, not onlyfrightening, you just felt you were close todeath, because when that sea would comeover, you could be washed over so easily. Imean you’re just a little feather, and the sizeof those seas. So often you’d tie yourself. You’d


have a line to tie yourself to go out and dosomething. And I remember being sweptfrom one side of the deck to the other by bigseas. But then the largest ones coming overwould snap your line if you were out there.But I can remember joking about this . . . wefelt better when it was like that than if wewere in calm seas and somebody reportedthere was a sub in the vicinity, because atleast with the sea you had some kind of achance of living.

In fact, those old liberty ships, wereknown to split in half, because they weremade in such a hurry—although they weregreat ships; they actually saved the war in away, particularly during the lend-lease period.If it wasn’t for the liberty ships, we wouldn’thave had enough ships. They were put outin a hurry, but they were remarkably goodships and stable ships, excepting the rivetingand the joining of the sections, the bulk-heads, et cetera, would give way, usually aboutmid ships. And some liberty ships wereknown to break in half—just two halves![laughter] So when we’d hear a particularlyloud crunching sound or grinding sound orthis kind of rending sound that metal makeswhen it’s tearing, everybody would say, “Uh-oh, there it goes,” and we’d have to go arounddown to the hulls if we could get to themand see whether there was any break.

I remember being on a ship that had leaksfrom that sort of thing and splits, but I neverwas on one that was seriously cracked. Butthere were fellow seamen and crews oftenwho had been on some ships where they ac-tually cracked and water came pouring in.So all those things are on your mind whenyou’re out there at sea. It wasn’t just a glori-ous trip, as I may have given the impressionearlier, because that was going on, too.

Everything was glorious to me in thoseyears. I was, you know, twenty-one, twenty-

two, and the world was just a magnificentlyfascinating place, and everything was new,and everybody I met—even the screwiest,wildest member of the crew, the most farout—was to me a fascinating individual.They all were wonderful, and I had my note-books—full of conversations with the variousguys, and the language, the terms, the won-derful colloquialisms that were so new to meand to me so marvelously expressive. I’venotebooks loaded with those things! Becausethat’s where my head was. I thought I wasbeing a writer, and I was pulling my materialtogether, and at the same time I was, by vir-tue of being what I was at the time, fascinatedby everything.

That fascination and sense of adventurecarried me through all that with these otherthings being there as a kind of . . . I guessthe drums and the bass fiddle underneath.They would come forward every now andthen in experience—I mean frightening, dis-turbing and terrible moments—and theywere frequent. But one tends, looking backat it, to gloss over those things and see onlythe part that was glorious. And so, in think-ing about this, it keeps coming back to methat it wasn’t all glorious.

There were some terrible and ugly timeslater on, some very ugly times, in places likeOkinawa and Bikini, and the Ellice Islands.During the war not only did we hear horriblethings that were happening in the war, wesaw the results of it—the troop ships that Iwas on, bringing back wounded soldiers anddead soldiers; and taking them on, then hear-ing about what had happened to them afterwe left them off. So, you know, there werethese terrible things, but at the same time, Ithink when you’re young, you tend to see itall as a great drama. And I tended to dothat—something that’s a fault, I guess; at the


same time I think it got me through a lot.[laughter] I felt so lucky to be a part of it.

Did you have a sense that you were collectingmaterial for a future creation that you were go-ing to write?

I think all through my early life I thoughtthat I was experiencing something that Iwanted to do something with later.

You were going to interpret it later, or . . . ?

I was going to write novels. Early in life,I guess from the time I was fourteen, fifteenyears old, even earlier, I had a sense of beingan alert observer. I kept a rather disorderlyjournal, little notebooks, with ideas in themfor things that I was going to write about, orpoems that I was going to write or did write.Now, that’s the kind of a role one gives one-self ideally, that one is the observer of theworld, all that. But for me, I felt I had such agreat, empty void in me to be filled with expe-rience. [laughter] I mean that my job in lifeat the time was to experience and do, and totry to understand and interpret what I saw,mainly about people. I wanted to know aboutvarious kinds of people and why they behavedthe way they did. I wanted also to know themand to interreact with them and even to beaccepted in other groups and people, differ-ent from the ones that I had grown up among.This business of getting away, of distancing—finding another group, finding another world,learning to live in another world among otherpeople—that was a very exciting kind ofthing to me. That was a sense of achieve-ment or real accomplishment, because I feltthat I was getting along in a really different,strange group of people. And going to sea wasreally that! [laughter]

But among the officers, among the people thatyou no longer wanted to be a member of, do youget the sense that maybe it’s because they weren’tstrange and wonderful enough?

No. They were also new and interestingto me. I guess it was a status thing. I didn’twant to be in the position of command orauthority, particularly if I felt I hadn’t expe-rience enough or know enough. I had thisawful feeling sometimes while I was a cadeton ships, “Who am I to be out there makingeven a slightly better wage than these guysdown there?” They’re doing all the work; theyhave the knowledge, and some of the newofficers didn’t know.

Nevertheless, my feeling about that wasjust a matter, I imagine, of class. I thoughtthe officers were in a different world from theone that I wanted to be in on ship. I didn’tdislike the officers, though I did have prob-lems with authority, as will come out later. Idid have problems with what I considered tobe the unearned authority of ship’s compa-nies. These are litmus papers—the feelingabout the ship owners. One old-timer usedto talk about the goddamned ship owners.One old-timer used to talk about thegoddamned ship owners and somebody be-ing a company stiff, somebody who’s alwayspraising the company or overworking, doingmore of the job than had to be done, tryingto impress the company. I dug that. [laugh-ter] And in a way, most of the officers werecompany men in that sense. They had to be.That’s what they were; they were paid by andhired by the company to do a particular job.And there were very few of them that I likedpersonally, although I was very interested inthem. I tried to get along. I wanted to be partof that too. But my real interest, during myfirst trip was gravitating toward this motley


crew—all these fascinating, different charac-ters down there. The fact that they couldwork so easily and so efficiently in as com-plicated a situation as a ship during thewar . . . the engine crew, steward’s crew, thedeck crew. Somehow just the romance of thework situation, had a great appeal.

The officers were connected with author-ity, were connected with the institutions thatalso, in my growing radical political frame, Isaw as being the causes of war. Governmentscaused war; people in authority and bureau-cracies mindlessly created wars for their owninterests. And all of those things that laterbecame jelled into a political view, were sortof pre-political, proto-political views that Ihad that were feelings of class differences.And so I was very easily influenced by thenotion of “us against the ship owners.” [laugh-ter] And later on during the strikes that wasa very important basic view I had.

Now, you didn’t go to Hawaii on this first trip?

Oh, I forgot while I was in Australia . . . .I’ll just throw this in, because it was kind oficonistic and romantic. I found in a littlepawn shop in Sydney, a little dusty place.Looking into one of the cabinets, I saw thisbeautiful, large, black opal, and it was in afunny pin setting, a silver pin setting. And itwas just beautiful, a terribly beautiful thing.I wanted to bring something back like that

with me. I gave it to Kathy, but I’m not surethat I had her in mind when I first got it, butmaybe I did. I have the idea that I was goingto give it to somebody. Anyway, working ona ship, I had about seventeen dollars, and thatwas a lot of money in those days, and thatwas a good part of the payoff. And the guywanted twenty, and I got him down to fif-teen. [laughter] For fifteen dollars I boughtthis magnificent black opal, and now it’s oneof Kathy’s prized possessions. I had it resetlater; it’s very beautiful. So that’s one thing Irecall. I brought that back with me.

And then in New York, coming throughNew York, while I was there getting ready tocome west, there was an auction of theWilliam Randolph Hearst collection in NewYork. It was in a great big, sort of ramblingauditorium, kind of a dingy auditorium,where thousands of things that came out ofwhatever collections, whatever warehousesthat Hearst had, were laid out on tables. Andthey were being sold off; sort of, I guess, theminor things of their collection. And I didn’thave any money, you know, what could I buy?And I remember I came across this beautiful,little, silk painting, a Chinese silk painting,with a plain, dark, wooden, beautifullymolded frame. And I got it for seven dollars.[laughter] These are the little things that oneremembers at the side. I brought that backand gave it to my mother, I guess. And nowwe have it—one of our possessions.

26AFTER THE CADET CORPS

HEN THE BRET HARTE got toNew York, I went ashore. By thattime I had made very close

thought I could be picked up and either putin the army or fined or jailed or whatever.

Well, what was the plan?

My plan was to go to sea—the right way.

The right way.

So I went across country on the bus, andI really don’t recall this very clearly; I justwent. It took three, four days in those daysto . . . .

Sort of just sleeping and eating day and night?

Yes, sitting all the time. It’s funny I don’thave a very clear memory of that; I don’t re-member doing anything in New York. I thinkI just got out of there. And went back. Firstthing I did when I got back after seeing myfamily briefly, because I don’t know if I sawthem first, and did I see you? [to Kathleend’Azevedo] This is 1942. Although I knewyou, I don’t think we . . .

Wfriends among the members of the crew, andI made up mind what I was going to do. Iwent ashore, and I went up to the merchantmarine training office and told them I wasresigning and handed in all my papers. Theytook it very casually, this wasn’t unusual atall. They had me give back certain documentsI had. And they handed me a document say-ing, “Report immediately to your draft board,”which I was ready to expect. [laughter] Now,what did I do? I think I didn’t have muchmoney. I had just enough to take a bus back.That was the first time I came across countryalone by bus.

And this is your first time in New York, too,right?

Probably. You know, I don’t think I’d everbeen to New York. And I didn’t have muchtime there. I don’t remember that I did muchthere. I was really overwhelmed by the factthat I was now out of this service, and I


Kd: Well, we knew each other, but Idon’t remember . . . .

I was in a frenzy of getting placed again.And I went to the SUP Hall and went backto that little school and got my union ticketin the Sailors Union of the Pacific and gotready to ship out. Within a week or two Iwas shipping out. I don’t think that I gavethe dates of that first trip that I went as acadet on the Bret Harte. See, we left SanFrancisco, on June 12, 1942, and I didn’t getback to New York until November tenth. Soabout a week later I was back in Berkeley,having gone across country and resigned fromthe Cadet Corps. But, there are a couple ofthings that I didn’t mention that were signi-ficant to me.

When I got to Sydney in Australia onthe first part of that trip, I had very little mail.I got some mail from my mother, I think, andmy brother and one or two of my friends. Butthere was a tube, a long tube, and it was fromBerkeley. And I opened it up, and there wasmy B.A. degree! [laughter] My diploma! Avery ornate one that I unraveled, and muchto the glee of my shipmates, showed it around.And they thought it was extremely funny. Butthen the funniest part of it, the most amus-ing part to me was I had only gone two orthree weeks of that semester at Cal. I had notcompleted my final semester for graduation.And I had pretty well given up the idea thatI had a B.A. from the University ofCalifornia. And so here it was—B.A. inEnglish and Anthropology from Universityof California. Totally unexpected and a giftfrom the gods on high. And I gathered fromlater conversations, when I talked to peopleat Cal, that they had done this for a numberof people. This was doing something for theboys during the war, who had either enlistedor been recruited right after Pearl Harbor.

And there was such an uproar, and everythingwas so awry, not only on campus, but, ofcourse, everywhere on the West Coast, thatI suppose the decision of the deans and thepresident of the university was “to give themtheir degree.” So I got my degree by default,and I’ve always been very proud of that andhappy of the fact that I got it under thoseconditions.

OK, so I got back to Berkeley. And it wasa very excruciating kind of experience to getback to my digs in the Bay Area, with all thepeople that were still there that I knew. Infact, most of my closer friends were either inthe army, the navy, or the air force. And therewere piles of letters waiting for me from them,telling what they were doing. And I learnedthat Kyoshi, my Japanese acquaintance fromFresno, was now in the army. He had finallybeen inducted after being through these hold-ing camps for COs [conscientious objectors].But he managed to get into some sort of non-combatant work.

My friend, Pershing Olsen, who wasprobably one of the skinniest and most un-likely looking privates in the army one couldever imagine had been inducted; though hedid have reasons for being given a 4-F status,health reasons, but they inducted him any-way, and took him somewhere to Texas insome camp, I learned. And I have a letterfrom him, which I still have, which is abso-lutely marvelous; he was a very witty guy,talking about the fact, “If they want me, theycan have me, but what are they getting?”[laughter] He was terribly witty! Yes, he wasabout five-foot-seven or eight, and heweighed about 110 pounds. And he had ahead like the bust of Cicero, you know. Astrange, marvelously intellectual skull andface; really a very unlikely looking private.And he said that they put him through anumber of tests, and they put him in the tank


destroyer corps. [laughter] He said after threehours in it, he was told to step aside and wassent to a psychiatrist! [laughter] He said, “Idon’t know what my physical prowess has todo with my mind, but they think so.” And Iheard over time they finally decided that heprobably was not good material for the army.And later—this is after I got to Berkeley—Ithink he went back to Fresno State. At leasthe got his 4-F standing. And he was willingto do it, but he said, “If they can use me, theycan have me, but they don’t want me,so . . . .” [laughter] And my friend, Pierce,was in the air force. My brother, Donald, be-came a navigator, a bombardier navigator inthe air force.

All this had happened within a year. Youjust had the feeling that the world was turn-ing upside down, the world you knew. Thegroup from Lyon’s class, most of them that Iknew, had either volunteered or been in-ducted. And we were all writing letters toeach other. So all these letters were therefrom them with all this “new world,” the newmilitary world. There were still these terriblestories of ships being sunk right outside ofGolden Gate and all along the coast, andparticularly up in the Aleutians. TheJapanese had finally gotten that far after tak-ing the Philippines, and they were movingup. I think they controlled most of theAleutians until later in the war. When I wentto the Aleutians, we had most of it, exceptthe farthest Aleutian island which they werestill on. The name escapes me, but it was thelast of the Aleutian chain. And I think theyhad been driven back to that. It was a verylively area along the Pacific coast.

All that was going on—the worries aboutthe war, and the fact that I was back now,having resigned from the Merchant MarineCadets, and was now moving into anothervenue and a different domain. And I had this

feeling of being lost, not knowing what I wasdoing, really, whether I was doing the rightthing. And some people telling me, particu-larly my family, I should have stayed inbecause I was safer there, that lord knowswhere they will put you now. And I was 1-A,a draft classification that meant I had to getback to sea pretty quick, establish myself as amerchant seaman, but I wasn’t sure if thatreally would prevent me from being inducted.

Oh, I see. So you didn’t know.

No, you don’t know for sure, because theycould always say that having left this onething to another . . . . I was getting encour-aging things from the union, and when I wasback east, the cadet corps officer had said,you know, “Get a ship as soon as you can.Everything will be all right as long as you’resailing, as you’re at sea, and you are helpingthe war effort; nobody’s going to bother youat all.” But, nevertheless, I was in that limbo.Not only pressures, but the seductive pull ofwhat I had been doing before, and thestudents that I knew at Cal, like thePhillipsborns. They were still there, Ellen andRenata, whom I had known very well, alsoKathy was there now.

Before I had gone into the cadet corps,Kathy and I had known each other, and Ithink we had dated a few times. But then thistime I saw more of her, and we began to befairly thick. I remember thinking of her asprobably one of the more intelligent and bear-able women that I knew. [laughter] And shewas extremely beautiful. I was impressed bythe fact that she was a professional dancerand that she had been in two or three differ-ent ballet troupes. And I saw pictures of herin which I remember the image came to mymind—Dorothy Lamour in a sarong. [laugh-ter] She was much lovelier than that. She


was terrific and a terribly sharp woman—stillis, I think. And she and I had a lot in com-mon because her family lived in Alameda;born in Oakland, I had grown up part-timein Alameda. And also we had a similar sortof feeling, I imagine that’s very typical of lateadolescence, of having to separate ourselvesfrom our families. Not that we disliked orhated them, but we just had to get out, getaway. And she had this feeling of wanting toget away.

By the way, when I got back from thistrip and I was in Berkeley, she was workingin a shipyard. This is the Rosie the Riveterperiod. So she had a job in shipyards, andsometimes she was doing something withsocial security benefits or something like that.And then also she wanted to go to school,and so at one period she was staying withEllen Phillipsborn and Doris Woodhouse andstarting Cal, taking some courses. That didn’tlast long because it was a terribly disruptiveperiod.

So many things were happening, and somuch was going on, and she needed themoney, and the shipyard offered that. I justthought she was one of the most beautifulwomen working in a shipyard; highly glam-orous. And there were a lot glamorous thingslike that because they were new and won-derful. Later on, I learned an old girlfriend ofmine, Esther Dinkin, had been the firstwoman to apply to go to sea as a merchantseaman. And it created an enormous stir. Thatwas later; that was in 1945, 1946. But, any-way, I had great admiration for women whodid things like this. Kathy was a great dancerand did all sorts of things.

We saw a lot of each other, and I saw alot of my friends that were still around or onleave. My friend, George Leite, had takensome merchant ships before the war, makingme very jealous. Then he had gone up and

down the coast in a fishing boat and donesome fishing in Boston, and I had a tremen-dous sense of the wonderful luck he had indoing these things, and the feeling of envy,deep envy, because he and I were very com-petitive—very close, but very competitive.Somehow or other he had not been inducted.I think he had some kind of disability. I don’tremember what it was. He had some prob-lem. And he had started the bookstore inBerkeley on Telegraph Avenue; it was calledDaliel’s. Earlier he had worked for Creed’s—that was a famous, old bookstore there, nowgone. And George had worked there, whilehe and I were going to school together. Thenlater he got to know a lot of the poets andwriters and artists in the area; he started theDaliel bookstore, which became well knownas the avant-garde bookstore on TelegraphAvenue. He was very good at that and did afabulous job of bringing in new materials ofvery special kind.

And so when I saw him, he was thinkingof starting a magazine himself, in competi-tion with this little thing that we haddone—Doris Woodhouse and I—and he hadhelped with on campus, New Rejections. Andso George was talking about this new ven-ture. He even had a name for it already; Ithink he called it Circle. Later on it becamea major small mag in the country for a periodof years.

Anyway, that was sort of gestating. AndDoris, who had been working on the nextissue of New Rejections which was to comeout in 1942 (1941 had been number one,while I had been away) had written me, tell-ing me, you know, “Get your tail out hereand help me get this thing going. I can’t getin enough contributions.” And so when I gotback, I ran around seeing various people thatI knew and writers that I knew. One of themwas James Yamada. I don’t know what hap-


pened to him. But he wrote a wonderful storyfor that particular issue we were working on.

I notice the covers are all the same.

That was our emblem. A young guynamed Alec Hugh Thornton volunteeredthis. He just turned that out as a woodcut, sowe used it throughout. You know, pearls be-fore swine kind of thing. [laughter] Wethought we were extremely clever. And sothere was James Yamada, a young Japaneseguy who wrote two or three excellent stories;we had people like Evy Blum, an old girl-friend, who was connected with the Blumcandy people in San Francisco—a very sharpyoung writer; Frances Slater, the poetess, shebecame fairly well known for a while; GeorgeEliot, who also wrote quite a bit of poetry atthe time, and was sort of thought of as theyoung and up-and-coming poet; then DeanJeffers . . . . Oh, who were some of the oth-ers? Jordan Brotman—I don’t think he everwent on to do much, but he was very able.Claude Capel; Lloyd Saxton; George Leitewrote some poetry and pieces for the thing. Iwrote some stories; oh, and Robert Barlow.

Robert Barlow, was an amazing poet; infact, he was something of a force in the artworld in the Bay Area. Not terribly wellknown outside, but he was a glorious kind ofa poet. Strange guy. We knew him very well.In fact, he knew Paul Radin very well. Andwhen Radin would hold his soirees, for agroup of people, Barlow was usually there. ButBarlow killed himself, oh, I don’t know, threeor four years later. Very unhappy guy. He haddone a lot of work in Mexico; he even haddone work on transcribing Aztec and thingsof that kind, and his poetry reflected thisMexican and South American experience. Ihave noticed recently some of the smallmagazines in the Bay Area, and poetry groups,

mention him. He’s something of a heroic fig-ure of the past, pre-Beat. This was during thedays of the Bohemian movement.

Do you think the war added any energy to thatcreative scene there in Berkeley, that literaryscene?

I’m not sure it added energy, so much ascreated a whole new kind of energy. Therewas a lot of, oh, what would it be, confusion,about what was important. You know, “Whatare we doing? Is this worthwhile? What kindof crap is this we’re messing around with?”Art and poetry, literature, you know, right inthe middle of the war. And there was a lot ofthat kind of feeling going on.

Was it explicit in some of the stories and litera-ture?

Yes, I think one of my stories in one ofthese issues deals with the kind of defeatistposition of the intellectual and the artist.Who in the hell do they think they are? Andyet I couldn’t help myself—I was doing it.

And there are people like RobertDuncan, who became a very well-knownpoet, a western poet. Kenneth Rexroth inSan Francisco, whom I didn’t know myselfpersonally, but saw him, and we knew hiswork. He was pre-Beat, very, very hard-hit-ting, crusty kind of poet.

Do you define the Beat generation as after WorldWar II?

The 1950s. Yes, I would say when thegroup that came from the East . . . it was theeasterners taking over the West: Ginsburgand Keasey, and a whole slough of people,and City Lights bookstore, and all that—the


Broadway/San Francisco phenomena. Thatwas in the 1950s. This is before, pre-Beat.

Like Josephine Miles, whom I knew fairlywell at the time, would have groups of us over,and we would talk poetry and writing; andBenjamin Lehman, who was chairman, Iguess, of the English Department. He in someway was spurring people on, he had been aprofessor of Earl Lyon’s.

And, then Paul Radin—I’d almost for-gotten him. That’s where I first got to knowhim. Coming back, I had taken courses andsat in on lectures of his as an outside exten-sion student most of the time. [laughter] AndRadin was something of a character. I couldsee why Kroeber and Lowie were askance athim a good part of the time, because he wasa real Bohemian, and yet a very simple,straightforward, little guy—kind of rotundand very witty. And his wife, who was thisvery large, impassive woman—we neverreally knew her, we used to call her the“Magic Mountain.” [laughter] And he wouldmeet groups of young people, artists. He knewpeople like Varga, and, oh, I forget some ofthe others, and even Miles and Barlow. He’dhave a lot of us over, and some anthropologystudents, as I remember.

Later on, when I saw Radin after the war,after I’d left going to sea, I saw him a coupleof times doing the same sort of thing. He usedto have these parties where he was one ofthe first people to use finger painting—othershad been doing it, but it was not well known.Most people didn’t know about finger paint-ing. He’d have these parties where he’d havefinger paints and big sheets of newspaper.And everybody would have to do fingerpainting. Drink and finger paint. And theneverybody would have to pin theirs up on thewall and talk about it. [laughter] And hethought it was wonderful. He said it was kindof a Rorschach test [or ink blot test—the best

known projective test in psychology] whereeverybody had to see the work. Well, all thatwas kind of new at the time.

Of course, I took some of Radin’s writingto sea with me, and Kroeber’s wonderfullystrange rambling introductory text on anthro-pology, and even Lowie’s, Primitive Society.God, nobody reads that anymore. It was won-derful. But three or four things of Radin’s,the work he’d done with the Winnebago,Crashing Thunder. I also had some of his field-work notes somehow or other.

Oh, really?

He was very free with these things. Hewould give these things out, you know. Andso all that was going on in the few weeks thatI came back to Berkeley. It was just a pot-pourri, a great stew, a lot of my own making.I had created the conditions by which I cameback and found myself. So I was torn in manydifferent directions about what I was goingto do. I think I thought again about declar-ing CO and refusing to do anything, go backto sea or anything, but staying and doing this,you know; that I was going to stay home andhide out and go to the mountains and writeand all that sort of thing. That was just fan-tasy, though, because I still wanted to go backto sea. I wanted to become a regular seaman.

Did you find that this group you were reintegrat-ing with in Berkeley was a . . . I mean couldyou tell them your sea stories? Could you relateyour experiences to them in any kind of waymeaningful to yourself, or was it an alternatereality?

Well, yes, we were all a very loquaciousbunch of people. And, of course, I had a lotto say. I was loaded with stories! I was loadedwith impressions. And certain of them


became key mantras for me, I would tell themover and over and over again.

Kind of defining moments and . . . ?

Yes. Yes, self-defining kind of stories,things that I had seen. Oh, yes, and every-body had some stories, except those whohadn’t gone anywhere, they just hung on ourwords and slathered and all that. [laughter]Or looked askance and critical about whatwe were doing. Some, you know, anti-warpeople, “What are you people doing? Justdon’t go.” And on the other hand, mostpeople, though, found what you were doingvery exciting; and you knew others doingexciting things, so it was a highly efferves-cent kind of time. And yet at that particulartime I was very lost. I wasn’t sure what I re-ally wanted to do, and I was getting a littlescared about my future. When the war wasover, what was I going to do? And some ofthis came from my parents and my brother,you know, who’s a very fine guy. He wroteme some of the most wonderful letters dur-ing the war—very funny letters—that hewould not now admit that he had written. Imean the wild times that he had or braggedabout or invented or whatever . . . ! [laugh-ter] But also he kept prodding me that Ishould do something that would get me some-where when the war was over. What was Igoing to do? And that worried me, and I thinkit worries everybody at that age, you know.Somebody looking you in the eye and say-ing, “What are you going to do with yourlife?” [laughter] And you haven’t the slight-est idea what you really can do with your life.You don’t know what you want. And so allthat yeasting was going on. But we, Doris andI, managed to put the second edition of NewRejections together, and there were a lot ofpeople around who were sort of part of this

operation. And we got it out, but I guess Dorishad to distribute it later after I left.

It was in many ways overwhelming.Everything was happening at once, it seemedto us, to me. It was a terribly stimulating, andterribly distracting kind of environment,coming back to where we’d been. And thewhole world was distracting and excited atthe time.

My friend, Pershing, as I had forgotten,actually had come back from his experiencetrying to be in the tank destroyer corps orwhatever and was working for the SonoraDaily. So he got some newspaper work beforehe went back to Fresno State. And a numberof old girlfriends . . . I had letters fromVirginia Hess and other wonderfully intelli-gent women at the time. I always wonderedwhat happened to some of them. One of themmarried me. [laughter]

That was the beginning actually, not ofthe women’s movement, but of a very sharp,aggressive, intellectualization among certainyoung women, as a new breed. They had beenthere at the turn of the century, in the 1920sand 1930s, but the war brought this out—agreat deal of independence.

Doris Woodhouse was one. She was amarvelous woman, terribly able and bright,and she was determined to do everything thatwas not the right thing to do for youngwomen: she swore, and she sometimessmoked a cigar, and she did this, and she didthat. But she was also a very wonderful, richkind of a person, who did a wonderful job, infact, of putting our magazine together.

And Frances Clark, whom I had knownwhen I was in junior college in Modesto andkept in touch with later; and Pershing keptin touch with her. Another very bright, mar-velously sarcastic and ironic woman. I alwayswondered if she lived past thirty; she musthave been a magnificent older woman, if she


ever managed to get past thirty. She waspretty wild and wooly.

And Ruthie Haugen whom I’d knownwhen I was in Camp Tallawanda. She and Ikept a correspondence, and her parents hada place up at Lake Tahoe. And Bobbie JeanMiller, whom Kathy knew very well andstayed with in Modesto. And thePhillipsborns, whom I continued to see. Theywere very important to me in many ways.

Where were you living? Where did you stay?

I lived around with different people, andI think I stayed in my old digs up on RidgeRoad where I had stayed as a student.

OK. So you still had that?

Well, different people that I hadknown—Pershing at one point, PhilHoffman, and a couple other people had livedthere. So the old landlady, when I came up,you know, always found me a way to have abed or something. And that was one place Istayed. Different people; I stayed with friends.

Later that year when I came back, I stayedwith the Millers where Kathy was staying,and then she and I got to know each othervery, very well at that point. And that wasreally the beginning of a relationship, really.Before that we just knew each other anddated occasionally. But that was pretty heavy.That was a little later.

Then, of course, now I had to do some-thing about going to sea. At the same time,while all of this was going on, I was living fora while being the Bohemian. I say Bohemiannow, not in the antique sense, but in the senseof the avant-garde Bohemian set. I don’tknow if we had any other name for what wasgoing on in the writing and art world of theBay Area at that time. It was very lively. But

they weren’t Beats—you know, the Beat gen-eration was later. But I use Bohemian in thatsense; I mean something of an avant-gardegroup.

Well, analogous to the West Bank in Parisand . . . ?

Well, in a way, but not that grand. But,yes, I guess they considered themselves like,you know, Greenwich Village.

Taos?

Taos? Oh, yes, excepting those places hada rather grander image. I mean the Berkeleyand San Francisco scene was not quite as fullydeveloped as all that. But these people therewere very talented, doing a lot of work.

Well, it was more youthful and untested or what-ever, but . . . .

Yes, well, not any more youthful; therejust wasn’t that much going on. It was theWest Coast, and there were some very goodpeople there and good work coming out ofit, but it hadn’t really . . . it wasn’t really a“scene,” in that sense, yet.

Did you have a feeling, when you were there,that you were part of something new that wasdeveloping, or had Berkeley already acquired anaura of being conducive to the new and avant-garde?

Well, Berkeley had always been that, onthe West Coast and particularly for a lot ofthe rural characters like me, coming becauseit was twelve dollars a semester at the time ifyou were from California. [laughter] I meanyou were coming to the metropolis and tothe center of learning and of knowledge and


of excitement. And everything was happen-ing. And to have that as a university, itwas . . . . Berkeley, as a wonderful universitytown in those days, had that image. But itwas also connected with San Francisco andthe work that was going on there. So the BayArea had a certain panache in that sense. ButI don’t have enough objectivity at this point,looking back, to know to what degree thatwas a special phenomenon.

Well, were there other people who had startedliterary magazines like you did or . . . ?

I don’t recall whether early Ferlinghettiand others were putting out magazines. Cer-tainly things were being published anddistributed in presses. But, you know, I don’tknow if there had been previous Bay Areamagazines. There must have been, but I don’tknow.

And people like Josephine Miles, and,well, Duncan was too young then, but shewas a noted West Coast poetess, poet—usedto say “poetess.” Isn’t that interesting? Thereare no “poetesses” and “actresses” anymore![laughter] They’re poets and actors, and that’sgood. But, no, I don’t recall.

So when George had this idea of startinga magazine with a number of others, it wasreally one of the first magazines that I knowof out of central California or northernCalifornia, anyway, that began to have anational, international standing as a smallmagazine. Do you know of any other literarymagazines in the Bay Area then?

Kd: No, that was one of the earlier . . . .

Well, I really don’t know. I don’t knowwhether the Bay Area was considered to havea degree of standing as an “art scene” at thattime, like you know, Taos, sort of like Green-

wich Village, or the West Bank. The peoplewho were there felt that way, but that doesn’tmean that they . . . .

Well, it’d be interesting to know if it was consid-ered a mecca for young, aspiring, creative peoplethat wanted to go someplace where there was thissort of ferment. You make it sound very exciting.

It was. It was full by people who hadaspirations.

Kd: Well, quite well-known people cameout of it, like Phillip Rexroth and Eversonand . . . .

Oh, Everson! Right. I knew him verywell. He later became Father Antonias.

Kd: Yes, but I mean he was quite a well-known poet.

In fact, I think we have some of his poemsin the early magazines.

Kd: We did. I remember that.

Yes. There were a lot of people there. Wewere talking about whether or not it was con-sidered to be a special scene that . . . .

Kd: Well, obviously it was, because it didproduce a number of people.

But like the Beat generation period in the1950s.

Kd: Yes, it was before that.

Yes. It didn’t have that kind of . . .

Kd: Didn’t have the national focus andpublicity.


That focus, the focus of being a center,with all of the publicity and excitement ofthe Beat generation. It was pre-that. Therewas a lot of stuff going on, but it hadn’t con-gealed, I don’t think. A lot of thingsdeveloped later. I think with Circle, GeorgeLeite brought some kind of early pre-Beatfocus to the Bay Area—that’s true for writ-ing, anyway. But in 1942, this was not even aglimmer yet in our eyes.

There were artists like Giacomo Patri,whose work we got in New Rejections—a verywell-known artist around there at that time.Varga on the coast . . . . Oh, and Henry

Miller had now begun to make his mark. Iread everything that he had written. I wasvery impressed by Miller’s work and, of courseJoyce’s work. I have mentioned RobinsonJeffers and Aldous Huxley. Those are the sortof works that I was all involved with at thetime, plus many others.

Now, anthropology—you asked what Itook to sea: Kroeber’s textbook, some worksof Lowie, Radin, and Herskovits. Herskovits’sMyth of the Negro Past had just come out, andI was very taken by that, and it had a greateffect on me later on.

27BACK TO SEA

HILE ALL THIS mishmash wasgoing on in 1941 and 1942 I hadhad these three or four or five

Well, I don’t know if he went throughthe SUP. He may have gone non-union; Ihave no idea. He was shipping out on somegod-awful old freighters. He may have justshipped on anything available, through anycrimp on the water front. I don’t know.

But the SUP would have been the onethat everybody knew about. The crew on theship I was on [Bret Harte] was Sailors Unionof the Pacific. And I had heard a lot fromthe old-timers about the early struggles notonly of their union, but of Andrew Furuseth,the old leader of the SIU, and then later ofthe Sailors Union; he became really thefounder of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. Iheard about his struggles with the ship own-ers and his impact upon Congress andlegislation. He was a very old Norwegianguy—came over as a kid, as an immigrant,and became a major American labor leader—quite a remarkable figure. Later on, I becameaware of his conservative right-wing views,not only about politics but his anti-commu-nist position. He was not very strong onintegration. Nevertheless, he was a great

Wthickly larded weeks of confusion, and I wastorn in different directions. I had to get backto sea or do something else. So I began spend-ing time at the SUP hall, the Sailors Unionof the Pacific, in San Francisco. I’ve askedmyself since why I didn’t check in at theNational Maritime Union at the time, whichI later, for reasons we’ll talk about, became amember of. But I think it’s because the SailorsUnion was the best known at the time. It’sthe one that, when I was seventeen or eigh-teen, I had gone to, to try to ship out.

The National Maritime Union really wasa very young union. It started in the East in1937 or 1938. And I’m not even sure whatkind of a hall they had in the early 1940s.They were there, but I just don’t rememberbeing aware of them. All I know is that theSailors Union had been the one that peoplethat I knew sailed, had gone out from.

Including George Leite, right?


labor leader. And unfortunately the mantleof Furuseth was passed on to HarryLundeberg, who was probably, in my view,one of the more corrupt influences on thelabor movement on the West Coast. But hewas proclaimed as the heir to Andy Furuseth,which is a lie. But I have my own beef withHarry Lundeberg on a different matter.[laughter]

So, anyway, I got my union card and mynumber. It was a very early number becausethere weren’t many members.

So it wasn’t hard to do, I mean, once you wentin the hall?

No, it wasn’t hard to get into the unionbecause they wanted to grow. Well, it wasn’tthat easy. I had already been to sea; thathelped. I mean you had to go to sea as anordinary seaman or something to get a cardor be tried out or whatever. I forget . . . youhad to go to the “school” for a length oftime—wasn’t a school—it was kind of a get-together with old-timers showing you howto splice a line and telling you what to do ondeck, which was very useful. But I’d alreadydone that, so I just went perfunctorily. But Igot my card, and I knew I had to go. Aroundthe turn of the year, the period that I beganto know Kathy very well, I began to go to ahall. You have to go and wait for your num-ber to be called. You are in a line. That’s theunion hall dispatcher’s job really to line uppeople in terms of when they applied to cometo take a ship. And you have to be there whenthe ship is called and your number is called,or you miss out.

And go to the bottom of the line again?

You go to the bottom of the list, unlessyou have some very good excuse, or you left

a note in advance that you can’t be there. SoI began to go to the hall, and my number gotcloser and closer and closer. And finally, Iguess it was early January . . . .

What were you classified as, or would you havebeen classified at this point?

Well, at this point I was an ordinary sea-man. In fact, I didn’t know much more thanthat, but knew a lot more than before I tookthat cadet trip. Two trips later I was an ableseaman, so I moved up rather quickly, whichI was happy about. But I started as an ordi-nary seaman.

So I began to hang around the hall. I gota lot of the feeling of what shipping out waslike from the hall, met a lot of people that Ilater would ship with. I think I met BobNelson on the ship that I took, the MahiMahi, or maybe the John B. Floyd later. But,anyway, the ship that came up was the MahiMahi. It was an old, dirty, long scow, with threeor four hatches. And it was docked out atthe Crockett Sugar Refinery—or was thatSpreckels?

So this is not a liberty ship.

No. It was a big old tub, a rust bucket. Itwas a true, for sure rust bucket.

An old freighter?

An old freighter, and it really was a sugarboat. It made the run back and forth toHonolulu from the Spreckels refinery inCrockett, in the bay, and sugar would bebrought back. It looked to me like a thou-sand booms when I got out there. It had fourhatches. It was a big ship, and it had boomsthat looked like a cockroach on its back. An

227BACK TO SEA

enormous ship. And you had to go throughthis big Spreckels sugar warehouse.

Kd: It wasn’t called Spreckels. It was C& H or something like that.

C & H . . . well, now it is, but I don’tknow what it was then. I’m not sure whatcompany owned it.

Kd: I think it was Crocker.

Well, yes, I can’t find that I have thename of the company and whether it waseven the sugar company that owned the ship.But, anyway, it was really a rust bucket. Therewas so much rust on it, it looked like it’d beenpainted in red lead. And you went throughthis great big warehouse—and most of it isstill there—the sugar warehouse and theoffices along the docks there at Crockett. Acavernous place. And I went through thereand thought, “Oh, my god! Where am I go-ing? What is happening?” Had my seabag, andI got aboard the ship. And it was like beingthrown back fifty years and going to sea.

There were two or three ships that I wason that were of this ilk. Another one, whichI will mention later, was the SS Alvarado, theship that went faster backwards than forwardswhenever there was a current. [laughter] Butthe Mahi Mahi, this great, sluggish, rustyscow—the quarters were in keeping. Theywere the grungiest, dankest, darkest. It lookedlike a ship that should have been part of themothball fleet—the ones that they took upand left for years at anchor, you know, atSuisun Bay or something, and ships that hadnever gone anyplace. I see now that it was aMatson ship, one of the Matson discards. Alot of ships that would have been torn apartfor scrap or taken to the graveyards, as we

call them, were running at that time becausethere was a shortage of ships. So this was oneof those.

And I remember it with a kind of affec-tion now, but I was horrified when I wentaboard. “Is this where I’m going to live? Isthis what I’m going to do?” And we didn’tknow really where we were going, but every-body thought it would be Honolulu. And,since it had been a sugar tramp, taking sugarfrom Hawaii, it was infested with billions ofcockroaches of various kinds. There weretribes of cockroaches of various sizes andvarieties. And the little ones were the mostoffensive; the big ones would just scurryaround like mice, and they’d stay out of yourway. But these little ones seemed almost fear-less, except that they had a way with them.[laughter] You’d come into the mess room,particularly at night, and turn on the light inthe mess room, and the whole room seemedto be alive. The whole room would move—the walls, the floor, everything. You hadvertigo! You felt that the world was movingaround you. It was these millions of little,half-inch to inch-long kind of an orange-gray,orangy-looking cockroach, with very longfeelers. And they could scamper; they wouldtumble over each other. And there werewaves of them; they’d go in waves.

They’d got into the corners, and you’dsee them pushing through little holes andcracks and pockets, and a lot of them goinginto the galley and into the food, and youcouldn’t control them. I don’t recall whetherany of the measures that were usually takenon ships worked on that ship at all. They wereso deeply entrenched . . . this was their turf.That ship had become their turf. And, ofcourse, there was enough sugar around in thecracks and everywhere, so that they werequite healthy.


Did they get into your clothes and your sleepingquarters?

Oh, oh! That was another tribe that wasin the fo’c’s’le. They were the larger ones, theblack ones. And I remember waking up some-time in my bunk and looking to my side andseeing one of these large cockroaches withfeelers pointed at me, feeling in my direction.There was one that I got to know. It wouldcome every time I was in my bunk. It wouldcome and look at me, and his feelers wouldpoint. It obviously had some kind of nestnearby. And I couldn’t bring myself to killthat one, though we killed thousands. Butthat one somehow or other, I had a feeling itwas a mascot of some sort, because it neverbothered me. It never came onto my bunk ortouched me, but it went along the ledge alongthe bunk. And it would stop and then faceme. I knew it was aware of me. Of course, wehad all kinds of stories of cockroaches suck-ing at the corners of your lips and your eyeswhen you’re asleep. You know, we’d tell thesehorror stories, and we’d be told these horrorstories. But this one never seemed to botherme. It was just going about its business, but itwas aware of my existence.

So it was that kind of a ship. And veryquickly, as I got aboard, I realized that it wasgoing to be a very special trip—my first tripas a legitimate seaman, ordinary seaman. Andit was also an interesting crew. They weremostly old-timers. For some reason or other,a lot of them had made that run—they calledit the sugar run or the Hawaiian run—andthey had worked on the ships with that com-pany. And they were mostly Norwegians andSwedes, and that’s where I learned about thegreat historical lore about Norwegian andSwedish seamen, and their reaction to eachother, and I heard that wonderful song that

the Norwegian seamen used to sing, [withaccent] “Twenty thousand Swedes runthrough the weeds, chased by one loneNorwegian!” [laughter] And the Swedesaboard had other things, but they werequieter. The Swedes were more morose andsullen and quiet, and the Norwegians wereloud and aggressive. And they would speakof that as showing the difference betweenSweden and Norway. You know, Norway wasbeing overrun by the Germans, so theSwedes would make comments about theNorwegians, who gave up their land to theGermans, and never fought back, and all thatsort of thing; the Swedes had something toanswer for, too, and certainly the Danes andthe Finns. I got into that.

Well, were there American seamen who weresigned on?

Oh, yes, most of them were, but some ofthem were naturalized, they were immigrantsor from recently immigrated families, livingin pockets of America where they couldpretty well maintain their identities, youknow, and their accents.

Did you hearken back to your own Swedish roots?

Oh, yes. Oh, I was very much involvedthinking of my Swedish grandpa, who wouldhave understood these guys very well. Theytalked a lot together in either Norwegian orSwedish to one another. So there was a sec-tor of the crew like that, and then a lot ofmotley seamen from various backgrounds—a Filipino or two, which surprised me, becausethe SUP was very racist.

But everybody on that ship was a member of thisunion?

229BACK TO SEA

On deck. But the Marine Cooks andStewards was another union on the water-front. And they were still pretty much whiteor Filipino. I think that the steward’s gangwas mostly Filipino. And then there were thefiremen, the marine firemen, and the blackgang, and that was another union. And allthese gangs were mostly white at that time.But the Marine Cooks and Stewards and theMarine Firemen were beginning to becomevery closely aligned with the National Mari-time Union, becoming more left in theirorientation. And so when you found blacks—not Filipinos, they had been around for sometime in those unions—or Indians or any otherethnic group, you’d usually find them in thoseother unions, not in the SUP.

I don’t remember ever sailing with a mi-nority on the deck gang when I was in SUP.That began to bother me a great deal, par-ticularly because the National MaritimeUnion was beginning to get literature aboardthe ships, and there was a lot of propaganda.

So it’s the way the unions worked, though, theywould monopolize one particular ship, or the shipwould have a contract with a particular union?

Oh, yes, yes. Matson certainly had to beSUP, but certain companies were SUP; cer-tain companies were NMU. And certain ofthe jobs were one union or the other. Theelectricians, the radio operators, the Masters,Mates and Pilots, and all that were differentunions. But, yes, the union had contracts withthe company. The SUP had the deck gangs;Ordinary seamen through A.B.’s and bosuns.

What’s a bosun?

A boatswain, the sort of leader of the deckgang, yes, the work leader of the gang. Like amate on the bridge—just below the third

mate was the bosun. And they were unionguys, too. They were men who had gone tosea for some time and could handle deckgangs. So on that trip I got a real taste of beinga member of a crew, and this was an extremelyvaried, interesting crew.

I don’t think there was a gun crew on thatship. It was scheduled for Hawaii, and on yourdischarge paper they called it “coast-wise” inthose days; Hawaii was considered part of acoast-wise run, for whatever nefarious pur-poses the war shipping administration had.

So the ship took off, and as I remember,when we left bay, we were plugging along at,I think, probably six or seven knots, youknow, just barely moving. And I rememberthe pilot joking about it. I was at the wheel,I remember, and I was very concerned be-cause I wasn’t that knowledgeable, and I wasgetting my first taste of being at the wheelwith a pilot, you know, going out. You reallyhad to be quick, because you got all theseorders, you know, “Two degrees starboard andfour degrees . . . .” (I’m trying to think, some-times the pilots would just say “left and right.”Some of these things I’m forgetting. I thinksometimes it’d be “left wheel,” “right wheel.”)Then you had to answer. But going out theGolden Gate, I had this wonderful feeling of,“My, gosh, here I am at the wheel of a greatship . . . this rust bucket!” [laughter]

[laughter] Full of cockroaches!

Full of cockroaches and a very mixedcrew. And I don’t even remember what cargoor if we had cargo going over. We were goingto bring sugar back. We must have had cargo,because it was right after Pearl Harbor. Ivaguely recall trucks and jeeps and things ofthat kind, some of them on deck, but it’s toolong ago for me to remember. We had somesort of cargo, I’m sure.


I had this marvelous feeling, “At last, hereI am, an ordinary seaman, member of a crew,and I’m going through the Golden Gate, youknow, out under the new bridge.” And thepilot gave me orders, and I was very, very alertand worried that I was going to make a mis-take. I didn’t, though. Because if you make amistake, they just call somebody out and,“Get your ass off this bridge,” you know. Parti-cularly a pilot, because they are veryconcerned about rocks and reefs and thingsof that kind.

So off we went. And it took a long time.I forget how long, but it was an ungodly timeto get to Hawaii, because like the Alvaradolater, but not quite as bad, we were lucky tomake ten knots. And that is very slow evenfor a freighter. And most of the time we weredoing six and seven, and that, you know, isjust . . .

Well, what’s an average speed for . . . ?

Well, it depends on the type of vessel,and in those days if you could do twelveknots, that was pretty good. Some could gomore; some could do fourteen knots or some-thing—new ships. A good new liberty mightdo that in good seas. But, you know, ten totwelve knots was cruising speed in goodweather.

So you were lucky to do ten.

Oh, I think we were doing six or seven. Imean that Alvarado would do two and three,and then sometimes it was a minus two andthree if there was a current. [laughter] You’dmove out with the coastline, and you’dsee . . . .

Going backwards! Things moving this way in-stead of this way! [laughter]

So those are the slow scows. And yet itwas an interesting trip because it took a longtime, and, oh, the food was terrible. I don’tknow what was wrong, it must have been thecompany. Everything was bad on that ship,but it was a good, interesting crew, so we gotto know each other.

Particularly the Norwegians and theSwedes were always at each other, joking and/or getting angry, and arguing politics. Andthen, of course, there was an awful lot ofunion talk, a lot of union history. One of theguys had known Andrew Furuseth very well.(I think Furuseth died in the 1930s.)

And, oh, there was a lot of talk about thelabor struggles on the front, all the way tothe early 1920s and the turn of the century,and the role of the SIU [Seafarers Interna-tional Union], and of the dirty commies—alot of anti-communist talk because the SUPwas a very conservative union. However,there were a lot of Wobblies and radicals. Onething, when you talk about the left wing, youhave to include the radical left or the Wobblyleft, the anarchist left. A lot of that. Andpeople, you know . . . there was one of thoseguys again who was throwing things over side.I mean it was the thing to do if you were mad;and particularly if you were on a rust bucket,an old scow.

Did you have to guard your books?

No. They wouldn’t mess around withshipmates. [laughter] Just anything to do withthe company, the damn company.

And blacks were referred to as “shines,” Iremember. And I used to get very, verythoughtful and upset about the fact that ifyou said anything against that, you were con-sidered a nigger-lover right away.

Is that a slur on shiny skin or shoe shining or . . . ?

231BACK TO SEA

“Shines” . . . your guess is as good asmine. Yes, yes, shoe shine boys shined . . .and ‘nigs,’ you know, and ‘Japs.’ Well, I hadhad so many Japanese friends, I never duringthe war was at ease with the colloquialism of“Jap” for Japanese. And I would try to avoidthe term, but to say “Japanese” among peoplewho were using the word “Jap,” immediatelyputs you . . . . So I would use all kinds of cir-cumlocutions, so as not to have to name thepeople from Japan. [laughter] Just, you know,“Those people are over there,” or something.And I found I was very uneasy about this.

In fact, my growing unease about thateventually led me to the NMU. And I re-member reading a lot of the NMU literatureon discrimination. It was in 1943, 1944 whenit began coming aboard our ships. A lot of itwas Communist Party literature.

Was it aboard that ship? The literature?

There were always some pamphlets. Andsometimes they were just left in the messroom, and . . . the “sneaky commies,” youknow! “Oh, look what somebody left here.”[laughter] And if somebody really felt stronglyabout it, they would take them and throwthem over side. But every now and thensomebody would hoard a few just for read-ing, out of curiosity, and I had a few.

And there were a number of excellentpamphlets—in fact, I own some of them; Isaved some of them—which were war pro-paganda and union propaganda. Some of itwas just straightforward trade union policyand positions. And the ones on discrimina-tion were to me very interesting, themovement to integrate ships that gainedmomentum all during the 1940s, and cameto a head really in 1945, 1946, and duringthe CMU [Committee for Maritime Unity]strike, the big maritime strike. And I would

think about our own crew: why was there noteven one black on board or even one dark-skinned Hispanic, you know, a Filipino oranybody? We used to be referred to as the“lily white” union. We were the “lily whites.”And so that all was coming together in mymind on that trip, and I did a hell of a lot ofreading. I wasn’t reading any Marxist litera-ture except these pamphlets, which, by theway, gave me the name of being a hard-hatMarxist later on. I find I didn’t have muchtheory, but I had read a lot of propaganda—picked up my left-wing views the hardhatway. [laughter] Which was nice. It was nevermeant to be an insult. But I was thinking likea Marxist, I suppose, long before I ever be-came one or read seriously. Even though atschool just before the war, I had begun toexplore this literature, it wasn’t really the clas-sical Marxist literature. It was a little bit moreof the periphery of the literature.

Also, it must not have had any relevance to whatyou were doing until you had this experience atsea.

Yes, well, lots of relevance then, becauseI was anti-war and anti-fascist and knewpeople who were, and probably some peoplewho were Marxist and communist. And I waspro-labor and all that, so I had been familiarwith those ideas and movements, but theyhad not really registered in me. Actually, it’svery hard for me to reassemble in detail thatperiod, excepting I think my political views,if they could be called that, were more sortof a general socialist orientation to events. Ihad an anti-capitalist as well as anti-fascistview. It was in my mind at the time, alongwith many people that I knew, that fascismor national socialism, was an extreme ver-sion of capitalism, so we were sympathetic,at least, to not only the Soviet Union, but to


left movements throughout the world. InChina—to the growing mood of the com-munists in China—not just because theywere communists at that time but becausethe kind of things they were struggling forseemed to be meaningful and reasonable tome. And certainly the Spanish Civil War hadawakened that in me and in many, manyothers. And by the way, many seamen, par-ticularly in the National Maritime Union,which I didn’t know at the time, had gone tofight with the Lincoln Brigade, made upmainly of Americans; and many of them wereAmerican seamen.

This was not necessarily something thatthe members of the SUP that I knew felt veryfriendly about. That was, to them, a commu-nist thing. However, that’s unfair, because alot of the sort of Wobblyesque, anarchistic,and old trade-union men with that orienta-tion were rebellious characters. They were, Iwould say, radical. They didn’t have a par-ticular political philosophy, but they wereradicals, and they had usually supported any-thing that seemed to be radical. But somehowor other communism had been already madeinto a very special kind of threat in Americanlife, so that they always put that aside: Thatis a special kind of enemy and problem. Butthen they would praise a lot of people whodid things like that, and certainly destroyingcompany property was one of the great, heroicthings that one could do. That, of course,caricatures them. That’s not fair, becausesome of them were very thoughtful, think-ing union men—thinking more in terms oflabor struggles than in terms of broaderpolitical struggles.

Now, as I remember, when I took this trip,that probably was one of the worst periods inthe Pacific and of the war not only in thePacific, but generally. This was whenRommel pretty well overran North Africa

and was going into Egypt. And the Germanshad attacked Stalingrad, which, of course,was an important thing among the far Leftin the country, and to me, being a kind of, Isuppose, inadvertent fellow traveler at thetime, along with others: those Russians hadsuffered so, and were putting up a great fightat Leningrad, and then at Stalingrad . . . .And there was a kind of admiration for howplucky they were against enormous odds.

The siege of Stalingrad was a very im-portant event at that time. It was a kind ofemblematic moment in the war, so that a lotof people who were anti-Soviet and anti-communist felt very positive about theRussians at the time.

Also, there were a lot of ships sinking allthrough the Atlantic, particularly in the Gulfof Mexico and in the Northwest Coast areain Alaska. Then there was that period of thelend-lease. Of course, seamen looked uponthat in the seamen’s unions very favorably,because this meant more ships had to bemanned to take the lend-lease materials toEurope, excepting for the fact that Roosevelthad made the agreement mainly withChurchill, and that there was a lot of anti-British feeling, as I remember at that time,among seamen and probably elsewhere, too.[laughter] “Those dirty limeys. Oh, those limesuckers, for god sakes, what right do they got?There they sit over there with their kings,you know, and millions of dollars, and theyhaven’t done a goddamn thing. Germanyought to bomb the hell out of them.” It wasnot pro-German feeling, but, you know, itwas such anti-British feeling, a “nuke ’em”kind of view. [laughter]

Not everybody. There was an elementthat felt this way, because there had been thislong period of the 1930s during the Depres-sion, when England was considered to be notnecessarily our friend, you know. And dur-

233BACK TO SEA

ing the period of American withdrawal fromconflict, isolationism, and all that, in whichthe early British requests for aid prior to thewar were looked upon as handouts: theBritish were demanding something, and, “Tohell with them,” kind of thing. There was alot of that sort of feeling. But all sorts of thingswere going on.

I guess the attack on Pearl Harbor shiftedeverything, so that, at least on the West Coastand among West Coast seamen and those inthe Pacific, where I spent most of my time,the major concern was what was going onwith Japan. And Japan, by that time had notonly taken on the Philippines but a good partof sections of southeast Asia and were mov-ing in on all the islands of the Pacific. Theywere not only pushing us back, but making itdifficult for us to even move in those areas,all the way up to the Aleutians and China.There was an enormous range of Japanesecontrol. So that was our concern. I mean,“What in the hell are the Japs doing?” Andthat word again, the “Japs,” you know. Butthat’s what it was—the Japs, the squint eyes.Squint eyes. “Hey, those squints.” The collo-quialisms were rampant about the enemy. Wedidn’t have as many about Europe and theGermans . . . except for the limeys, thegoddamn limeys. [laughter]

Who were allies?

[laughter] Who were our allies? The“Huns,” that was like the First World War—the Huns and the Nazis and the wops. Butthose were distant.

People on the West Coast were follow-ing all this, but the real concern was whatwas going on to the west, in the Pacific. Japanhad been extremely successful that first yearor so. It wasn’t until the end of 1943 and 1944that the United States began to move them

back—Guadalcanal. In fact, in late 1943there was a great flap and headlines about“Merchant Marine Refuses to Unload Shipsat Guadalcanal.” I mean terrible stories, thatthere had been some incident where themerchant marine seamen taking cargo downto Guadalcanal during an encounter had re-fused to remove the cargo, and that themarines had had to do it. It was in all thepapers. It turned out to be a complete fiction.

Oh, by the way, I think merchant marinetrade unionists were very aware that everyeffort was being made in the American pressto diminish . . . demean the role of merchantseamen. Now and then you’d get a praisingeditorial somewhere about the heroic mer-chant marines losing two thousand men outof six thousand and all that. But for the mostpart, it was this business, “Here’s our gloriousnavy, the men in uniform, fighting the war,and the merchant marine making all themoney.”

But of course, we weren’t. I mean therehave been studies made. We were makingmuch less than any navy person of equal rank.And I mean the most I ever took home wastwo hundred dollars a month, and that wasbecause we had risk pay for being in the warzones. For those brief periods we were in thewar zone, your pay was double. Well, I nevermade more than nineteen hundred, twothousand a year—that’s sailing all year round.Our hourly rate has been calculated at thirty-four cents. [laughter] And on and on. Wedidn’t get any death benefits like the navydid. We didn’t get allotments sent home toour families, and certainly didn’t—though wewere supposed to—get the GI bill when thewar was over. Every attempt was being madeby the right wing and Congress to discreditthe merchant marine. I was aware of this atthe time—this was before any kind of specialpolitical orientation, ideologic orientation.


I was aware, along with everybody else, thatthe merchant marine—because we wereunion men—every attempt at the beginningof the war had been made to make us part ofthe armed services.

Completely militarize it, right?

Yes, so that there would be control. Andthe unions fought that and said, “You’ll haveto take the union along with the men whoare skilled to work on these ships, or youwon’t have them.” But the efforts to under-mine the merchant marine were wellorchestrated, and this newspaper story wasan example. This was a completely fictional,false thing. Within three or four monthsmarines down in Guadalcanal, marine gen-erals, came back and reported the story aboutrefusing to unload ships was false; it hadn’thappened; that actually the reverse had hap-pened. The merchant mariners had unloadedships under fire, they were on shore whenthey didn’t have to be, and that was the re-verse that had been reported. So that scandal,the great Guadalcanal scandal, was some-thing all of us talked about there in late 1943.I mean, this is the way it is, and this is goingto happen to us. They’re going to ignore . . .if we get hit or something we’re, all going tobe called cowards and shirkers, anyway.

Well, now, I know you didn’t have a gun crewon the Mahi Mahi, but when you were on shipsthat had gun crews, including the Bret Harte,were the relations between the navy gun crewsand the deck hands . . . ?

Usually very good. I mean, actually, theywere just considered to be a special comple-ment on the ship, and they usually had theirown mess and their own quarters. Usually . . .I guess it was aft; the gun crew quarters were

aft on liberty ships in a special part way backin the stern. They had nice quarters, some-times better than ours. And although theykept together a lot, there was a lot of inter-action.

They would come in our mess rooms, andwe’d play cards and talk and listen to the re-ports from Sparks, and all that sort of thing.And usually they were young kids, very youngkids. This is wartime; these are kids, fifteen,sixteen, seventeen years old, you know! Wenever had any trouble with them that I canremember. But there was a whole lot of jok-ing about navy, and navy versus merchantmarine. There was that kind of bantering thatwent on all the time: That it took ten navymen to do what one merchant marine sailordid. And alongside a navy ship, these greatbig ships next to us, with a hundred men ondeck, and we’d have three, you know, takingin the line. And then we’d call back andforth, you know, “Do you need any help?”[laughter] There was a lot of that. But I don’tremember any nasty feelings; they were there,I’m sure, at times, but I don’t recall.

So this sort of campaign, you see, being placedat a higher level?

But at home in the media and in Congresswe were . . . . Later on, with Senator Casethe Case bill prevented us from getting theGI bill on the basis that we were not trust-worthy; we might turn the guns of the UnitedStates upon the United States. I mean abso-lutely ridiculous and horrible kinds of things:“They’re all communists, all scruffy charac-ters, the lost of the world,” and, “We don’tneed them in the armed forces.” But all dur-ing the war we were in the armed forces. Wewere part of it. But the tension was becausewe also had a separate, independent unionorganization. That was the tension; that we

235BACK TO SEA

could demand things. We couldn’t get them,but we could demand them independently,and we had a more relaxed kind of discipline,and all that sort of thing. And then the mythof our high wages, because now and then inthe Murmansk Run, for example, somebodywould make very high wages for being underfire for weeks at a time; and their wages woulddouble. Nevertheless, the same person on anavy ship was sending home extra allotments,and if he got killed, his family got eleventhousand dollars, and the merchant marinewas . . . .

Got nothing, right?

There was, I think, a five-thousand-dollarbehest of some kind. But I mean none of theseextra things applied to us, you see. But then,of course, the idea was, we were making agreat deal of money; we were a bunch of shirk-ers; and draft dodgers . . . .

Almost like pirates taking advantage of the . . . .

Exactly. Yes. And, also, that we werestealing from the ships. A lot of that hap-pened, but I saw much more organizedstealing going on on the part of the army andnavy in ports that we went to. I mean big-time, big-time racketeer kind of stealing. Andno merchant marine could actually haveswung the kind of deal as someone with auniform on, being able to re-direct trucks,whole truckloads of cigarettes, as I saw later.And so that was going on. There was a hellof a lot of graft going on. There were fortunesmade abroad during the war; I don’t thinkanybody has talked about that very much.

I saw it with my own eyes, and everybodyknew that certain people in the army weremaking fortunes ashore and stowing it away.So, sure, there was pilfering going on. [laugh-

ter] I mean pilfering is in the nature of theAmerican way.

It’s just capitalism, right?

As a matter of fact, I got a letter from mymother that she had read about some sea-man who had been put in jail in, I don’t know,Portland or somewhere like that for stealingblankets off of ships. He got three or fouryears, and my mother wrote and said, “Do becareful. Don’t take anything! Look what theydo!”

Well, I had done it! And others that I waswith, we never left a ship without somethinglike a good, heavy wool blanket to put in ourseabag, or those table cloths—on that Dutchship I was on—those wonderful, white,damask table cloths that had come from thedays of the passenger ships. And they wereall beautifully brand-new, folded, never used,but they were in the ship stores. All of ustook two or three of those; I took more thanthat. Well, that was enough to put me in jailfor ten years, if anybody wanted to makesomething out of it.

Pilfering, petty pilfering, was the natureof the game. You never even thought aboutit. In fact, toward the end of the war, whenthe Seabees and the soldiers were comingback, and we were bringing them back fromall kinds of god-forsaken holes in the Pacific,when they got near shore, they started to takeoff all of their clothes—the most wonderfulSeabee jackets and heavy, woolen pants andsocks and shoes. Some were throwing themover the side; others were just throwing themin the hold or leaving them in the variousquarters that they had. And when they allleft, here was the crew looking at mountainsof wonderful clothing that was going to goprobably to what became part of all thosesurplus stores, years after the war. Of course,


we took those. I mean I took all I couldhandle, all I could carry or wear on me.[laughter] I wore them for years at sea. Won-derful clothes. So, sure, that was going on.

But what did the press say? “The mer-chant seamen are a bunch of thieves,commies, anti-American, this and that . . . .”It was a real concerted effort to underminethe seamen as union people before the endof the war. This came out of certain conser-vative groups in Washington that wanted tomake sure that we didn’t get in the pie at theend of the war.

And it worked?

Oh, it worked. This was talked about alot. These kinds of political views were verymuch a part of seagoing conversation. Notso much “commies against our great democ-racy” because, by the way, nobody thoughtthe United States was the great democracy. Inever met anybody at sea, except certaincompany men and mates, who ever took thatpatriotic line. Oh, and the conversation wasalways about the corruption, the evil, theanti-union acts and views of capitalism, and

all that. Not Marxist—these were just trade-union, class attitudes. And there was a lot ofthat: “The United States was in the war forits own good. That’s all.” And when lend-lease started, “Oh, those damn limeys, whatare we feeding them for?” And, “Oh, we knowwhy we’re feeding them. We’re feeding thembecause they’re going to have to buy from usafter the war!” And later, the same kind ofcriticism of the Marshall Plan, “We’re send-ing stuff over there; we’re giving them moneyso they can buy our goods.”

A lot of cynicism of that kind, a tradeunion cynicism about capitalism that wasdeeply ingrained. I don’t ever recall anybodywho was really romantically patriotic aboutthe great democracy of the United States—they would have been laughed out of the messroom. If they were, they kept quiet! [laugh-ter]

Now and then, somebody might say,“You’re a bunch of commies!” you know, buthe would never elaborate because if he startedin, there would be not only an argument, hewould be lectured to for the rest of the tripabout, “Oh, you company stiff. You poorfink.”

28TO HAWAII ON THE

MAHI MAHI

HAT NOW occurs to me is thatI was very aware of the great dif-ference between my previous trip

been classified 1-A. If I didn’t make that tran-sition soon, my draft board would be after me.And so I had hung around the union halland gone to the little union fitness schoolthat the SUP had on the front.

And I’m thinking of this comparison be-cause while I was out at sea on the Mahi Mahi,I became aware that I was among a group ofindividuals, members of a crew who werequite different from those I had been withon the Bret Harte. The Mahi Mahi crew was adepressed group of men, except for these oldseamen whom I had a great deal of admira-tion for—the old Swedes and Norwegianswho argued all the time, but who knew theirjobs very well—the old able seamen. Someof them looked to be sixty, sixty-five yearsold, and still working harder and better thanany of the younger men. But the rest of thecrew was a motley bunch, and there was adeep kind of cynicism and anger that theyhad of even being at sea, some for the firsttime. Others were sort of roustabout typeswho had been to sea off and on for years.

When we got out to sea I was beginningto feel a strong sense of disappointment and

Won the Bret Harte and the Mahi Mahi—kindof an ideal introductory trip in a way, eventhough I was very irritated about being ajunior officer type and feeling estranged fromthe crew; and then working hard all trip toestablish relationships with members of thecrew, and finally being accepted by them. Butduring that trip, as I think I’ve already talkedabout, I determined to leave the cadet corpsand go to sea as a regular seaman. And sothat trip had this kind of mythological andmarvelous sense of having gone to sea for thefirst time, having seen a good part of thesouthern Pacific, Australia, and the south-ern ocean and all that, and having thissomewhat idealized connection with thecrew. The people that I knew were sort oftypical seamen, and I remember them as be-ing particular types of individuals.

However, here I was on the Mahi Mahiafter coming from New York, spending a fewweeks on the West Coast, and then realizingthat I had to get out to sea, because I had


depression about seamen, because there wasreally an unpleasant bunch of characters.There was a lot of fighting and there was alot of liquor aboard and drunkenness. But alsothis deep cynicism was expressed throughthings like, “Why in the hell were we givingaid to England? All those lime juicers, all theywill do is to take it and use it to support theirdamn monarchy [laughter] And that’s all weare doing. The American taxpayers are sup-porting a lousy monarchy,” which is all right;I mean I might have partly agreed with it.

But that was the general tenor—the atti-tude about the war, which of course, touchedon my own feelings to some degree. But tothem the war was merely a dirty plot on thepart of a bunch of corrupt corporations andinternational conspirators to make a lot ofmoney when the war was over. All thesethings rang bells for me, but for the kind ofguys that were on this ship, it seemed likethis was the kind of world they wallowed in.And this was a little unique for me. Therewas always something like this on every ship,but this one had a deep sense of the mean-inglessness of the world and the difficulty ofit, but also a depression, a deep depression.And all I could figure is that there happenedto get together on that crew a lot of the lostsouls on the West Coast.

But the old seamen, I felt very positiveabout these three or four old guys, who werevery judicious, very quiet, kept to themselves.They kept their fo’c’s’les neat; they did theirwork excellently. They never ever arguedwith you; they just looked at you and wentabout their business. They were great atmaking seabags, sewing seabags and stitch-ing canvas. They made all kinds of things.One old guy had been on the ship for a yearor two, and felt that it was his home. And hesaid, “Crews come and go. This one is a bunchof assholes, but they . . . [laughter] they come

and go.” His fo’c’s’le and his partner’sfo’c’s’le had this beautiful macrame kind ofstuff they made out of canvas. They wouldtear out strands of canvas and leave a kind oflacy effect; they had curtains in their rooms,on their bunks. [laughter] And everythingwas neat and clean. They were two oldScandinavians, and they had made it a home.

The ship was their home. And they said,“It used to be in the old days, on ships likethis, there were good crews that all mindedtheir own business and did their work, andleft everybody alone. But as now you got allthese gazoonies coming aboard, you don’tknow what you’re going to get,” on and on.Well, I didn’t want to be one of thosegazoonies. [laughter] I was an ordinary sea-man, so I hung out with these guys, and Ilearned a lot from them about seamanship—just that short trip. I’m awfully glad that Iwas in a situation where I could know threeor four old guys like this, because when theysaw I was interested, they showed me things.

There is a kind of an unspoken patternamong older seamen, at least, where you don’tshow anybody that you really give a damnabout them. And you certainly don’t makefriends easily. But the way you show interestis to watch them do things. And they werevery glad to let me watch them do splicingin their fo’c’s’les while they were sewing can-vas. They had their gear out—thesewonderful sail needles and the beeswax thatwas used not only on your fid, so it went eas-ily through the eyelet but also on the needles,on the sail needles, so they’d go easily throughthe canvas. And all these little tricks and thewonderful business of making this macrame-like thing out of canvas. They made themand gave them as gifts to their old girlfriendsashore—all sorts of things—bags made outof macrame and all that. And out on deckthese guys were wonderful. They knew where

239TO HAWAII ON THE MAHI MAHI

everything was; they knew exactly what to do.And you’d never ask them to show you any-thing. You just followed them and watchedwhat they did. If you asked them, you wouldprobably either be ignored, or some insult-ing remark would be made, you know, like,“Use your eyes, you son of a bitch,” or some-thing like that. But they didn’t mind if youwatched them, and, in fact, were quietly verypleased that you showed an interest in whatthey were doing.

So I learned to do that. And at the endof that trip I really knew a lot about thingsaboard ship that I would never have learnedotherwise. I knew the names of all the rig-ging and the lines; I knew how to secure ahatch properly, even how to use a winch. Ihad some practice when we got to Honoluluusing the winch for cargo. I wasn’t good at it,but I had a chance to try that. And, anyway,that was the positive side. The negative sideI’ve already mentioned—this rather unpleas-ant bunch of characters, a deeply angry andcynical group of men. There were variationsamong them, but there was that quality.

So on that trip, on the way over, the onebright spot in my mind was I was probablygoing to see my friend, Francis Motofuji, whohad been a pen pal way back in 1937, 1938.He and I had been corresponding up till 1940,and then I hadn’t heard from him. And wehad a very, very full correspondence. I stillhave a couple of them. He wrote poetry, Japa-nese poetry. He was a young guy, young kid,very concerned, very ambitious; wanted tobecome something important in the world,and he wasn’t sure what that was. He wasreflective about the war in Japan and China,the Japanese incursions in China. I’d askedabout that.

He was very, very careful and cautiousabout talking about it, but as he had said in aletter in 1940, a lot of his friends and rela-

tives were thinking of returning to Japan,because there was a lot of anti-Japanese feel-ing in Hawaii and the mainland. He saidpeople didn’t seem to be able to accept eventhe third-generation Japanese as Americans.Although he felt American—he was anAmerican—he said he wondered whether ornot, like some of his relatives thought, hewould have a better chance in Japan. Andyet at the same time he felt very uneasy aboutJapanese expansion and the Japanese socialsystem. He said, “I am part Japanese, andmaybe I’m not fully accepted here; maybe, Iwouldn’t be accepted there, but maybe it’sworth trying. At least I look Japanese.” Thesewonderful, reflective letters of his and thepoetry he wrote—you know, young adoles-cent poetry, and some of it was haiku-like,which intrigued me.

Were you the same age?

Yes, the same age. This correspondencestarted way back when I was in high school,I think. I saw an advertisement for a pen palin Hawaii—Hawaii!—you know. You can’tbeat that. And although the name Motofujikind of stopped me, because I wished it hadbeen a Polynesian name, I thought, “Here isa way for me to find out a little bit about thatplace.” And I did. He wrote quite beautiful,very intelligent letters. But then around 1940,1941, our correspondence fell off. And I sus-pected it was because of this growing sensethat he had of the displacement of the Japa-nese. Certainly, after Pearl Harbor, Iunderstood that. Although there were a lotof Japanese in Hawaii, and though most ofthem stayed during the war, there was thisintense negative feeling generated about theJapanese, although not as bad as was ex-pressed on the West Coast of the UnitedStates.


Yes, because they weren’t actually incarcerated,were they?

No, no, they were not. I think there wasa lot of surveillance and there may very wellhave been certain Japanese or groups thatwere tagged as difficult or dissident. Butapparently a lot of Japanese were returningback to Japan. Even though they wereAmerican citizens, they decided that the timewas coming when they were going to haveto make a decision. This was before PearlHarbor, which interests me, and I didn’t real-ize of course, though it had already begun onthe West Coast. But the large Japanese popu-lation and other ethnic populations on theislands probably protected them to some de-gree, apparently throughout the war. So,anyway, that is one of things I was thinking,“When I get to Honolulu, I will be able tosee Francis Motofuji.”

Were you still keeping the kinds of journals andnotes that you did on the Bret Harte on the lan-guage—you know, your excitement about thelanguage, the vernacular?

Yes, I had lots of notes on what peoplesaid and what they were doing. All throughmy shipping period I did that. My notebooksare extremely messy. Sometimes they don’teven say where I am and what ship I’m on.But at least they’re in sequence. And, yes, alot of the notations are about the way peopletalk and stories they told and descriptions;what they made of their lives ashore and whatit meant to them.

I’m interested in you being the observer andquickly learning how to adapt in the social set-ting of that ship. I mean the unspoken rules offinding someone that can teach you things, butnot asking.

Oh, you had to. If you didn’t, you werevery quickly not only isolated, but ostracized.There was another ordinary seaman who wasa lanky, arrogant young kid, who kept talk-ing about what a good job he could have hadashore if there hadn’t been a war. And, youknow, about his family being a family thatwas shocked to think he was going to sea asan ordinary seaman. And that he didn’t gointo the army because he had some kind oftrouble with his lungs, and he didn’t thinkthat it would be good . . . his family didn’tthink it would be good for him, and all that.He was a totally spoiled brat. Everybody veryquickly hated him. And, of course, whensomebody gets in that position, they becomea scapegoat for the whole crew. Nobodyharms them or mistreats them, but there isthe constant use of this person as an exampleof the dregs of humanity.

Did he ever change or adapt?

Not really. He got so he had to work, be-cause you have to. [laughter] If you’re onwatch, you have to do your job. He was alsolazy. He would be in his bunk, and nobodycould wake him up, and his watch would haveto pull him out of his bunk and shake him upand get him out on deck. And this was al-most an enjoyment; it was a kind of a drama.I mean he was part of the theater of the ship.Nevertheless, he wasn’t very likable. [laugh-ter] He was kind of disgusting. He ate notonly sloppily, like a kid who had never beentrained, a spoiled kid, but he always ate themost of everything—especially something inshort supply. He would be in there gobblingeverything up. And the crew got to the pointof just keeping stuff away from him. Grab-bing as he put something on his plate, thenputting his hand back in the food and all.[laughter]


He was that kind of a kid. He was kind ofpathetic when I look back—a very pathetickid. And he was probably very anxious andupset during the whole trip. I guess he wasaround eighteen, nineteen years old, but heacted like ten. And so, yes, when somebodygets into that kind of a position, or if some-body is tagged as being a little fey, a littlequeer, as the word used to be, they weretreated a little differently. A lot of asides andjokes—seldom directly to them.

This is one of the things in small groups,particularly shipboard—and I’m sure in manyother work situations—there’s a lot of toler-ance about letting people be what they are.Yet that doesn’t mean that you’re not goingto talk about it or you’re not going to makesomething out of it—but usually not directlyto them. You don’t want trouble.

Anybody who makes trouble is, of course,also pegged as a little outside the group. Any-body who continually creates an argumentor gets boisterous or aggressive, everybodydeals with them with kid gloves. You leavethem alone; don’t get the guy going.

It sounds like what your approach was, was toreally observe what the dynamic was and then tofit in.

Maybe. I don’t know if I was that clever.I just wanted to get along. I was also just en-joying the idea of going to sea. But this tripwas not pleasant. This was the darker side.There were one or two younger guys—oneof the black gang, one of the steward’s gang—you know, that were intelligent, articulate,people you could sort of rap with, and, therewere a few others. But this particular deckgang, except for these three or four older guys,were unpleasant characters.

So here I was; we were approachingHonolulu, and I had this considerable excite-

ment that I was finally getting to the heart-land. I’d missed it on the Bret Harte; we’djust gone around Polynesia, from Australia toSouth America. And I wanted to see if I couldfind Peter Buck, Te Rangi Hiroa, at theBishop Museum, because I had read his earlywork on Samoan material culture in Lowie’sclass. One of the assignments Lowie hadgiven us, I believe, on Polynesian religion,was one of Buck’s very early works written inthe 1930s or so. By the way, the BishopMuseum has his work as a tourist attraction—a big pile of his books, that he wrote later onvarious aspects of Hawaiian material culture.He also wrote the history or the role of theMaori in populating Polynesia. He was quitea scholar, and I liked his simple, direct wayof writing and the fact that he was, I think, aMaori himself or part Maori.

Lowie was interesting that way. We wouldget some rather obscure works. One was theman that worked in the Amazon or in Brazil,Curt Nimuendaju. Nimuendaju had workedwith the Mundurucú, a small group in SouthAmerica. And Lowie had a tremendousadmiration for Curt Nimuendaju, who heapparently knew, because he was such anadventurous and courageous type of anthro-pologist. He’d worked with this very remote,hidden tribe in South America. Lowie praisedhim to the skies. And, also, Peter Buck, washardly known. I remember trying to find hisname in the bibliographies. He’s seldom men-tioned because I guess he was a minoranthropologist—and, of course, he was aPolynesian. This kind of thing was very rarein those days—a member of a non-westerngroup being recognized as a legitimate scholar.But Peter Buck was. And Lowie recognizedthat. His name was Te Rangi Hiroa. (PeterBuck) he’d always put in parentheses, mean-ing, “This is my name for the rest of you.”[laughter] And so I had an admiration for


him, and I was hoping I could see him or seewhere he worked.

So we come at last into Honolulu. I re-member the tremendous excitement I had asI was on the bow as a lookout when we werecoming into the bay. I don’t know if I’d everwant to go back . . . well, I went once againjust a year or so later, but I don’t know if I’dever want to go today, you know, to an enor-mous, sprawling city. The whole of southernOahu is practically a city. But in those daysyou came, and it had the look of being a fairlypristine island, from a distance. It had green-ery along the shore; Waikiki . . . I think therewas one hotel. Later I learned that the houseout on the point under the pali, under themountain, was Doris Duke Cromwell’s man-sion. And that was about all there was. I wentto Waikiki, this one long sweep of sand, andbeautiful background of palms. And from thesea, except for a few little buildings, that wasit. When I see pictures today, I mean mystomach turns over at what it’s become.

So we came into this beautiful harbor,and I remember having people point out, say-ing, “Over there, to the west, is Pearl Harbor.”And I must say—I’m very curious about myown reaction to this—I did not want to seePearl Harbor.

The ships were laying on their sides. Youcouldn’t see much of it, but you knew thearea of the docks and some ships at anchorwas Pearl Harbor. This was only, gosh, a yearand a half from the attack on Pearl Harbor.But I just had this feeling I didn’t want toknow about it. I mean I knew about it, but Ididn’t want to see it. And it wasn’t because Ihad any queasiness about it. It just to me . . .you know, I guess, it was irrelevant to my in-terests. I’m a little ashamed of this, but it’sthe way I felt. I was very ambivalent. I’m notvery clear on what my feelings were aboutthat, excepting I did want to sort of ignore

Pearl Harbor. Though I was quite aware thatI had very strong feelings about the attackon Pearl Harbor.

But here I was in Hawaii! [laughter] I wastwenty-two years old; I guess I can be forgivensome strange reactions. And then the mem-bers of the crew—there were certain of theseroustabout members of the crew—making allkinds of comments about, “Yes, there goesall the taxpayers’ money. That’s what we’repaying for.” There was very little sympathyamong this particular level of guy; little sym-pathy for the war, the war effort, or theAmerican response to it. And I was ambiva-lent. Not that I didn’t feel that my owncountry had every right to be reacting againstthis and defending itself against it. At thesame time I had very strong doubts, which Idon’t think I have now, because I have morehistorical background, but I had seriousdoubts about how we’d gotten into the war,and very strong feelings about what we haddone to the Japanese on the West Coast, andcertain of my friends—I was wondering aboutFrancis Motofuji and all that. So I had thesemixed, rather, what you call plural, earlyviews, without much knowledge. I didn’thave much knowledge about the politics ofthe situation. But I still had questions. I wasstill ambivalent about wars and how they startand what they really mean. But my feelingsweren’t the same about this war as some ofthese very cynical, mean-minded charactersthat I was sailing with, who really didn’t haveany interest in anything except the denun-ciation of the universe.

However, I do understand them. [laugh-ter] I understand the kind of men they wereand why they were that way. They were fromthe dregs of the slums of western cities. Andsome of them had been at sea; some of themcame to sea because they had to do some-thing, and that’s what they did. They weren’t


acceptable in the army; they had drug prob-lems and all that. The Mahi Mahi was aunique ship. I had sailed with wonderfulcrews, but not that one, except for my oldSwedish-Norwegian friends.

Anyway, here we were in Honolulu, andwe finally docked, and there was a navy shipthat had just docked ahead us, and all thenavy men were getting off and had been givenleis. They were being decked with flowers. Itwas a small destroyer. We hadn’t an escort oranything; we just come slopping in on ourold rust bucket. And here we were dockednear these guys, and we were watching, youknow, “Where is our greeting?” “Where arethe hula girls?” [laughter] Here was the navyall decked out in their white uniforms andall that, coming off the ship, and a lei beingplaced on each one of them, and some kindof music—some kind of awful, popular mu-sic. Maybe some horrible crooner like TonyMartin, whom I had hated at Treasure Island,because he was an officer at Treasure Islandand would give concerts [laughter] and croon.His voice would be on the intercom, and Ijust hated crooners. So, anyway, that was oneintroduction.

Nevertheless, here we were, docked inHonolulu, and we had a lot of work to do.We were taking off a cargo, which escapesme—I don’t recall what it was—but we weregoing to be taking on pineapple and sugar.And, of course, hearing the comments like,“Well, we’re sure aiding the war effort. We’retaking sugar and pineapple back to the States.We’re taking gin and rum to the world andtaking back sugar and pineapple.” And Ithought that was a very justifiable bit of cyni-cism. [laughter]

I did have a little shore leave. I’m nottoo clear on time. I figure we were only therea few days. But first thing I did was try tolook up Francis Motofuji at his old address

that I had from one the last letters he’d writ-ten. I didn’t see him, but I saw members ofhis family. They were very suspicious of whyI wanted to see him. Everybody was suspi-cious in those days, and they had reason. Herewas this white young guy, this kid, comes up,dressed pretty frowzily, I guess—I probablywas clean—and looking for a relative. Itturned out this was his aunt or somebody andcousin living there. Finally word got to him,and he got in touch with my ship. He sentword, “Yes, I’m indeed here.” So I spent onevery interesting day or two with Francis. Hehad changed a great deal. He was now a ratherdignified, careful young guy, and probably forgood reasons. But, you know, I felt that hehad decided he was grown up. He kept tell-ing me, “I hope you burned all my letters thatI wrote you. I was such a child; I was such anadolescent.”

I said, “I thought they were wonderful. Iliked your poetry, and you were doing a lot ofthinking.”

“Well, a lot of that,” he says, “is just whatadolescents do, and I’m not adolescent any-more! I’ve got serious things to do in thisworld.”

He was very careful, as were the membersof his family I had just briefly met. We nevermentioned Pearl Harbor. It was never men-tioned. There was a lot of difficulty on theisland; the people were confused about whatwas going on, and he was, too. I said some-thing about, “Well, you never went back toJapan.”

He said, “No, I’m an American. That’sall there’s to it.” And yet I felt there was kindof a tension, that he didn’t know how muchhe could talk to me, and I didn’t know howreally to talk to him. But he was extremelyhospitable. He took me all over Honolulu, asmall town in those days.


It looked like a village, as I remember it.There was a long main street and I think astreetcar or a bus that went all the way out toWaikiki and along Waikiki. And there was alot of vegetation. I remember very few thingslike hotels or houses. There was a lot of low-income housing and neighborhoods. Therewas a Portuguese section, a Japanese section,and a Chinese. I was fascinated by this multi-ethnic quality of Honolulu. And then therewas downtown and then places where therewere wealthy people and mansions, but I’mnot sure just where these places were. Someof them were up in the hills along the pali.But you had the feeling of being in a fairlyrural town. He took me out—I’ll never for-get it—out toward the pali, inland, througha large, what I guess would be called a slumor a ghetto, but a nice one—a clean, tropicalghetto. A tropical ghetto, with unpavedstreets mostly, but something very beautifulabout it, because there was so much green-ery. We were in the Hawaiian section. Thesewere mostly laboring people of the lower-in-come section of town well out on the edge ofwhat was then Honolulu. We went to a largepark; it was all lagoons, with Japanese gate-ways, and beautiful Japanese gardens. It musthave been acres of this. And you got into alittle boat, a little skiff, and you poled your-self out to little houses—stilt houses—on thislarge lagoon. You tied your boat up, and youwent up and sat on the mats. You sat for afew minutes. And then another skiff wouldcome with a beautiful Japanese woman in akimono, you know, with a little brazier andtea to serve you tea and dinner. I rememberthat because it was such a far cry from any-thing I’d had for weeks! [laughter] And hereI was, sitting in Honolulu in a Japanese gar-den, with all these little houses on stilts,where mostly Japanese people were eating.In fact, I don’t remember any other

Caucasians around. I always have wonderedif it’s still there. I doubt it. It was a series oflittle lagoons. And these big goldfish, koi fish.You dropped rice, they would come in droves.

He and I talked for two or three hoursabout things. The war came up, and he toldme at one point, “I’m too upset about it; Ican’t really talk about it. I’m torn in manyways.” He said, “I am not sympathetic to whatJapan has done; at the same time, I don’t feelcompletely accepted here.” And he said, “I’mtorn, Warren. I don’t know quite what . . . Idon’t like to talk about it, because I mightsay something I would regret,” and on andon.

We talked about literature and the thingswe’d read, and films we’d both been veryimpressed by—All Quiet on the Western Frontand Idiot’s Delight and a number of other filmsthat . . . . Oh, and Algiers with Hedy Lamar.We both agreed that she was a fabulousbeauty. He had seen Algiers three or fourtimes, and I told him I’d seen it five becauseI was an usher in a theater and saw it everytime I could.

So, you know, all this went on, and hedid show me Honolulu. Then that was theend of that, because he had things to do, andI was going to be leaving.

Do you remember what he was doing for a living?

I’m not sure. He was going to school,University of Hawaii. But he also had a job,and I don’t remember what it was. He wastalking about getting into some alternativemilitary group, either ROTC or something,but he was very reticent about this. It wasobviously something that bothered him, andhe didn’t really want to discuss it. But it wasa wonderful thing to have been able to seehim. He was a very fine guy and then to seehim actually after having him as a so-called


pen pal. And yet we never kept contact witheach other after that. I never wrote him, andhe never wrote. So that was sort of the endof an era.

I had to go back to the ship a couple timesto be on watch and would help with cargoloading, although the longshoremen werethere—the ILU [International Longshore-men’s Union]. By the way, that was the periodin which Harry Bridges was being attackedas a communist and slated for deportation, acase which, years later, he won. And the ILUwas very active on the islands.

But we were on watch not only to watchthe ship, but we had lots of rust to chip onthat ship. [laughter] And also, occasionally,to take turns at the winches where cargo wasloading, which I enjoyed learning.

That’s actually operating the winches?

Operating the winches. At that point Iwas ordinary seaman, so I couldn’t do it alone,but I would work with somebody, and theywould let me do it. And I found that intrigu-ing. It felt wonderful to be able to move thosebooms and bring on the cargo of pineappleand sugar . . . . [laughter]

For the war! [laughter]

Sugar for the war. For the war effort![laughter] With the attending cockroaches,a new sort—a new genetic input going intothe ship! That’s why they were so healthy—they were constantly being infused with newgenes. [laughter]

Well, anyway, one day I just took off togo to the Bishop Museum. And I rememberwalking into this place. I vaguely recall it wasvery beautiful—small at that time, but a beau-tiful building. And I walked into it, and therewas a long corridor. All this is from a distant

memory. We’re talking about 1943. Almostfifty years. Well, so give me a break here![laughter] Anyway, I do remember this longcorridor, polished floors, out to a kind of agarden area, surrounded by the building, acloistered garden. With all kinds of plants—banana, hibiscus, and orchids—everythinggrowing in it. And there was a desk and overon one side in a little room on the side, and Iwent and I said, “Is Dr. Peter Buck here?”

“Well, who are you?” said this woman.I said, “Well, I’m from the States, and I’m

on a ship, and I’ve always admired him, andI wanted to meet him.” And I said, “I wantto meet Te Rangi Hiroa.”

She immediately brightened up. I thinkshe was either Hawaiian, or she may havebeen Portuguese. And she said, “Oh! So youknow his name! Wait; I will see.” So shewent, and this little guy came out—at thatpoint he was probably in his forties. And hewas extremely cordial and polite.

He sat me down and said, “Well, I’m go-ing to have to do the hospitable thing. Ifsomebody comes all the way here to see me,I’ve got to do something.” So he called fortwo fresh coconuts, and with his little ma-chete, cut the tops off and poured the milkout into glasses. He and I had coconut milktogether. [laughter] I’ll never forget—I wasmoved and pleased about this. And we talkedbriefly about his work and about the museum.He showed me through the museum and thecollection.

Now, was he the director of the museum or . . . ?

I think he was the curator at that time.He later was director for a period of time. Butat that point I’m not sure. He showed me thecollection that he had of Hawaiian and otherPolynesian material culture—all this magnifi-cent weaving, the feather work, the


headdresses, the incised calabashes, all sortsof things that were to me magnificent, won-derful. The weapons, photographs of verysacred sites. He was doing some archeologi-cal work—he did quite a bit. He was workingon the book that later came out on the dis-persion of the Polynesians and on the Maori.I don’t remember much about it, except I wasso deeply impressed and pleased.

Do you think he was surprised that someone,you know, a seaman from Berkeley . . . ? Imean did you talk about Lowie at all or . . . ?

Yes. Oh, he was very pleased. When heheard that I was a seaman, he was even morepleased. “Oh!” he says, “I come from a cul-ture of seamen.” And I told him that I hadread of him in a class of Lowie’s . . . . “Oh,yes! Old man Lowie! Yes. Oh, fine!” And hewanted to know about the department, ofcourse. By that time I was a little separatedfrom it, but he asked was I going to be ananthropologist? And I said, well, I wasn’t sure.At that time I didn’t know what I was goingto do.

But I was very disappointed in Honoluluand Hawaii. I mean these few high momentswere great, but here was this gorgeous tropi-cal island, the world of Polynesia that I hadbeen reading about and yearning to see. Andhere it was: a rather tawdry, sad, little town,full of American sailors and soldiers, all ofwhom were very bored, depressed; drunkengroups of men going down the streets frombar to bar, and I was among them.

There’s something called Primo gin,Primo beer and five-island gin. There wasvery little available. And five-island gin wasa terrible, horrible fire water. It was the worst![laughter] I remember drinking with a groupof guys from the ship and going around frombar to bar getting very, very drunk. And then

sake—always there was sake available. I re-member one night just before shipping out,getting so drunk that I couldn’t get back tothe ship. We were on—I think it was thislittle streetcar—going out to Waikiki, andhanging onto it like a cable car. I was withsomebody else, some other member of thecrew, both of us sloppy. We were just kids,sloppy drunk, and in Honolulu.

And at one stop, where there was a bigstretch of sand, we got off, and I went downand fell onto the sand, and didn’t wake untilmorning, with the water lapping at my feet.This sudden tide had come in. And the waterwas washing over my legs, and I woke up feel-ing just horrible, but being aware of the mostmarvelous air, the sound of the sea, you know.I was still young and healthy enough to havea hangover, but still be able to enjoy life, look-ing around—“Here I am on Waikiki.”[laughter]

“Here it is! This is it!” And I guess I hadto wake this shipmate of mine up, and hewas in awful shape. But I was feeling prettygood, except for a mild headache and feelingsilly. And we went stumbling back and gotthis little tram, and got aboard ship, and tookoff.

So did you go swimming while you were in Ha-waii? [laughter]

That’s a good question. Yes, I did. Thatday when I woke up on the sands of Waikikiin early morning with a hangover, I remem-ber there was nobody on the beach; there wasnobody around in those days. And I remem-ber just taking my clothes off and in my shortsgoing in and taking a swim just to . . . [laugh-ter] just to relieve the pain of a hangover,which it did. It was wonderful, beautifulwater: Just absolutely magnificent clear, spar-kling water and surf. But the guy that I was


with, my shipmate, he was just too soggy stillto . . . [laughter] to go in. Anyway, I cameback, dried off in the sun, and put on myclothes, and we went back. A little footnoteis that seamen really don’t swim. Any sea-man who likes to go swimming, who’s alwaystalking about swimming, is immediatelypegged as a land lubber. He’s just come fromshore. He’s new. Most old seamen, the olderseamen . . . some don’t even know how toswim.

They have very little interest in going inthe water. I remember later, in the SouthSeas, they didn’t want to swim. They alwayswore heavy shoes, heavy dungarees—theywore their work clothes. Even in the hottestweather, they would have these heavy shoeson. Going around in sandals was consideredreally freaky. And they also wore their win-ter underwear. [laughter] The older guys.

The younger guys, if they’d been at seaany length of time, just had lost interest inthose things. They might swim when they’reashore at pools and things like that, butthere’s not this great interest you see gettinginto the ocean and all that sort of thing. ButI did go in there, not because I was that kindof a seaman; just that I found it very helpfulto get in the water that morning and to wakeup.

So, anyway, we got back, though I don’trecall the trip back. I think we came back toSan Francisco in middle March. We had beengone about two months.

Now, were there any incidents at all related tothe war, or did you just take this in your stride bythis time, of alerts if someone had seen a subma-rine or . . . ?

Yes, it’s interesting that I left that out. Ofcourse, there were. That Hawaiian trip, wewere constantly on the alert. And I remem-

ber the first mate saying, “With the crew wegot here, we could be blown out of the sea,and nobody would know the difference!”[laughter] He said, “I wouldn’t trust one ofthe goddamn guys (except the old seamen)to spot a sub or anything out there. Theywouldn’t even see a destroyer or a sub if itwas within two feet and out of the water.They wouldn’t see anything.” And that’s true.There was a great deal of disinterest in thatcrew. But I remember that some of us whowere on lookout, were constantly on the alert,because we got these reports of subs all aroundus, and we were alone with ships being sunkjust to the north and to the south of us. Andthese reports would come in on the ship’sradio. So, yes, there was that going on all thetime, but somehow or other, during thiswhole period, you begin to take that forgranted.

Yes, just take it in stride.

Yes. And I would only remember the fewinstances later on when we were actuallyattacked and when we saw ships sunk andthings of that kind.

At night, we had the blue lights in thepassageways. We had these pale, blue lights.These were blackout lights. And I rememberthat first night out from Honolulu, all theseguys who had been drunk ashore wanderingaround in a kind of a blurry daze through theblue lights, looking out of passageways, pal-lid and ghostly, looking like a bunch ofDraculas, and groaning and belching andvomiting.

That was quite a trip; when I think of iton the least likable ship. And it was my firstone as a regular seaman. I realized that thiswas no picnic. And Honolulu wasn’t all thatI had expected to be, and yet I had some valu-able moments there. And then I’m still


curious about the fact that I never went outto look at Pearl Harbor. I don’t remember anymember of the crew going out to look at it. Itwasn’t the thing to do. Now it’s a touristattraction.

But I think there must have been a greatdeal of denial and reticence about the place,even there in Honolulu. Nobody really wantedto think about it, look at it. It was a grave-yard and a recent graveyard. I don’t thinkthat’s all that I was responding to. I just didn’twant to be distracted from what to me wasmore important, these other things. But, yes,there was that. I don’t remember people talk-ing about it there. There was no discussionabout it.

Well, I can certainly see why you wouldn’t dis-cuss it with your Japanese pen pal. I mean thatseems almost like a matter of courtesy, but . . . .

He didn’t bring it up. Well, now it comesback to me, too, that there was a lot of talkabout the dirty, rotten Japs, “the squint eyes,”at the bars, by the soldiers and sailors andeven our guys—you know, “The dirty, rottenJaps doing this and that. ‘Squint eyes.’ We

should bomb them out of existence,” whichdidn’t take long for us to do. Yes, there wasvery strong anti-Japanese feeling. And that’s,of course, what somebody like Francis wouldbe reacting to. And I reacted to it, too.

I felt very uncomfortable with this kindof thing. Not that I was pro-Japanese, but Iwasn’t ready to characterize, to stereotypethem at this point. And, oh, yes, the cha-rades that would go on—people imitatingHirohito and the Japanese dialect and, oh, itwas even worse at that time than the anti-black feeling: You know, the “shines” and“jigaboos.”

Among this SUP crew there was a lot ofthat. When we’d see a black on a new ship,they would say, “This is a jigaboo ship,” youknow. And by the way, that got me thinkinga lot very early. All through that next two orthree years when I was on SUP ships, moreand more I became aware of the fact that thecrews that I was with were—not every mem-ber of the crew—were generally anti-black,anti-minority, deeply ethnocentric in theirviews. And that was probably commonthroughout the American life at the time.

29ON SHORE AGAIN

HAT TRIP on the Mahi Mahi was, Isuppose, where I got my feet wet,literally, and realized that the

verbal interrogation, and it was wartime, sothey weren’t too particular.

Did you have to be recommended by somebodyfor that?

Well, the union had to send you to dothis. So, anyway, on that trip also, I reallysaw—and I’ve already touched on this—Ireally saw the differences of orientationamong various seagoing people at that time,during wartime. And saw, also, this verystrong anti-owner point of view. The shipowners were really the enemies. Everybodytook that on—even new people were soontalking about the goddamn company stiffsand the phonies. Anybody who said anythingnice about a company was a phony or a com-pany stiff, a company man. And that wouldbe true of all the mates and the skipper. Evenif you had a good mate or a good skipper, theyhad to be company men. They were workingfor the company; they had to do what theydid. Oh, I remember one old guy saying, “Youknow, aren’t the companies great? Aren’t theywonderful—for being there to make jobs for

Tromance of the sea wasn’t all it was cut outto be. Though I continued to have this greatsense of excitement about going to sea, I real-ized that there were going to be some realunpleasant times, rough times. At the sametime, I was feeling very good about being anordinary seaman and doing it well, with apossibility that I might now be able to goback—because during the war they werepushing people through faster—I might beable to get my green ticket as an able sea-man. Actually I did when I got back. So Imade this quick jump from ordinary seaman,which usually takes two or three years. Butmy cadet experience helped, and then thistrip as ordinary seaman.

Was there a test you had to pass?

Yes, you had to pass a very simple test,but it also had to do with time and the shipsyou’d been on, what you knew about this orthat or the other thing. There’d be kind of a


us? Their whole concern is to make jobs forus and good conditions for us.”

That kind of deep, dark humor went onall the time. “You know, the governmentexists to make it possible for us to have jobsand to live. And the companies—they’rereally working so hard to give us these jobs.”

So that was one thing, and anybody whowas pro-company was a phony or a companystiff, as against the real radical element. Andthat included the old Wobbly types. Therewere no reds in the sense of politically leftpeople, or if there were, they kept their mouthshut, because these were highly conservative,anti-communist crews.

But was there leftist literature still available onthe ship?

Yes, well, later. Yes, I had seen it. But lateron there was a lot more of this literature onthe ships. In fact, later one problem I had

when I got dumped out of the SUP, was thatI had supposedly passed out NMU literatureon discrimination. I think I did. But that wasmuch later.

But, at this time, the radical element werethe Wobbly types, the anarchists, the oldcharacters who had been hobos during theDepression. The hobo world was talked abouta lot. Oh, and some of the older guys wouldsay things like, “When the war is over and Ican get off this goddamn ship, I’m going toput an oar on my shoulder, and I’m going towalk inland. I’m just going to walk inlandfrom whatever port I’m in. And when some-body says to me, ‘What’s that?’ I’m going tostop there, and I’m going to make my homethere. That’s my home. I am through withthe sea.”

But then somebody else would say, “Yes,but you’ve been saying that for the last fortyyears, so, you know, don’t give us all thatbull.”

Warren’s Able Seaman Certificate.

251ON SHORE AGAIN

However, there was another elementmostly among those in other unions: Theywere extremely proud of being seamen, wherethey were putting up a real fight about theseattitudes about seamen; they were demand-ing respect; they were asking for a seaman’sbill of rights, which came up as a politicalissue towards the end of the war. I was justgetting little indications of this through thescuttlebutt, through the grapevine.

And here I was on one of the worst kindsof ships at that time. All the SUP shipsweren’t that way, but this one just turned outto be a real slum bucket.

So, anyway, we got back to San Francisco.And I was ashore about a month and a half,in which time I buried myself in the prob-lems of getting out another issue of NewRejections, our magazine with DorisWoodhouse, and seeing Ellen Phillipsborn—both dear friends of mine and formergirlfriends—and then Kathy. Kathy also knewthem, and they were friends.

Kathy was working in the shipyards. AndI remember seeing a lot of her, and talkingabout the fact that she wasn’t dancing any-more, and I hadn’t really been doing muchwriting, and that, you know, we were reallycaught up in this vortex of the war, and, whatwas happening to our lives. And Kathy and Ihad a lot in common. I had a tremendousrespect for her. She was and is an extremelybright and insightful kind of a person. I justfelt she was one of the few women I’d evermet that I could have a connection with andfeel positive about. And she was so terriblyintelligent and so beautiful—an absolutelyravishingly beautiful woman. I remember tell-ing Francis Motofuji, you know, when wewere talking about Hedy Lamar. I said, “Well,I know somebody who looks just like HedyLamar and Dorothy Lamour put together, youknow, if not better.” And I was thinking of

Kathy. I didn’t really know her well, but wewere seeing each other.

So I saw quite a bit of Kathy that timeashore. We went around a lot, saw someshows, and all that, and knocked around withfriends.

Among my main tasks with DorisWoodhouse was to try to pull New Rejectionstogether, which we did, and it was quite dif-ferent than the previous ones. This one in1943 was a labor issue. It wasn’t a great maga-zine, by the way, but there wasn’t much goingon at the time, so for people at Cal and appar-ently for others who picked up and tradedcopies of this thing, it filled a niche of sorts.James Yamada [a student at Berkeley] wrotean article on the samurai, and I did sort of ananti-war free association piece called the“Inner Dialogue.” And there were a numberof pieces that were aimed either to labor orto work, because some of these people hadnow gone to work either in the shipyards orelsewhere, so they were writing about thisexperience. And then the work of GiacomoPatri, who was a well-known artist in the area,who did woodcuts of laboring situations, pri-marily of the waterfront.

Is that the issue that has the one of the merchantships on the cover?

Yes, yes.

That’s quite something to have an article aboutthe samurai in a wartime literary . . . . [laughter]

Well, it was a metaphor for fighters.

But weren’t the samurai elitists?

Oh, yes. But this was really at the begin-ning of an anti-war critique of the war andin praise of labor. Patri’s art was all about the


waterfront and also about concentrationcamps and Jews and Nazis. So we were be-ginning to get politicalized in a way andcritical.

Doris Woodhouse and Ellen Phillipsborn,of course, were very, very, very far left fromme at the time. In fact, I think Ellen wasworking for the California Labor School inSan Francisco. It was a marvelous organiza-tion. I got involved in it very much later. Butit was supported by donations and by variousunions throughout the area.

Was it to educate children of laborers or to . . . ?

Oh, no. No, the Labor School was a kindof open college, where all kinds of courseswere given by various fairly well-known fig-ures in the area—scholars who had a laboror a leftist interest. Courses on the history ofthe Negro in the United States; history ofthe labor movement; series of lectures onEnglish as a foreign language, I was going tosay! [laughter]

That’s wonderful! [laughter] I think we shouldstart one at UNR.

But in fact, I did a course in that. That isteaching English as a second language.[laughter] I love that: “English as a foreignlanguage!”

I mean one might well have called someof these courses just that. But, anyway, it wasa lively place, full of events. A lot of artworkcame out of it; crafts work; the posters thatwere later done for the strikes and things likethat, most of them were done by CaliforniaLabor School artists who were also workingin the various unions. And it was very left. Imean it was a hangout, I suppose, for mem-bers of the party at that time, as well as others.

So it was a very important center for tradeunion interests and left thought at the time.

So Ellen (Phillipsborn) was workingthere. And I remember getting clippings fromthe People’s World from her in the mail whenI was at sea—articles on what was going onin Europe, articles on race relations in theUnited States, articles on various events inthe People’s World, a lot of them having to dowith California Labor School activities. So Iwas beginning to churn around more in thatworld and in a much more serious way, be-cause these people were very serious youngpeople. Ellen and Doris (Woodhouse) weremarvelously intelligent young women, andKathy also knew them and was hanging outwith them. She knew them through me, butthen she had formed a connection, a rela-tionship with them independently, and sheand Ellen Phillipsborn got along very well.

Do you remember if there was an overt femi-nism at that time?

Oh, yes, but I don’t know what to call it.Women’s rights kind of thing. I told you aboutthat very good friend of ours, Esther Dinkin,who had applied to go to sea as a seaman alittle later in the war. And she made it, shemade a trip or two. It got a great deal of mediaattention.

And Kathy in a way was among thesewomen that we knew. Kathy was much morereticent on this; it was fairly new to her. Butshe was very forthright particularly about thewar. Women were doing work in shipyards.They were riveting; they were working asalternate longshoremen. I don’t know if theywere in the longshore union, whether womenwere working on the docks . . . I think so. Ithink that was the period in which somewomen were working on the docks. You

253ON SHORE AGAIN

know, there was a great deal of this kind oftalk, that women were wanted; they wereneeded. But, “As soon as the war is over,they’re going to try to get rid of us, but we’renot going to do this.” It was that kind of anattitude, where, “We are going to continueto demand to have this kind of work.”

Well, the gate’s been opened to the . . . .

The gate had been opened. And, ofcourse, the young women that I knew wereleft wing. It was more than just the role ofwomen and feminism or . . . I don’t thinkthey used that word then. It was women’srights, women’s rights.

But I just wondered if there was something overtin the left-wing movement that was liberating towomen.

Oh, yes. I guess I knew then, but knewcertainly better later, that a very strong partof the Communist Party’s platform was onwomen’s rights and women’s equality, andusing the Soviet Union as an example ofwomen working, doing all kinds of jobs thatmen had done.

Well, you just don’t want to waste that humanresource. [laughter]

Yes, of course. But, no, it was also a strongphilosophy.

My comment was a little cynical. [laughter]

No. That’s exactly what one could say.It’s true. I mean, who can argue that?

Women on a pedestal is a great waste! [laughter]

Of course. Well, I don’t think the Rightwould agree with you today. Their idea ofwomen as human resource is for women tobe at home with their children and takingcare of their husbands. But, no, there was thisstrong feeling—women’s emancipation—andwomen’s rights. And the Communist Partywas very, very up-front on this, as well as onracial discrimination. They took the lead; Imean they were the vanguard. And that wasvery attractive to me.

It was certainly attractive to a lot ofpeople that I knew. You know, if you wantedto find straightforward, open statementsabout the role of women in society and theevil of discrimination and what to do aboutit, the Communist Party had it, as well asthose unions that were left-wing unions.

Was the California Labor School overtly associ-ated with the Communist Party or just had thesame ideas?

Not overtly, but it was assumed by every-body, particularly the press, particularly themedia, particularly from the Right that it wasa “red school,” it was a communist school.However, it was much more ecumenical thanthat. I mean there were all kinds of people—you know, from sympathetic, to fellowtravelers, all the way to very active commu-nists, who worked pretty much in those daysin the open. I mean they admitted what theywere. So the California Labor School was acenter for the Left.

Are you doing anything at this point about yourinterest in religion other than as an ideology?

No, at this point I had become prettysecularized. I mean, always there was this ele-ment of interest in religion as a phenomena;


also it had attraction poetically. It was in asense a glorious kind of spiritual phenome-non. But organized religion was an anathemato me. I mean, I felt any organized religion,was in itself bad, you know, and corrupt. Par-ticularly Catholicism, which linked me backto my father, and then the charismaticchurches of my mother’s parents. Althoughthey were the most interesting, and they werethe most lovable—examples of simple, primi-tive religion—they were still religions. Andthe Protestant churches were to me a pallidversion and far cry from the inquisition andthe death and transfiguration in the devel-opment of the Catholic church and all otherreligions of the world. At this same time Iwas affected by the existence of large reli-gious groups, as a wonderful ceremonialphenomena. I was interested in it aestheti-cally. That’s it—I had more of an aestheticinterest in it. But, I was by that time anavowed atheist.

And you’re seeing your parents at this point?

Oh, yes. Yes.

I mean did you go home and are they gettinginterested in what you’re doing, or . . . ?

Oh, they were. My mother wrote volu-minously to me, which I’d forgotten. I havesince found some of her letters. I think shewrote weekly and very dutifully, and triedvery hard to be understanding, tolerant, andin wartime, you know, as one of the boys offto war, not to say things that would make mefeel bad. But always underneath was, “Areyou praying?” and, “Are you doing this?”

And I never wanted to say to her, “No, Idon’t pray. I don’t care about those things.”But they knew it and there was some tensionthere. But I must say my folks were remark-

ably tolerant. Now that I have also had chil-dren and seeing what happens and goingthrough their adolescence, I thought, youknow, what pain I had given them.

However, I had to give them the pain,because I was going through this learningexperience. I was assuming my own identity.But at the same time, I’m more and moreaware of what problems and what pain it gavethem, because the word got around in myhometown that I was a communist seaman—well, that came a little later—but that I wasa seaman, and that I might always go to sea.

Now, were they still in Modesto?

Oh, yes, yes. That was their home. But,anyway, later I became notorious in a sense,because there were times I got in the news-papers and things like that, but, no, at thistime they just knew that I was drifting awayinto a very bad life; I was moving in very,very bad circles. And hopefully I could berehabilitated when the war was over, and allthat.

When you saw them, would you go home toModesto, or would they come to the Bay Areaand visit you there because you had relativesthere, too?

Yes, they would visit my Aunt Edith, theone in Oakland. I’d see her whenever I could.I could always get a good meal out of her!And also I’d see my grandmother, Amalia,my Portuguese grandmother. I’d see herwhenever I could—not often, because shehad moved to Alameda, to a little apartmentbecause she didn’t have any money. She hadlost everything, and her husband had died—my grandfather had died. Oh, yes, she wouldwrite me these flowing, highly charged andeloquent Latin letters. And I began to see

255ON SHORE AGAIN

what the problem was for my father becauseshe could create guilt so beautifully about nothaving seen you, and wondering and dream-ing about you, but she can’t see “my owngrandchild.” [laughter] And, “Today is mybirthday, my dear Warren. And nobody hassent any . . . . But I will sit here and have mylittle birthday cake all by myself. Ha, ha, ha.”[laughter] Grandma’s birthday. And thenshe’d go on, chit-chat about all kinds of won-derful things. Oh, she was a magnificentpreacher, Amalia.

But I didn’t see a lot of these people. Imade a trip, I think, to Modesto betweentrips, but they knew that I was going far afield,and my world was shifting greatly, and I thinkmy mother worried a lot. But she was amaz-ingly restrained.

Were they interested in your writing and thingslike that?

To a degree, but they looked upon thatas so much fluff, you know, not about the realthings of life. They were partly right; [laugh-ter] nothing was getting solved through that.

So, anyway, all that was going on, whileDoris (Woodhouse) and I got this issue ofNew Rejections all ready to go. But it cameout after I left on my next ship, so DorisWoodhouse really did the main editorial jobthere. And that was the last issue of NewRejections, and it was a wartime issue. GeorgeLeite wasn’t in this last issue or around forthis last issue, I don’t think.

It is very interesting how the magazineshifted ground, with this element of laborawareness of the fascist and Nazi threat andthe Jewish problem with Giacomo Patri’swoodcuts of the waterfront and ships andmerchant seamen. And we were beginningto get into that swing of things. Come to

think of it, it was a very long time, three orfour years, until I was to be, in a sense, awareof the importance of unions and of a polit-ical ideology that had begun to attract me.And I was more and more attracted to, I sup-pose, not just the left literature, butcommunist literature. I didn’t have a lot ofthe major works but was very interested inthe propaganda, and read the leaflets andthings of that kind.

It all made sense to me. Oh, I had readthe Communist Manifesto. Somebody hadgiven me a copy, and I remember taking thatto sea with me, I think, on one of my nexttrips, and reading it with an enormous senseof discovery. Of course, I was working on shipsand with people who felt in an anarchisticway but radical way many of the things thatMarx had brought out in the Manifesto.

Well, it seems like a ship by definition is just thisvery discreet world that you can . . . .

A microcosm.

Yes, that you can just see an idea you have. Youcan say, “Well, there it is or isn’t.”

We didn’t talk too much about theManifesto on SUP ships. [laughter] But theideas in it were terribly meaningful to me,and they related to the kinds of feelings andthoughts that came erupting then at sea inthis little microcosm of a ship. But, no, I don’tthink I’ve ever said, “I’m reading Karl Marx’sCommunist Manifesto, and here is what itsays.”

[laughter] It would have gone overboard.

It would have gone overboard along withsome of the tools. [laughter] Indeed!


Well, that’s such a wonderful image, because Ithink a lot of other people who live in other kindsof societies besides ships wish they could get ridof things that easily, you know.

Just “give them the deep six.” [laughter]So, anyway, all that went on—this veryyeasty, busy period between ships. As I re-member, a period of great ambivalence, pullsin different directions.

On the one hand, seeing people that Ihad known who were writing fiction or poetryand seeing them publishing in not only thismagazine, but others. I was writing stories,and in fact, that year a story of mine was ac-cepted in a small mag, Interim, up north. Itdidn’t come out until a few months later. Butmany of us were writing, thinking, involvedin various kinds of activities, a feeling of be-ing avant-garde—part of that early Bohemianworld. (And “Bohemian” is a hell of a word,because that’s really not what it is.) We werepart of a world of artists and thinkers in theBay Area.

And so there was that, and on the otherhand, there was the ship, the union, and allthis, which I felt were two worlds, and yet Ididn’t disparage one as against the other. I

just felt I had to find a way to knit them to-gether. Although I did disparage what I callthe effete world of the intellectuals in Berke-ley and who were disassociated from therealities of the world. I thought I was reallygetting close to reality. Among the set that Iknew, there was this kind of snobbishnessdeveloping about anybody who had notworked and had not been out in the worlddoing things at the same time—a feeling ofinferiority, a little bit shamefacedness, likeyou hadn’t really got out there and sweatedand worked with your hands and taken part.

Well, was there an expectation that your profes-sors should be like that too, or just among yourpeers?

Yes, in fact, when we heard that Earl Lyon(a professor) from Fresno had become a lieu-tenant in the air force, we were overjoyed,that he would be the kind of person whowould do that, an involved intellectual. Yes, Iremember I saw a lot of the young guys, anda couple of the women, who had been aroundEarl Lyon, and they were coming in and outof the Bay Area. But most of them were, youknow, either in the army or the air force.

30THE SEAMAN’S MINDSET

N ALL THIS GROWING political aware-ness and interest in political things, was thereany discussion or acknowledgment of

hard and roustabout lives. There would be,when they get together, this kind of grousingabout government, about companies, aboutthe conditions that exist on the ships, andthe war itself then became somehow a targetfor blame. “Who caused this? What is thecause?”

Now, when I said that everybody wasanti-fascist, I have to modify that a bit. Youran across people who were saying, “Maybethe Germans had the right idea. Maybe Hitlerwasn’t such a bad guy.” And particularlypeople who were anti-Semitic would some-times say this. And there’d be argumentssometimes about it. On the other hand, some-times the guys would just listen, because itwas always one of those possibilities that wewere caught up in a conflict that wasn’t ofour making, that others had engineered.

People—and I’m not excluding myself—feel since they’re isolated together in a smallspace for long periods of time, a freedom toexpress opinions that they wouldn’t ordi-narily express. They find themselves reallyaddressing one another rather than address-ing the world, addressing a larger, more

Igovernment, covert government?

Oh, yes. You know, it’s hard for me to puttogether now, but just in my guts I know andremember that a lot of our feeling and con-versation would be not only that the war wasnecessary, but that we were anti-fascists. Wewere all anti-fascist, and the war was in asense an absolute necessity. But at the sametime, there was a tremendous amount of cri-tique and cynicism about the forces that wereorganizing the war effort; the fact that somuch of it was corrupt, and about the secretrole, the covert role of governments in thewar, the kinds of plans that were being fos-tered to meet elitist agendas.

This underlying roiling of dissidence wasalways there on every ship that I was on, andI’m sure it was not just on ships. I think itwas among any group of men of disparateorigins throughout the country from rela-tively low income and sometimes reallydeprived backgrounds, who had lived very


complex social life around them. They findthemselves opening up in ways that theywouldn’t elsewhere. So you really got to knowthe real opinions of the people that you weresailing with.

And there were a great many differentkinds of views that seldom erupted into a vio-lent argument, because there was always akind of a boundary at which people realizedyou can’t go any further without having afight or breaking down whatever kinds oforder there were among the crew on the ship.Now and then it would happen, but usuallynot about politics or social points of view. Itwould usually be something very personal, anargument over a poker game, or somebodyfeeling that somebody else was stealing theirstuff out of their fo’c’s’le—something of thiskind, or sometimes just sheer blowing off ofenergy, or sometimes in drunkenness. Thesearguments would erupt into fights now andthen, but not very often.

As far as attitudes are concerned, therewas a wide range, and even this view thatmaybe the war . . . maybe all the informa-tion we were getting about the enemy wasfalse, and that maybe it was all propagandato keep us going, to keep us, as one old sea-man I remember saying, “To keep us enslaved.We’re nothing but slaves here. We have norights; we’ve got no voice. We’re just doingwhat we’re told. We’re just pawns of this sys-tem!” A lot of that kind of feeling.

However, I wouldn’t say that was general,because I think there was a kind of—eventhough it wasn’t considered cool to expressit—a kind of patriotism. I mean you were outthere protecting your country, and a way oflife, even though some cynical seaman mightsay, “What way of life? Whose way of life arewe protecting?” A lot of this kind of grous-ing. But it really wasn’t taken seriously.

You said something very interesting last timeabout a number of the seamen had been hobosand disenfranchised during the Depression?

Yes. There was a large number of middle-aged, older seamen, who had been throughthe Depression and through periods whenthere weren’t enough jobs, in the pre-unionperiod—a period when you had to wait fordays and days and sometimes weeks to getthe crimps to accept you on a job. And dur-ing that period of uncertainty, particularlyduring the Depression, a lot of those men hadtraveled around the country on freight trainslooking for jobs, or were sometimes just get-ting used to that kind of roving life, and“being on the bum,” looking for handouts:And not always looking upon that as bad. Imean, looking at it in a kind of romanticway—that they had gone through very toughtimes.

Well, you were interested in that.

Oh, yes. I mean I identified with this.[laughter] They survived; they moved aroundfreely. The idea of the freedom of the hobo—there was a lot of allusions to the freedom ofthe freight train and the hobo camps and allthat. And, of course, there was a spark in myhead about that; it had always interested mewhen I was a kid.

Did you think they were sort of perpetuating amyth about their own experience, or do you thinkthat there really was an honest affection for that?

Well, both. I think both. There werepeople who looked upon that as a terribletime in their life. Sometimes men werewrenched from their families, looking forjobs. Way back in the turn of the century mygrandfather was going from lumber camp to


lumber camp looking for a job, while mygrandmother was taking care of the farm andbringing up five, six kids. There was that kindof feeling, too. But, also, one has to remem-ber that over a period of ten or more yearsduring the economic slump of the late 1920sand all through the 1930s and up to the1940s, there were thousands of men in thatkind of situation. You know, we have picturesof soup kitchen lines and hobo camps on theedges of towns. These were not all people whohad lived as hobos all their lives. These werepeople who had been thrust into those con-ditions, particularly a lot of Midwesternpeople coming out west to get away from thedrought and to have a new life. And thesepeople sometimes couldn’t find anything, andthe men usually would have to go out look-ing for jobs. And sometimes they’d end upjust roving from town to town, looking foranything, and sometimes sending moneyhome.

Others, of course, found it a way of life.It became a way of life that became romanti-cized. It was also connected with the Wobblymovement earlier—the idea of avoiding,being free of all entanglements, of all gov-ernment, and all legal entanglements; beingsomehow a free agent, moving from here tothere. Oh, there was a whole mystique ofhobo life that has even been written about—songs and poetry and a feeling of a kind ofcommunity, of the mobile community.

Well, there were some of the seamen outof that period. Some old seamen could re-member when they were younger actuallyhoboing, being roustabouts for periods of timeduring the Depression when they couldn’t getjobs. So they would either create a myth ofits glamour, which a lot of us are prone to,because they were identified with a certainorientation to life that became almost an ide-ology among groups like that.

Or they looked upon it as a terrible pointin their life, when they were estranged fromfamily and friends, and there was no order intheir lives, and there was nothing to returnto. A lot of mixed feelings. Nothing is everone way. So, yes, there was quite a bit of thatas an undercurrent. The older seamen whohad managed to sail continuously, had, I sup-pose, what might be considered now aconservative view of themselves and labor. Imean they held the old concept of tradeunion loyalties and solidarity as a kind ofideal, that hadn’t actually been implementedanywhere; nevertheless, it was an ideal—likesocialism. Trade union solidarity, trade unionorganization—intensely loyal to the idea ofunionization, the idea of working class soli-darity, but very cynical about it ever beingexpressed in social life, and certainly not bygovernments. These guys often had an oldIWW—Industrial Workers of the World—orientation, but got it from early unionstruggles and strikes. There was this élan, thisview, of the noble working class.

At the same time, a realization that theyhadn’t gotten much of anything from any-body. Therefore, doing your job well, being agood seaman, sticking to your ship, hatingthe company, as you should, and everythingthat stood for authority; at the same time,doing your job. And so the job became youridentity. Your identity was your job.

And I remember often talking to theolder men on a ship, I always found themvery attractive among the people I could talkto. They liked to talk. They wouldn’t volun-teer, but if you showed an interest, youcouldn’t stop them talking. Their view of theworld oriented around work, their job task,the evils of capitalism, the evils of class, thefact that class warfare was the only way tobreak out of the bind that we were in: But noclear idea about how you did it, except


through unionization and strikes, or throw-ing equipment overboard!

I mean, if you were mad at something thatwent on you had no way of fighting the com-pany directly. You know, how is one ship andtwo or three people on a ship going to changeanything? But you could get back! You couldshow your contempt and your anger. Youcould piss in the mate’s coffee when you tookit to the bridge. There were ways you couldexpress this anger. It was kind of sad, pathetic,in a way, but nevertheless, also very attrac-tive, this view among certain members of thecrew—this feeling of a solidarity, that theyunderstood each other on this level. And yet,also, it was a kind of dead end.

It was the end of an era, really, rather thanthe beginning. They were expressing viewsthat had been extremely prevalent and hope-ful—when there had been great possibilitiesabout change in their minds—in the past,during the great union struggles, strikes andthe anti-company riots; and the great leadersthat they had had in the past. Not only theILU, but during early union development,like Andy Furuseth, the heroic figure to mem-bers of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, theolder members.

So there was this set of myths and idealsthat these old men had. But mainly, theiridentity was their job—they dressed like asailor, they worked like a sailor, they lived likea sailor. They went ashore and got drunk andwhored and did all the right things that asailor did.

A few of them even had wives at homeand had children, but they had a sailor’sorientation to that. You couldn’t be tied toit. A sailor’s life in society was when he wasashore. But then he was off on a ship, formonths and months he was separated fromall that. You couldn’t worry about it. But I doremember at least some of the older seamen—

and when I say older, not necessarily very oldpeople, but men who had been to sea for along time and rather steadily—writing longletters home. Very long letters. Sometimesthey would tear them up before they gothome and got to port, and throw them intothe drink. [laughter] But there was this nos-talgia about something that exists at home.

At the same time, you might discover,when they talked about it, their home lifewas absolutely horrible. Their lives were dis-rupted; their relations with their wives andfamily were atrocious. They were always won-dering whether their wives were living withsomebody else while they were gone, andwhether their children were growing up likestreet kids, and all that sort thing. There wasa lot of feeling of sadness and helplessnessabout this. At the same time, a glorificationof freedom—the glorification of being ableto go and come, and get away and go back—an eternal adolescence in a way, aneternal . . . what would it be? The eternaladventure. And ship after ship after ship aftership.

It’s almost like a perpetual limbo, though, too.

Well, in a way it is. In a way it is. And . . .nothing really changed.

You weren’t “home,” whatever that means, longenough to be part of making a change or . . . .

No, you didn’t grow with the situation;you escaped from it. And yet it would beunfair to characterize the lives of a lot of theselong-term seamen as one of continual escape.In a lot of cases, that’s all they knew how todo. It’s where they felt most productive asindividuals; they knew that job. They under-stood it, and they had a feel for the ships andthe sea. So it wasn’t just a matter of escape;


it was a matter of maintaining an identity aspersons. Yet there was a strain—a constantstrain between shore time and sea time.

It’s kind of like a cause and effect. Sometimesyou don’t know which is which. I wasn’t think-ing so much that they would be escapingsomething by going to sea, but, in fact, youcouldn’t . . . the sea life also has been sort of arefuge from the frustration of not being able tofulfill a role. I mean there was no continuity.

Sure. You felt useful and capable if youwere a good seaman, at sea, and you mightfeel absolutely incompetent and the lowestof the low at home.

I think some of them had houses. Par-ticularly when I went on the Alaska run, later,I knew men who went off for a number ofweeks and returned. A lot of those men whohad been working for years at sea had homes,little places, particularly places outside oftown, or in the mountains, where they had awife who was more or less loyal to them andkids who were growing up not knowing theirfather very well, and all that. And there wasalways this kind of mystique about that fam-ily at home, that woman and those kids andthat way of life. But then I remember timeand time again, getting on a ship and the firstnight out the guys saying things like, “Oh,my god, that’s over. Wow! Off we go!” Or,“We’re heading out to sea, out to the great,wide ocean. And we don’t know where we’regoing, but we’re going to go there,” and songs.But a sad . . . a deep sadness was often con-nected with this elation of “getting away.”

Look, that affected me, too. I can remem-ber getting into that frame of mind, wherebeing ashore was exciting, and I knew a lotof people, and a lot of things going on, and Ihad ties, and all that. And yet it was duringwartime, and things were not very good.

Things were disruptive; people you knew hadgone away, and nothing was the same. Andyou had to face people like your family whowere saying, “What are you doing with yourlife?” And, “Isn’t there a better way to getthrough the war, to get something out of it,than going to sea?” That came sometimesfrom my family, my mother. And there wasalso the glamour of being a seaman and com-ing back, and all that, but it didn’t last. Thisis very short-lived, and then the realitiescame upon you: first, that you had to getanother ship, because you were compelled to;and the other was, “What would you do ifyou didn’t have a ship? How would you sup-port yourself? How would you get along?”And that became more and more a seriousproblem for me as the war went on, and, asI’ll talk about later. I stayed at sea for a fewyears after the war because I didn’t know whatelse to do. I guess that whole problem hadtaken root in me. You know, what was I go-ing to do?

At that point I had a wife and children,and it became a very serious conflict in me. Iknew I couldn’t go on doing it, but how toget out of it, see. And so I have a lot of sym-pathy with that view that develops in peoplewho have gone to sea a lot, for a long time.It’s a deeply ingrained sense of two worlds—of shore time, of sea time. And sea time wassometimes a great relief, a great, boring, end-less, routine, disciplined relief from therequirements of ordinary society. [laughter]

Well at sea, you can’t face all the choices thatthe society and your family are imposing on youto do something.

Yes, that the world imposes on you andsociety imposes on you. And a ship is a smallsociety in which you can control to somedegree your own role in it. Your role is even


ascribed to you. And then you can play withit, and you can dissent against it. You can besomehow a freer person—like the mess roomconversations that I was just discussing.People could express their views and notnecessarily be afraid that they were going tobe ostracized for them, or that it was going tohave repercussions or implications in a widerworld around you. Oh, the things that wouldgo on in terms of interpersonal relationshipsand talk and conversations that would go on

for weeks and weeks on a certain subject.None of those guys I don’t think would haveoccasion ashore to talk like that. That wasnot the arena nor the setting for them to doso. But somehow this kind of enclosed envi-ronment allowed a tremendous amount ofinner turmoil and concern to be expressedopenly, sometimes in the most marvelous, elo-quent, colloquial ways. My notebooks areloaded with this.

31A PERIOD OF YEASTING

Y NOTEBOOKS are not travelogs.I mean I have a hard time findingwhere I was or where something

reality of these other lives. So I guess I be-came an enormous voyeur. I mean I was justlistening to everything—fascinated, amazed bythe way people talked and what they had tosay, the various points of view, the stories oftheir lives, which were unbelievably distantfrom my own. Things that had happened tothem, which I felt were marvelously arcane—the mysterious things that happened to them.Their relationships with women, their rela-tionships with family, and the relationshipswith other people in the worlds that theylived—were all new to me, and I absorbed it;and my notebooks are full of that. Hardlyanything about where we were going or whyor what we did. [laughter]

Were you conscious of trying to learn how tocapture the essence and everything that was goingon around you, so that you could communicateit later as a writer?

Oh, yes. All through that period, I was awriter in my mind. That was what I was, whatI wanted to do, the arts and literary criticism.

Mwas written, you know. I sometimes don’teven note what part of the world I’m in. I’mtalking about what people on the ship aredoing and saying—not even much aboutwhat’s happening practically in terms of theship and its cargoes and its direction or any-thing of that kind, but what individualhuman beings were talking about. I was be-ing a writer, listening to people, getting thecadences of their expression, and the waythey expressed themselves about things wasa most fascinating thing to me.

So it wasn’t just understanding what was goingon around you, but it was learning how to com-municate or what was going on with other people.

Learning how to read and understandwhat was happening. Being absolutelyamazed. I was very young then, I thinktwenty-two, twenty-three. It was for me, anew world, and a world that I had never expe-rienced or even had any inkling of—the


And I did a hell of a lot of reading. Oh,gosh, I read more in the few years of my lifethere from 1938 through the 1940s, than Iprobably have ever read since, including myprofessional work, you know. [laughter] Imean, just a great absorber of everything—also, all kinds of odd stuff. I’d read pamphletsand leaflets and the writings of other mem-bers of the crew.

There was always somebody who was notonly a great raconteur, but a great creator ofverse, of rhymed verse, usually so goddamndirty and scatological I couldn’t even men-tion it here, but marvelous. I mean justbeautiful stuff. I would take that down. Therewas one or two guys I remember used to keepvery elaborate diaries, and they would let meread them to comment on them. Well, now,I couldn’t help but putting some of that inmy journal because it was so beautiful. I mean,the language that was used, the way peopleexpressed themselves. Yes, I was absorbed bythat.

And you said that sometimes people would askwhat you were writing.

Yes. Right. On my next trip with the JohnB. Floyd is when I started taking a typewriteraboard, a little, portable typewriter. I thinkit was on that trip, too, that I may have takena little Victrola, a little wind-up Victrola, andI’d play La Mer out on the deck at night. Thatwas after I got . . . you didn’t do that rightaway; you waited until people knew you, andthey knew you were a little nuts and screwy.You had your own kinds of screwiness, andthey had theirs, and, you know, it was allright.

But my typewriter later gave me a lot oftrouble because I always was elected as ship’sdelegate because I had a typewriter! [laugh-

ter] So I was ship’s delegate on most of theships that I took later—not these early ships.

I’m not sure I know what a ship’s delegate is.

A union delegate. The union guys wouldhave a meeting. Sometimes there’d be a ship’smeeting, but usually the union meeting wasof the deck gang of the Sailor’s Union of thePacific members. And they’d elect a delegateto be their spokesman, to go to the bridgeand complain about something or go to ei-ther the galley or to the bilge rats of the blackgang, and keep a little record of the beefs sothat you could present them to the unionwhen you got back. You had to make a re-port to the dispatcher when you got back, orthe patrolman who came aboard the ship.He’d ask, “How’s the ship been, boys?”

And the delegate would have to comeand say, “Well, here’s our record of beefs andour comments,” if it was a good ship or not.So the delegate had that kind of a role. But Iwasn’t the delegate on this trip. I was just anew able seaman, so I was rather careful notto extend myself or allow myself to get intothat kind of position.

But, yes, I was writing all the time. Andwhen I had the typewriter, I couldn’t type inmy fo’c’s’le unless the others were gone, be-cause there’d be two other guys in thefo’c’s’le—three to four men per fo’c’s’le. Prettycramped quarters. And you learn very quicklyto know your space and not to interfere withothers sleeping or even just their privacy andtheir being alone.

So how to be alone with three other guysin a small, six-by-eight fo’c’s’le, or six-by-ten,was not easy, but you learned. You learnedjust to leave people alone. And sometimesyou wouldn’t talk to your bunk mates for days.If somebody didn’t want to talk, you just left


them alone: Didn’t even show that you wereaware of it. So there was a lot of that. WhenI needed to, I would either go into the messroom at night, if it was empty, nobody wasusing it, or I’d go out on deck if the weatherwas good. I’d type up letters.

I have to mention again that I was veryseriously interested in Kathy, KathleenAddison. We had seen a lot of each otherearlier, before I got on the Mahi Mahi, but Isaw a lot of Kathleen in this interim period,after the Mahi Mahi, when I was trying to getout the New Rejections, along with DorisWoodhouse, and seeing a lot of my friends.And I began to think, you know, maybe thiswas serious and I should give it some veryserious thought, so I wrote long letters to her,typed. We still have those. They were glori-ous. [laughter] They were glorious letters!There was more in my letters than there wasin my journal.

My journal was the soil from which Iwould put some of these letters together. Andthey were so full of myself that it makes mecringe now, when I look at them. I mean Iwas entirely involved, absorbed in myself andwho I was and what I wanted to do and whatI wanted to be. At the same time there was aglimmer of the growing interest in Kathleen![laughter] And so I wrote a number of letterson that trip on the John B. Floyd that I tookright after.

Circle became, in the next year or so, thebeginning of a very influential small maga-zine in the country, along with New Directionsthat was the older, more established, avant-garde magazine. And there were a number ofother small magazines—Interim up north,edited by Will Stevens.

There were a dozen or so small magazinesin the country. It was a period of a great dealof yeasting—writing and new work in thearts. And George tapped into that very well,

and his magazine was really quite impressive.It went through twelve to fourteen or fifteenissues, and I think now would give a very in-sightful picture of what was going on in theBay Area, although it became more nationaland international. There are a lot of peoplefrom other areas represented.

Was it based in Berkeley?

Yes. And Big Sur later. Henry Miller wasliving at Big Sur, and he really stimulated alot of this. His writing was something likeJames Joyce, who was on a much larger scale,and Kenneth Patchen, a number of others.Oh, and Anaïs Nin—a number of avant-garde writers and thinkers were emerging atthat time. And Miller, because he had beenin France and then got a lot of notoriety be-cause his work was banned in the UnitedStates, was something of a guru for a numberof people. And George was one of them. Thatrelationship, I suppose, really had a lot to dowith George starting Circle and getting itgoing. It reflected this very sophisticated,avant-garde world that was active, at thetime.

Were Kenneth Patchen and Anaïs Nin contribu-tors to Circle?

Yes, I think Patchen a few things; AnaïsNin, a number of articles; Henry Miller, ofcourse; and Paul Radin, some of his littlepieces were in there. Radin was a wonderfulcharacter, when I come to think of it: [laugh-ter] He was part of all this in a way. Thenpeople like Robert Barlow, who later com-mitted suicide and was an extremelyimpressive young poet at the time. RobertDuncan even had some things in there. Oh,a lot of people: musicians, composers, mostlyavant-gardes of the new wave of modernism.


Was there art?

Varga was one; Dalí. I think they gotsomething from him; right now I can’t re-member all of them, but it was part of anextremely exciting, experimental and adven-turesome literary scene of the time. And itwas pre-Beat. This was in the 1940s. George,unfortunately, has passed away. But he’s tobe specially commended, I think, for gettingthat little magazine going—with a lot of helpfrom others.

I had a story in it that I had written in1943 or 1944—“Deep Six for Danny,” Ithink. But it didn’t get published in Circleuntil a year or so later. It got Circle bannedin Australia—I was very proud of that![laughter] And a story “Blue Peter” gotaccepted by Will Stevens for Interim up inSeattle. I was writing other things and laterpublished some other stories. But these wereyeasting at the time.

Also, I have to say that not only was Ireading Joyce, who had a great impact on mystyle—not that I think that my style wasJoyceian—but it opened up all sorts of possi-bilities in the way of expressing oneself, theways of talking, ways of writing, ways of han-dling sentence structure and handlinglanguage. Joyce was a great eye-opener to mein that; Finnegan’s Wake, I remember I didn’tfully follow it, but even though I couldn’tgrasp the whole thing—I couldn’t do a cri-tique of the thing—the language and thetremendous openness and freedom of mov-ing with words into situations, into character,and into environment, was to me very im-pressive. And I think I absorbed some of that.Also by Henry Miller. Henry Miller, I foundexciting, freeing, argumentative, revolution-ary in a way, because he was absolutelyunrestricted in what he could talk about orwrite about or say—and did it. There was

something to me courageous and marvelousabout that. It affected me and a lot of otherpeople I knew. So I think that time has togive some credit to Miller for impact.

That’s a really nice distinction between some-thing having a tremendous influence on you andactually being a model for something that youemulate.

Yes. Well, in a way they were models,because they were successful and had doneit. So they were a kind of model, but only inthe sense of a kind of person who had done akind of thing, not necessarily a guide to everyaspect of style or every aspect of thinking,you know. Though there were people whodid take them that way. I didn’t. I guess Iwasn’t that intense of a literary thinker inthe sense of taking on someone else’s style. Ihad my own.

But you were very geared at this point towardwriting fiction, right?

Mainly, mainly fiction. Except when yousay fiction, it stops me. I didn’t think my writ-ing was fiction.

Well, it stops me, too.

Well, I mean it’s a good question, becauseyes, I suppose it would be called fiction inthe sense I was writing stories. At the sametime, I never thought of it that way. I thoughtof it as my observations of the world aroundme and how I saw it. And if I wrote aboutsomebody, it was through my eyes; it was thereality that I saw in the world around me.So, yes, fiction, stories, and I was also writ-ing poetry. It wasn’t very good, but, you know,I think some of it would stand. In fact, I didpublish some much later, and I resurrected it


along with other stuff, and used it on a fewoccasions.

Yes, I would say my whole orientation andgoal at that time was to write. Now, I can’tsay “be a writer,” because I didn’t think of itas a profession. I didn’t think of it as any-thing but something you did as a way of life,along with what you were doing—that I sawthe world in terms of interpreting it and writ-ing about it. And so phrases like “being awriter” or “writing fiction” had no place inmy thinking at the time. I was just being. Iwas just being a kind of person. So that wasthe frame of mind I was in.

Meeting Kathy began to make me thinkof what I really wanted to be later and whatkind of life I wanted to live: And was it atime for me to have a relationship? It was abit more constant than the ones that I’d had,and I’d had a number which were casual andfrivolous and all that. This was somethingserious. And she was the kind of person thatI felt I could be with that way. She was themost communicative, communicable womanthat I had met. I mean we understood a lottogether, and I could talk very freely with herand have a lot of fun with her. And I under-stood her life to some degree. I think sheunderstood mine, but I don’t think wellenough to realize she should have stayed tenfeet away from me! [laughter] But I was apretty loquacious and an elegant contriverat that time about myself, so I may havefooled her a bit. Nevertheless, I was very seri-ously interested in her during that interimperiod in the early 1940s.

I was also seeing a lot of my old friendsthen, and hearing about them. LeonardRalston, for instance was a young composer—I think a brilliant young guy with tremendous

possibilities. He had gotten a scholarship atthe beginning of the war with Roy Harris, awell-known American composer in Coloradoat Boulder. So he’d gone to Boulder with hisnew wife. But that didn’t work out becausehe got his 1-A draft notices and had to dosomething.

And for the next two or three years I washelping him go to sea, and he finally wentout as an electrician on some other ships. Hehated it. He despised going to sea, because Ithink Len was really a city guy, and he wantedto be back doing music and living in theworld that he knew. But he did it.

He was also a very good electrician. Heleft music some years later and had a busi-ness with electronic materials and soundequipment. He constructed and sold greatspeakers and hi-fi equipment and installedthem in various buildings and homes. But I’vealways felt, “Here is a guy who was on hisway to becoming a major American com-poser.” And that disruptive period during thewar affected him as well, you see.

It was happening to a lot of my friends. Ihad the fear at the time it was happening tome—you know, “Where is this going, andwhat am I going to do with my life?”

It was like that horrible thing that youngpeople hate when some older person sits themdown and looks them in the eye and says,“What are you going to do with your life?”

You want to kill. I mean, you don’t know!You want to run and hide. And I was doingthat to myself. “Where is this going?” Thatwent on for a long time. But I knew onething—that I really felt very close to Kathy,and that I wanted to maintain that connec-tion. So that was going on.

32THE JOHN B. FLOYD

EXT I GOT ON the John B. Floyd.It was another liberty ship that hadgone through a great deal, and it was

happened to that ship, nobody would be ableto get out in time. It was a death trap.

Oh. It sounds horrible.

And we knew it; the seamen . . . we’d godown there and take a look at where theseguys were going to go.

And then just before sailing, I forget howmany hundreds, but hundreds came aboard;some Seabees, some army, a mixed militarygroup of these young kids! I mean I wastwenty-two, twenty-three, but they looked tome like twelve and thirteen. I mean they werejust little, pale, skinny kids. Oh, not all of them,but I mean you had the feeling you were deal-ing with pubescent kids. They were actuallyeighteen, nineteen, and some older. Butwhen you looked at the group, you saw a massof kids—trying to look like they were savvybut scared to death—looking at this [laugh-ter] horrible old ship, coming aboard up thegangway, some of them for the first time awayfrom home. They’d just come out of bootcamps from all over the country and were on

Npretty well beat up by the time we were onit. It was a troop ship. This was the first oneI was on; I went on others later. They hadturned it into a troop ship by gutting out allthe holds in between decks. They set up hun-dreds of cubicles with bunks piled on eachother, five, six high, in all the holds, line afterline of them.

Six bunks high?

Yes, but all over. I mean you went throughlittle corridors, through rows of these stackedbunks. And I remember when I got on theship, the troops had not yet come aboard.When we went down there, I didn’t ever wantto go down again. It was nightmarish. In thefirst place, they’re right near the engine room,and we’re going into the tropics, and at timesthey had to close the hatches; and they hadtheir own mess room between decks some-place. And you could just see that if anything


their way to lord knows where. They hadsome idea it was to the tropics because of thekind of things that they were given.

Did you know where they were going at thispoint?

No. Those are the days when you weren’ttold. You heard rumors—usually the rumorswere right—that we were going to the SouthSeas. But nobody was sure. Some of therumors where we were going to Midway; we’regoing to Honolulu; we’re going to Okinawa.Okinawa wouldn’t have been possible for us,but Christmas Island and places like that werestopping-off places for routing people fromone place to the other. Or Australia, youknow. But all this was speculation. In fact, Ican even remember somebody saying, “Ah,well, they’re probably going to ship us toAlaska. This is all just to keep us off the track,you know.”

So, anyway, here are these kids gettingon the ship. It took them hours to get on.And here they were, climbing down intothese holes, these deep, dank, empty holesfull of bunks! And the bunks are numbered,and they all had their numbers, and there wasa lot of shouting and argument about whosebunk was whose.

And that was a full cargo, the weight ofthat number of men. I’m trying to think howmany hundreds. It had to be over three orfour hundred, but I can’t remember. It mayhave been seven hundred. But I can remem-ber people saying, “Oh, a thousand souls onthis ship,” or something, but I doubt thatthere were that many.

But I’ll never forget that feeling of, “Thisis the war that we are really facing now. Thesekids are going somewhere, where most of themmight get killed. Or we all might get killedon the way by subs.” And the fact was a troop

ship meant that we would be tagged by sub-marines, since, you know, “Loose lips sinkships.” Somebody would say, “It’s a troopship,” and then, of course, it would be trailed.

Were you going to be in a convoy?

We weren’t. I was on a number of tripswhere you’d get convoyed sometimes nearyour destination. But, no, I don’t think theJohn B. Floyd was. Oh, we were convoyed forabout a day outside of San Francisco, becausethat was a dangerous area. There were subpatrols all along the coast. At least that wasthought. But, no, when we got well out, wewere on our own.

They just didn’t want you to sink in sight of landand depress everybody! [laughter]

Yes, well if somebody had thought of that,it would have been said, because that was justthe kind of thing people said, you know: Theydon’t want all this blood on the ocean nearthe beaches. “They don’t want us stinkingup the coast.” [laughter] But, no. No, therewas a shortage of convoy ships.

And did you have gunners on?

Yes, there was a gun crew. But they werekind of lost among the rest of the militarytroops.

When we got out to sea, three-quartersof them were sick. And I can remember be-ing out well beyond the Farallons—we weregoing south of the Farallons—but headingout, the first two or three days, where thestench of vomit was so great on that ship, Iwill never forget it! And I felt so sorry forthese poor kids. We were at least up in theair, you know. We felt privileged. At least wewere up there in our fo’c’s’les that had port-

271THE JOHN B. FLOYD

holes and ventilators. They had ventilators—great big ventilators, actually cargoventilators, all over the decks. You’d turnthem around so you’d catch the breeze, anddirect the wind down there. Well, then, ofcourse, it had to come out. And so the venti-lator would spew forth this stinking, horribleodor of decaying human beings down there.And they couldn’t come up because it wastoo rough the first day or two. So they weredown there sick.

And, you know, moaning and crying, andyelling, screaming at . . . . It was like a slaveship. A lot of them were very brave and tak-ing it well. But there were a lot of kids therefor whom this was the end of the world. Theydidn’t know where they were, sick, . . . . Iremember kids calling for their mother, youknow: “Hey Ma! Ma, where are you, Ma?”You know, that kind of thing. And so thentwo or three days later, we got fairly calmweather. I can remember, we opened thehatches, and these sick and horrible-lookingkids were climbing out on the ladders, outon the deck and breathing air.

Well, then from there on things got kindof warm after two or three days. We were get-ting in the latitudes where it was somewhattemperate. But there were certain times theycouldn’t be out because of sub alerts andthings of that kind.

Because they’d be seen, and they’d know it wasa crew ship or . . . ?

Well, not that. No, the fear that they’dthrow things overboard, make noise, or Idon’t know, there were rules about the timethey could be out and I can’t remember whatthey were. Well, whenever there was an alert,they had to be down. But, nevertheless, whenthey were on deck they had to take turns.There were so many that they couldn’t all be

on deck at one time. I can just rememberthem pouring out, taking deep breaths of air,and, you know, some of them running to therail and puking again. And so many, some-times, on deck, that they were like sardines.They couldn’t find a place to sit, and theywere shoving each other. And actually manywere fairly good humored, making a joke outof it. Well, many did. But some couldn’t makea joke out of it; they were too miserable. Andthere was a lot of kindness, too, some of themhelping the others. Oh, I can remember guysholding onto some of the younger kids andhugging them to keep them from crying.

We had to work among these guys! Andwe got to know some of them, but there wasa distance between us and them and someresentment on their part, because we wereliving in, to them, elite quarters. I mean ourlousy fo’c’s’les were to them, you know, “Geez,you guys got bunks, only three or four guys.You’re eating the best chow on the ship.” Andour food probably was better than theirs—but not much better. They were eating armyrations and, you know, how can you feed thatmany guys? So we would take food to them. Ican remember some of us stealing food fromour galley and taking it out to guys we knewon deck. That, of course, created some resent-ment; we had to be careful.

And then we had to cut down on the useof fresh water. We might be gone for a monthor more going down, and with that manypeople, you couldn’t have fresh water show-ers. So everybody—including us—had tohave seawater showers. Well, that then cre-ates secondary problems, like rashes and boilsand itching and all that, because you can’trinse yourself off. [laughter] Seawater willeventually—particularly in the crotch andunder the arms—cause havoc. You start tosweat, and you have seawater salts.


So I can remember a hundred guys or twohundred on deck tearing their clothes off, andbuckets over the side, and throwing water onone another. That was their showers. Andthat is a scene to see that many men runningaround naked, throwing water on themselves,and cleaning themselves. And then doinglaundry.

Oh, in saltwater, also?

In saltwater. I have done that many times.It is not pleasant. I like the smell of it, but it’sstiff, and if you tend to rashes and irritation,I mean it’ll really do it.

One of the ways—we taught many ofthem how to do this—you just put a line overthe side with your clothes on, and leave itthere for an hour, and if it’s not torn to shreds,you would have relatively clean clothes!Well, that was brought to a close because itwas thought that if any of those clothes gotloose, that would be a sign. You couldn’tthrow garbage over the side; you couldn’tthrow anything over the side.

We were very concerned about subs onthat trip, because there was every reason forus to be a target, and particularly when wegot down close to the equator. There weresupposed to be some buoys that had been setup by the navy—buoys for marking distances,well out at sea. I don’t know quite how theydid that, but they were gone. And word gotto the radio operator that the subs, Japanesesubs, had shot out a number of these. So wecouldn’t use those for navigation or direction.

But those days of watching these ex-hausted, frantic, desperate guys climbing outof the hatches in groups to get air and to cleanthemselves and to wash their clothes wassomething that I will not forget. And, youknow, there were times, particularly in the

tropics, when guys were out on the deck andsunning themselves. Well, then, of course, ahundred of them would have such severe sun-burn that they were practically dead. I meanwe didn’t have enough ointments on the ship.The purser didn’t have enough ointments toeven give them relief, and some of them wereseriously burned—second-, third-degreeburns. So the warnings went out—I evenhave the directions that were put out bySparks, by the orders of the captain aboutsunburn. “If you stay out fifteen minutes, youcan expect to have three days of misery,” andall that sort of thing. So then they had to bevery careful, and they’d stretch tarpaulins tobe under and all that.

But just to be out there, just breathingair, you know, sleeping in the air as long asthey could—a couple hours, three hours—and then they would change a group. Andall night long, there would be these chang-ing of the groups. And as soon as there wasan alert of any kind on—frequently some-body might have seen something or heardsomething—everybody had to get below.

When you say “frequently,” just to get a senseof it, do you mean maybe once a day or . . . ?

Two or three times a day, maybe. Some-times not for a whole day, but then some daysthere might be two or three alerts. The crow’snest may report they had seen something.

Oh, we saw planes, and assumed that theywere ours because of where we were in theeastern Pacific, going down. On the otherhand, they didn’t need to be ours, becausethe Japanese could have made it that far. Sowhenever we saw planes on the horizon—and at one time a whole squadron came overus, and, oh, there was tremendous elation, youknow, with our planes—but whenever you’d


see planes and you didn’t know who theywere . . . down below decks for these guys.

And everything’s on close alert. Garbagepiled up for days, because only now and thencould garbage be thrown over at night—ifyou felt that you were going to make enoughtime between the garbage and the morning,so that any sub finding it would not knowquite where you were. Or if the currents wereright, so that it would not tell where you werein relation to the garbage. Otherwise, thegarbage stank for days—just piling up, full ofmaggots. I can remember seeing barrels ofnothing but maggots from top to bottom![laughter]

Well, I suppose they were taking care of garbagein one way. [laughter]

Oh, yes. Well, we had jokes about thefact if we ran out of food, there’s always themaggots! [laughter] And guys telling howthey were stuck on a lifeboat for days andthere were some maggots in a tin can, and,“Oh, they’re pretty good; they taste prettygood!” [laughter] So there was a lot of that.

But it was on that trip, as well as the pre-vious one, that I felt I was a member of thiskind of gang and mixed crew; this was a cos-mos. This ship had everything. Kids from allover the country, of all kinds, all ethnicgroups, except blacks! There were a fewHawaiians.

Are you talking about the crew or troops?

We called the troops the passengers. Thatwas a euphemism. They were mostly white.Except you’d see a darker skin now andthen—Hispanic or . . . I don’t think I sawany Filipinos, certainly no Japanese.

Any Indians?

Not that I knew, but there were a few thatcould have been. And two or threePortuguese kids that I got to know. They werefrom Hawaii; they were Hawaiian Portuguese,and very nice kids. We sort of struck up anacquaintance because, you know, I had thisidentity. We were “Portugees.” And theydidn’t really speak much Portuguese; neitherdid I, but there was this shared ethnic iden-tity, and they were really great guys. I reallyliked them. We talked about the islands, andthey sang some songs. They knew someHawaiian songs, and I would steal food forthem. They had a good reason to be pals withme. [laughter] I would bring bread down andsandwiches, you know, of horse cock—theselong baloneys. [laughter]. And I’d bring slices,great big hunks of that with what bread wehad. This was against the rules, but every-body did it.

And so there were those kinds of rela-tionships. And then the equator. That wasthe most elaborate and the most fantasticcrossing ceremony I ever experienced. I wentacross the equator many times with thoseceremonies, but this one was unbelievably wild.It was a Romanesque orgy. Well, more thanthat—it was from outer space.

When these guys got wind of the fact thatyou were supposed to do certain things whenyou go across the equator, it was taken out ofour hands, really. I mean the crew had verylittle to do with it, except to say what wassupposed to happen. Here were hundreds ofmen dreaming of things to do against theseothers and to work off steam. A young navyjunior officer of some kind was made the king,King Neptune. And they found some kindof stuff to put on him to make him look likea king. And then there was a young kid. Itwas really in a way kind of pathetic, becausehe was obviously very effeminate and very,very fay, as they used to say. “Gay” wasn’t even


a word you used about this sort of thing inthose days.

Queer was more like it, or “homo.” Andwhether he was or not isn’t the point. Hebehaved in a way that gave credence to othersthat this was the case. So they chose him forthe queen. And he was queen. They deckedhim out with red paint on his lips, and a gar-ish . . . it was a marvelous sight to see—theking and the queen sitting up on coils of ropethat were their thrones, holding forth.

And then the polliwogs and shellbacks—the polliwogs were people who hadn’t beenacross the equator, and shellbacks are theones who had been initiated. And, of course,I and the crew, most of the crew, wereshellbacks—just a few were polliwogs. I in-vented on that trip the name “throw-back.”That was for all of us who weren’t really partof all this, but were watching. We were thethrow-backs; we’d been around too long.

And it was orgiastic. In the first place,King Neptune gave orders that everybody hadto strip. So there was . . . [laughter] there washundreds of naked guys running around,looking very sheepish: And they had to tietheir clothes up into knots and throw themin the hold. So the idea was, you’re going tostay like this until arrival. And then therewere paddles. I don’t remember doing thiswith the regular crews. [laughter] They hadheavy paddles that they had put together, likeoars, and everybody had to run through agauntlet and be paddled. And there weresome guys with welts, deep welts, on theirbutt. I mean everybody had red butts, andthis was crazy. If you didn’t have a red butt,you weren’t initiated, you know. I mean hun-dreds of guys getting . . . you could hear thisslapping and whacking, and screaming andyelling and laughter and sounds of pain, andall that.

And it got very serious. In fact, a coupleof the officers had to come in and stop it attimes. With these guys it just out of hand. Alot of loose energy that no one knew what todo with, and a lot of cruelty, you know. Sothis went on all afternoon. Actually, it wasorgiastic. It was an orgy of pent-up feelingand anger and cruelty and fun—all mixed uptogether.

They had to do all kinds of strange things;I forget what they were. Then eventually,when they were declared to be shellbacks,the clothes were brought up from the hold,thrown out on the deck; they all had to findtheir own clothes out of this morass, and argu-ments taking place—“Whose roll is whose?”

All that, and finally they were able to puttheir clothes back on. Some couldn’t get theirpants on because their butts were so swollen.I mean it was something.

So that was getting over the equator onthat trip. And I’ve taken a long time talkingabout it, because it was to me a very impres-sive affair! [laughter] And frightening. I wasso glad I wasn’t part of it. Some of the crewhad to be in it because they hadn’t goneacross. But, then, everybody now is ashellback, so that creates a sense of unity, youknow. Everybody now has done it. Most ofthose guys had to be initiated because onlymaybe about a dozen out of the hundreds hadever been across the equator. They were themeanest, and they were the ones who did theworst things. And so we got across the equa-tor—hot and steaming.

And you still don’t know exactly where you’regoing.

Well, by that time we knew we were prob-ably going to Samoa. I think we knew by thenwe were heading for Pago [Pago Pago, mainport of American Samoa].


But I just remember that trip through thetropics. I’d been in the tropics before, but youhave an open ship and ways to get around,and you would have ways to escape heat andall that, but these guys didn’t. The ship getsdeadly hot. All the steel of the bulkhead andeverything just gets sometimes too hot totouch, and all that metal was heating up theholds, and there wasn’t enough breeze some-times for the ventilators to work. And theseguys were suffering. I mean they were sickand suffering, and coming up gasping on deckto get some air. They had to be herded, be-cause everybody couldn’t come up. And Iremember a number of days like that.

They had to stay out of the sun, so wehad to set up tarpaulins for them. Thenthere’d be a storm, and we had to take all thetarpaulins down. [laughter] We had to do alot of the work, but they did a lot of it bythemselves.

I remember guys going nuts. Young kidsjust starting to scream and yell and get hys-terical, and running up on deck, and throwingthings overboard, throwing whatever fewthings they had or anything they saw—just,you know, wild, and having to be controlledand sedated. A lot of that.

So my feeling was I was seeing the war atlast. This is no fun. This isn’t just a ship.Then, at the same time, I was having a lot ofmisgivings about my own role and what I wasin the world, of course. And I had this feel-ing of being a dilettantish, middle-classcharacter, like some of the others on the ship,coming aboard and just observing and watch-ing, and feeling aloof; and that I really wasn’t,that I was just a slob like everybody else,[laughter] and; you know, a feeling of havingbeen something of an elitist and looking uponmyself as special and; “What is this god-damned business of being a writer and anintellectual and all that?” A real sense of self-

criticism and . . . and sometimes shame aboutbeing on a different level than some of theseothers—a real sense of class differentiation,too, that I had come from a middle-class back-ground, lower middle class, but middle classand professional.

My identity had been with my grandpar-ents, and my great-grandparents, and then Irealized that that wasn’t the way I was living.I grew up in that early kind of impoverishedenvironment, semi-impoverished, but alwayswith the idea it was going to get better, andthen it was, and that essentially I had beenrebelling against a middle-class life.

And then the word bourgeois began tohave relevance to me. Oh, there was a lot ofwriting at that time—James Farrell and anumber of others were using the term bour-geois about the middle class. And I wasthinking, “Here I am, a bourgeois ass, goingto sea, thinking that I’m . . . oh, I’m specialbecause I’ve had some schooling, and I havelofty aspirations. And, really, these guys, mostof these guys, are better than I am in everyway.” And, you know, a lot of self-defacementgoing on, and beginning to really understandand feel this kind of dissent that occurredamong most of these people who come fromdifferent levels of life, about the hypocrisy ofpropaganda and the role of the bourgeois, themiddle class, as against the working class.

And I remember a man, a guy calledCarlson, whom I got to know and liked verymuch—an old seaman. He said, “You know,not only are we just slaves,” he says, “we arepawns, we are tools in the hands of the bour-geois and of the owners. We’re nothing butpawns. We’re just pushed here and there, andwe never rebel. We never say anything. Wejust do it and complain. But we don’t do any-thing about it.” He was the same guy wholater on in the trip gave a great oration downin the mess room—one of those nights when


everybody was feeling lousy, and there wereguys sitting around playing cards and all that.And somebody had mentioned somethingabout God, you know—well, sort of a reli-gious guy who said, “All we can do is rely onGod now.”

And Carlson stood up and says, “Whatdo you mean God? What does God got to dowith it? And if God has anything to do withit, why should he be praised?” And he said,“I don’t think that there is a God. I am agoddamned atheist. And I’ll tell you why.”And he gave this long oration that was bet-ter than anything that I’d ever read in atheistliterature.

I mean it was very scatological, and a lothad to do with sexual behavior and how theworld . . . . “Is this the world that your Godput together? And did your God create thisgame we’re playing now out here in themiddle of the Pacific Ocean? And those poor,poor bastards down there in the holds, Godhas created them to do this, too? While some-body else makes all the money and gets allthe loot, we’re doing all the work.”

And he said, “Now, anybody who thinksthat I’m wrong or is shocked at what I said,come with me. Come out here to the bow.”A group of us went, about eight, ten of us,followed him out to the bow and there wereall these soldiers down below sleeping—thiswas at night. We went out to the bow, andthe ship was rolling, and it was sort of a clearnight with the moon over on one side—avery tropical kind of night. And he said,“Now I’m going to show you.” And hereached up, and he says, “If you’re a . . . ifthere’s a God here, if you’re a God, strike medown! Strike me down now! I beg you, Sir,strike me down.” And he stood with hishands raised like that, and then nothing hap-pened. And he says, “I beg you. If you’re there,these poor assholes over here, they believe

you exist. Do something! Here is your chance!You can have conversions!”

I remember feeling shocked. I mean in away I thought, you know, this is kind of great,kind of wonderful, but it was shocking, be-cause the other guys with me were sort ofscared and deeply troubled. And they werewatching him and looking at the sky. [laugh-ter] And I had the feeling, even kind of asuperstitious feeling, “Maybe something willhappen. This guy is making a big case out ofthis.” [laughter] And then I remember himfinally saying, “Well, you sure are a failure.You poor son of a bitch up there. You can’tdo . . . .” Oh, he was just carrying on muchmore eloquently than I can reproduce. It wasan eloquent speech. I wish that I could havehad a tape of this guy’s eloquent atheism, andanger, and yet wit and humor.

And then he turned around; he says, “I’msorry, boys. The guy just didn’t comethrough.” [laughter] And for days afterwards,some of those guys would wonder and say, “Issomething going to happen to the ship?”[laughter] “Has he cursed this ship? Hashe made this ship . . . ? The hell with theJapanese. [laughter] And the heck with thesubmarines. We’re worrying about what hedid up there.”

Yes. It’s one thing to be an atheist and to say youare but . . .

Then to have the theater, the localtheater, to do it on this scale, in this way.But, you know, things like that you neverforget. I’ll never forget Carlson.

Was he an able seaman?

Oh, yes, he was an old able seaman and agood seaman. But he was foul-mouthed, andhe was bitter. He was witty, and he was, I


think he was against just about anything.And he was against anything that was pre-tentious. Oh, he took me on a number oftimes, and I . . . .

Oh, did he?

Oh, yes. Well, in a good way. I mean hewould put me down and make me feel like atotal heel. You know, things like, “Well, thatwas pretty fancy and eloquent of you, Daz.You must have some education!” Things likethat. And I’d get a lot of this ribbing fromsomebody like him. I mean he was a sharpcharacter. He said, “Well, I guess I just bettershut up, because guys like you know, and Idon’t know nothing. I’m just a poor, simplefucking sailor, you know. I don’t knownothing.”

Were there other people on the crew that hadcollege educations, though?

Occasionally, yes. In fact, I would say anumber on different ships I was on, yes. Theywere called college boys. “You college boys.”Yes, and I was able often to avoid that be-cause I was very careful. If I’d get in anargument or discussion with somebody, Ilearned very quickly not to talk in my usuallanguage, but to talk rather straightforwardly.Not to talk down, because it was so out ofplace, I mean, so incongruous to use certainlanguage, though it happened.

I even have things in my notes wheresometimes two or three guys would get to-gether, and there would be some of the mostbeautiful, eloquent conversations in a highlyliterary form. I mean a lot of guys had done alot of reading; some read Chaucer; I meanthere were some seamen that read Chaucer,had read English literature here and there,read the Bible. And so sometimes the lan-

guage of these things would come croppingthrough their colloquialisms. And that wasto me fascinating—this wonderful mixtureof levels of language.

So, no, it wasn’t all just the dregs ofhumanity on the ships. Although there werethose, too, who didn’t give a goddamn aboutanything, and who didn’t even want to work,who, you know, were people who were to-tally disenchanted with the world andthemselves, and drank a lot, and even ondrugs.

What kind of drugs?

In those days, you could get opium. AndI think marijuana was available, but what wasit called then? There was a name for it, butnot “weed.”

Oh, yes. It starts with a “g”? [ganja]

I don’t remember. It wasn’t common. Imean if they did it, you didn’t know about itvery much. But there were guys that you knewwere on something. Drinking, mainly. But wedidn’t talk much about drugs because nobodyknew much about it, except we knew thatcertain guys did it and were high on some-thing. I forget what some of the things were.But they had things you could get. Thewaterfront was easy to pick up all kinds ofthings. As you’d been abroad, you could geteven more, you know.

So, aside from that level, which later inmy ideological life would be referred to as the“lumpen,”—the lumpen proletariat, thosewho had nothing.

The lumpen?

They were the “lump” part of the world,the dregs at the bottom. Aside from that—


and they really weren’t—there were very in-telligent, able, clear guys. There were thosewith lots of problems, a lot of neurotic prob-lems—difficult, mixed-up, lost souls. Andsome others who had aspirations—when thewar was over, they were going do all kinds ofthings, and probably did become lawyers, andsome had been teachers and were going togo back and teach in schools. So there was atremendous variety of people. And on differ-ent ships you had a different mix.

And for each ship that you went on, were youalways with a completely different crew?

No and yes. For the most part, but some-times like later on the Henry Failing, therewould be pretty much the same crews. So ifthey liked the ship, they liked the run, they’dstay, and then you come on as a new personamong a crew that had been there. You’d fillin for somebody who had left. That was quitecommon. You know, you can make a ship ahome.

That was said ironically. Some of theseold characters made ships their home. Theystuck in there; nobody else could get on be-cause they liked the ship, and the grub wasgood, and they had good relations with thecaptain. [laughter] Oh, yes. The guy whowould say, “I polished your brass and kissedyour ass. Can I have another run on your ship,sir?” [laughter] That was the joke about theguys that stayed on one ship all the time, thatthey must have had some kind of special re-lationship with the captain or the mates.“Can I have another trip, sir?” But, yes.

And then I was on ships where I wouldgo on with partners—two or three guys—with Bob Nelson for example, who was onone later on the Alaska run, and Trot Ikensonand others, where we’d try to get on the shiptogether, so that we’d know two or three

other guys. I learned that system later, butthese were my first trips, and I just took whatI could get.

So, it’s on this trip, I believe, that I metBob Nelson, yes, for the first time, a youngSwedish guy. He became one of my closestfriends. Kathy knew him and liked him.What a wonderful, morose Scandinavian kid.Not a kid; he was probably in his late twen-ties. A very intelligent, wonderful guy. I thinkhe was in the same watch with me, samefo’c’s’le, on this trip, and I got little by littleto know him. We would talk a great deal. Hewas an extremely morose character in what Iwould call the Icelandic madness way. PeerGynt was his favorite—Ibsen, and he couldalmost recite it. He felt that sort of northern,mystical sadness. And Grieg, you know, thePeer Gynt suite. He brought the recordsaboard later, because I had this little Victrola,and we’d play the Peer Gynt suite. And he’dget very, very morose over it, deeply morose.When he’d get drunk, he would just turn intoa melancholy, angry man, you know. But hewas a great person and a good seaman.

And he was big. So later on when I be-came a ship’s delegate, and often got intotrouble aboard ships or ashore, he was almosta bodyguard. [laughter] Boy, I was glad to havehim. Nobody wanted to take him on.

I have in my notes early discussions withhim on the ship about race relations. Andhe was very . . . what we’d call today, racist.He thought Jews were parasites, and the onlything that Hitler had done right was to holdthe Jews down. In those days it wasn’t reallyadmitted that the Jews were being slaugh-tered—you know, but that he had put themin their place or something like that. Andwe argued. Oh, and Trot was on that ship.Trot was the red. His name was Ikenson, butwe called him Trot, Trotsky—not that he wasa Trotskyite. I didn’t know enough to know


the difference between Trotsky and Stalin inthose days. But, anyway, Trot was a Jewishkid who was very red. I remember him justblowing up at Bob one day in the fo’c’s’le andsaying everything that I had wanted to say:“Who in the hell do you think you are? I’m aJew, and I ain’t rich, and I don’t know manyrich people, and I’ve worked all my life, andwhat in the hell are you talking about?” Thosekind of conversations were terribly revealingto me.

Bob, also, was very anti-black—the“jigaboos.” And he was glad he was in theSUP, because they didn’t have checkerboardcrews. Checkerboard crew is where you hadall kinds of people, and all that. He argued alot, but somehow he learned from argument.And later on, when I knew him, he hadchanged; he was very careful, and I thinkactually his views changed. But despite that,we liked him very much, because he was adeep thinker. He would think a lot. And hewould think over and reflect on what hadbeen said. And he’d argue with you reflec-tively and try to find arguments, and thensometimes would agree that you had made a

point. You know, when you’re sitting aroundfor weeks and weeks on a ship, it was won-derful to have people like that you can talkto, so he was one of those.

So I got to know him, and Trot. Thesetwo guys I knew for the next few years. Kathygot to know them, too. In fact, Trot was ourbest man when we got married the followingyear.1 Bob wasn’t ashore, but Trot was there.And he brought us a gift. It was a deer-handled wine bottle opener. [laughter] Onethat he got at a junk shop in Seattle on thewaterfront. And I still have it; it’s just mar-velous. And some red literature—I forgetwhat it was. I mean like the Manifesto.

But, anyway, Trot was aboard that ship.So the three of us determined we were goingto ship out together later, and we did for anumber of trips. Partners, they called it, shippartners.

Note

1. Kathleen d’Azevedo insists that Bob Nelsonand not Trot Ikenson was the best man.

33POLYNESIA AT LAST

Y THE TIME the John B. Floyd gotwithin sight of Samoa, there was anescort. We had a destroyer escort for

Oh, yes. I knew quite a bit; I mean, notonly Peter Buck’s work, I’d read a lot of SouthSea literature and adventure tales and thingsof that kind. And Pago Pago was like goingto Tahiti. Papeete and Pago—these are theplaces to go.

It was absolutely glorious in those days.The only thing that indicated change was thearmy post that was there—a naval post, armypost—and a lot of buildings on one side ofthe bay where we had a base. The rest of thebay was just as pristine . . . I understand thattoday it is just one mass of housing. It’s a citythere. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’veheard so. And there were all these Samoanvillages, along with their fa’alee [a Samoanhouse]. These beautifully woven huts, wovenpalm-thatched roofs and poles, open verandatype of housing. And the people were stillgoing around in lappa; the women woresarong-type garments. That’s not the wordthey used. But anyway, still wearing theseearly clothes, and some even wearing wovenfiber clothing, and others dressed in westernstuff that they got from the army and navy.So it was still pretty pristine.

Ba day, I think, coming in. And by the timewe got there, I’d say that ship was in prettysad shape internally. I mean there were somepretty upset, lonely, sick guys among thesehundreds. They had a lot of spirit, too, youknow—ready to go to war, ready to do theirpart, whatever that may be.

Ready to get off the ship!

Get off this ship and . . . yes, well, get-ting off the ship was terribly important tothem.

And we came into Samoa, and here I wasfinally in Polynesia, you know, as opposed toHonolulu. And here was Pago Bay—Pago thebay and Pago the Rainmaker, that beautifulmountain overlooking it. This little, oval bayat Pago. Absolutely beautiful. I mean I hadthis feeling I was entering paradise.

Now, had you read about Samoa?


And I think Mead had written somethings by that time on Samoa. Yes, I’m sure Ihad read her. But that wasn’t my real readingabout Samoa; it was the adventure literatureof James Norman Hall and people like that,and Robert Louis Stevenson, that sort of ear-lier literature. But I was familiar a little bitwith the ethnology of it.

And the first day that we were there wehad to do a lot of the unloading, with thearmy, too—we all longshored. And I got thefirst taste of what happens to American cargoand produce, all through the war and cer-tainly I’m sure even today and elsewhere—I’llnever complain about the old Wobbliesthrowing stuff overboard. Anyway, we werebringing beer ashore. First, the troops left. Ithink a few stayed on because we were tak-ing them somewhere else. But most of themleft, shouting with joy as they got off the ship.But when we were unloading these great bigsling loads of beer, cases of beer, every loadthat went over the side, the winch driverwould sort of slow down, and somebodywould throw a case over off into the sea along-side the ship. So when you looked down tothis clear, beautiful water, there must havebeen hundreds of cases of beer down there,and some of these Samoan kids would be paidto run down and bring up bottles of nice, coldbeer! [laughter] There would have beenenough there for, I would say, a multitude,from all the different ships that had come andloaded beer over the side. And a lot of otherpilfering went on, too.

Was it mostly beer, or were there other thingslike that?

Oh, there were other things. Tools, itemsof clothing, toiletries; for girlfriends, anythingyou could pick up. Cigarettes . . . oh, ciga-

rettes were the main thing. Cigarettes werethe most highly pilfered items, I think.

But they weren’t dropped into the sea?

Oh, no. Just cases of beer . . . easy to putit down there refrigerated until you wereready to use them. So, you know, at nightthere’d be a line of people going and divingdown or sending somebody to dive down tobring up beer.

But then the other stuff was just pilfered justto . . . ?

Just picked up and taken, yes, or diverted.A case of something or other that waswanted—a case of cigarettes might just dis-appear.

Did you get a sense that it was some highly orga-nized sort of black market scheme or just . . . ?

Not there, but in Japan I saw the army,in a highly organized system, diverting largeamounts, where a truckload would go this wayand another truckload would go that way forsomebody else, yes. And this happened allover. It’s bound to happen. But, no, this herewas a wonderful kind of pilfering.

Ad hoc. [laughter]

Well, it was also kind of beautiful. I meanright there in Pago harbor, beer being refrig-erated! And I would say it was a pretty orderlyplace. It was quiet; there were, I don’t knowhow many hundreds of thousands there, butit seemed a well-organized place, and I wasvery happy about that.

And while we were working one day, get-ting cargo off . . . I don’t think we took

283POLYNESIA AT LAST

anything on that I remember. Oh, yes, wetook on some jeeps and trucks later. Anyway,there were some young Samoans helpingunload. And they were in breechclouts andvery strong, young guys. Samoans are verywell built and very energetic. And there wasone young kid that got his hand caught in achain and practically lost a finger. I remem-ber that he didn’t say anything. It must havebeen extremely painful, and he stopped workand came over with his dripping hand, andsort of holding it up. There it is, you know.

Well, I grabbed him and took him downto our fo’c’s’le, and we got some bandages andcleaned up the hand and wrapped it up. Andhe was sweating and in great pain. We gavehim some aspirin or whatever it was we had—painkiller and all that. And he went back towork on deck! [laughter]

This kid, Samuelo, came back aboard theship with his hand all bandaged. He’d got-ten it bandaged at one of the dispensaries, Isuppose, the army dispensaries ashore, andhe had a nice bandage on it. And althoughhe really wasn’t working too much, he wantedto be there, because I guess he got paid. Hehad come from Apia, the other island, theNew Zealand-British-mandated island. It’scalled Western Samoa. And he’d come overto stay with relatives so he could work at thislongshoring. When he came aboard, hebrought me two coconuts, and some beauti-ful fruit—what were they? Like mangos orsomething and a ring made out of tortoiseshell that he tried on me. He wanted to see ifit would fit, and it did fit, and then he said,“Wait,” and then a couple of days later hebrought it back, and he had inlaid it withsilver, with “Sam” on it. [laughter]

Yes, Samuelo. And, you know, it was verytouching. Obviously I was his friend. Andone day, about three days later, he asked mehaltingly—he couldn’t speak English very

well—did I want to go ashore? He wouldshow me part of the island.

So I remember this wonderful day whenwe wandered along the beaches and thesecoconut groves—what Samoa must havelooked like in the old days. It was quite beau-tiful. And he was very friendly, but wecouldn’t really communicate much, but it wasa very wonderful feeling. He was obviouslyvery thankful and grateful to me.

I remember we were sitting on a rockthere—this was on the sea side, not on thePago port side. It was overlooking the sea tothe south and the southern part of the island.And I was just barely able to talk about thewar, and he was saying millions of people,millions of people die, “Huh? Huh?” he said,“Huh?”

And I said, “Well, a lot, a lot.”And, “Oh,” he said, “it’s terrible. Millions

dying?” And the word “millions” obviouslymeant that he didn’t know any other largenumber. But, you know, he meant to ask if alot were dying. I said, “Yes.” And he says theirpeople are sad, very sad, and he was crying,you know, how terrible this was.

I know I had this feeling I was talking toa really sweet, simple person. He was a verynice, young guy. And so I said, “Yes. Well,” Isaid, “that’s just the way it is.”

He said, “Well, their . . . “ he was tryingto find the word.

I said, “Their souls?”He says, “Their souls must be very un-

happy, you know. They’re away; they’realone . . . alone.” And then he says, “Well,that’s the way it is.” And there was a littlecrab on the sand, and he picked up this littlehermit crab. He reached in, and pulled it outvery carefully. He took out the little crab fromthe shell. It was wiggling around in his hand,and he says, “My soul is like that.” Then heput it back in, and he let the little crab go.


You know, things like that I found very mov-ing, very touching. And then he asked me ifI wanted to meet his family. And so a day ortwo later, I went with him to this little fa’aleethey had, very nice little house on one sideof the . . . .

“Folly” is what?

Fa’alee is a house—an open, sort ofshelter-house; Samoan, woven, thatchedhouses, with sometimes plank floors. Thefancy ones are polished, where the chief livedwith his beautiful daughter—the princess, theprincess of Pago. [laughter]

For real?

Myself and another guy from the ship, wefollowed her one day home. She was carry-ing something on her head—a basket orsomething. Her walk was so beautiful. Shejust swayed, and she was a beautiful, youngwoman. And she was walking way out to theother end, under the Rainmaker, where thefa’alee of her father, the chief, had a numberof large palisade houses. We tried to get toknow her, but she was very uppity; shewouldn’t have anything to do with us.[laughter]

But, anyway, Samuelo . . . I met his fam-ily with his mother and two old guys—oneof them may have been his father—and acouple of brothers and other people, and thentwo very beautiful sisters, just lovelyPolynesian girls. And we went in some sortof cart—we went over to the other side ofthe island on the beach. And all afternoonthey played music, they danced, they sang;they made a kind of a luau—you know, theyhad a roasted pig. I had a real wonderfulPolynesian day. I danced with these girls; itwas just wonderful—or you danced by your-

self. Everybody was sort of dancing. Some-body had a ukulele and was singing Samoansongs. And I was in heaven. [laughter] I’dreached the epitome. Nothing could be bet-ter than this. And if I’d’ve stayed longer . . .Samuelo told me that one of his sisters likedme, and we should see each other. And therewas no time for this, but I was very intriguedby the whole situation. [laughter]

Oh, yes. And what did you say the Samoan wordwas again for the sarong?

Pareu, pareu. I’m not sure that’s the rightword, but I believe so. It’s for lappa, for whatwas called sarong and all that. It was a wrap-around of beautiful cloth.

So this was all brought to you by a mangled finger.

Just for helping to wrap up a finger. Hewas terribly grateful. And he kept showing hishand to his relatives. “This is what he[d’Azevedo] has done for me,” you know,“Everything is going to be fine” and all. LaterI wrote to him, or he wrote to me—he had afriend who could write English, and he wasnot bad when he could write, but he had anawful time talking. And he wrote these let-ters from Apia, said that his finger was notany good, but that it had healed.

Did they have letter writers?

He had a relative, I think, in Apia, whowrote for him. But he could write a little, andhe sometimes did write, and it was kind ofhalting writing. He was going to school,learning English. And so we exchanged twoor three letters. He wanted to go to NewZealand or something, I forget now. But thatwas a wonderful time. And I remember hissisters. They were everything I thought


Polynesian women should be. [laughter] Theywere beautiful. And one of them liked me.

Oh, when I left the ship, I went down tothe beach, and I got a little hermit crab. Thatwas my souvenir, aside from the ring that Ihad gotten from Samuelo. I got a little her-mit crab and put it in a dish, in a bowl, andhad it in my fo’c’s’le. And when I’d get up inthe morning, when we had left, I discoveredthe little crab had crawled out of the bowland was somewhere around in the fo’c’s’le,and I had to take it and put it back in itsseawater bowl. It obviously didn’t like that;wanted to be away. I had that hermit crab forat least two weeks after that, after a numberof escapes. But when we got up into the tem-perate zone, it got cold, and I’d find that hewould leave his shell and climb around look-ing for a way out. And I’d find him all full oflint; it had wandered around in the fo’c’s’le.And if I saw a little ball of lint, I knew it wasmy crab. I’d take him, and, like Samuelo,clean him up and put him back in his shell![laughter] And he’d stay there for a while,but he’d soon be out. The little guy finallydied.

So after we loaded at Samoa, we left andwe had a few troops still on the ship. We madeanother stop two days out at the ElliceIslands. We had on board a fat, little man,from the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.He couldn’t speak English, and he was veryreticent. He had no clothes, as far as I remem-ber; if he did, he didn’t wear them. He justwore some shorts, and he had a little, fat belly.He looked like a little gnome, a little Buddha.He was a man about fifty or so.

The story about him was that he had leftBikini, because he had heard that things werenot going to be good there. And this was wellbefore they were removed from Bikini in1945 or so, to other islands nearby. But there

was something going on there already, so hewas going to see relatives in the Ellice Islands.

I remember him sitting out on deck allday long and sometimes half the night, sit-ting on the hatch all by himself, looking upat the sky. This poor, old guy. I tried to talkto him, and I knew his name at one point. Iwas saying, “Your name, your name.” And itwas something like Papadagu or somethinglike that, and we used to call him “Papa.”And he was something of a mystical charac-ter—just sat there with his legs crossed, notsaying anything to anybody for two days, nearthe garbage buckets. Right near the garbagecan, and he didn’t mind. He sat there, andhe would eat his meal by himself. He’d comein and get a big, tin plate—it was really akind of a wash basin. And the galley manwould put his food in all together—hewanted it all together—potatoes, meat, vege-tables, everything, salad and everything inthe plate. [laughter] And he’d go out with abig spoon, sit all by himself and eat. He gotoff at the Ellice Islands.

Funafuti has become a kind of emblemfor me of one of the most beautiful, classicalatolls in the world. There were others, I’msure, but I saw Funafuti, this small, little atoll,about a mile long and, oh, five hundred yardsor more wide, with a magnificent lagoon. Youcome into this wide, open lagoon, with white,sandy edges and a coral reef all around it. Youcome through a little opening into this quietlagoon bay, with a small, flat island layingout, covered with palm and white sand, glis-tening white sand. And I was in the crow’snest coming in, rolling back and forth, andlooking down, I could imagine the water wasa hundred feet deep where we were. I couldsee, like old Lake Tahoe, all the way to thebottom, with these beautiful fish swimmingby. These schools of brilliantly colored fish


and a sparkling, effervescent water—abso-lutely beautiful scene. We just came in andwe dropped our lousy anchor there in themiddle of this paradise. [laughter]

The rest of the troops, I guess about ahundred and fifty or so, got off there. Andthen we had to unload on the barges oh, gosh,all kinds of equipment that we had on deck—jeeps, and I think there were a couple of carsand things of that kind. And the whole ques-tion was, “What are they doing here?” Theatoll was so small that I could walk around itin one afternoon, all the way around, in anhour—just walked around the whole atoll.[laughter] And there were hundreds of soldiersthere, camped, and jeeps and tanks lined upall the way across the island! And we werebringing them more! I remember one of theseguys, the pursers or something, from the armygroup that came aboard, said, “Oh, forChrist’s sake! What? What more arethese . . . ? [laughter] We don’t need them!Take them back!” They had to take themashore.

These things are probably still there rot-ting, and this happened . . . you know, wardoes this. Waste—enormous waste. Nobodyhad told them that they were supposed to pickup stuff and take it somewhere else, not leaveit there. They had no use for it. There wasone sandy road across the center of the island,and there were guys just going back and forthwith jeeps just for the fun of it. I mean, theywere just zipping back and forth. [laughter]And that was very sad to see.

And then there was a little glade on onecorner of the island where some ElliceIslanders were living. I’d say . . . oh, it was alittle camp of about two dozen people—families. And I was fascinated by them. Youknow, they were just over there in the cor-ner of the island. Now and then they werecalled upon to help with certain tasks and

jobs. But they were just surrounded by aliens,and the plans were for them to ship out. Oh,this old guy that was on the ship, he joinedthem because he had a relative among them,and the story is that they were going to beeventually taken to some other island becauseFunafuti was going to be abandoned. It wasjust a little atoll, and there were bigger atollsnearby.

But I remember one night I stayed therelate—a beautiful night. And they were hav-ing a little party. They were playing drums,and they had a uke, and they were singingbeautiful songs. I guess they were Fijian. TheseEllice Islanders would be Melanesian; theywere probably connected more to Fiji thanto Samoa—I’m not sure. They were aboutfive, eight hundred miles north-northeast ofSamoa. And so they were connected witheither Fiji or Samoa.

But they were going to be moved, any-way. And they were having a little dance,and I danced. They forced me to go up, andthey put a grass skirt on me, along with theothers. Anybody who was taking a lead dancehad this skirt wrapped around them. And so,you know, I tried to dance, and I danced.Everybody was very happy, and they were sing-ing and drinking. What were they drinking?I think it was gin. It was very hard to get, butthey may have had beer from the army. Andso I was there until midnight or somethinglike that, then back aboard my ship. And thenext morning, before we left, one of the guysthat had been there—one of the older men—came with this grass skirt and gave it to me![laughter] And I still have it. It is probably arather good museum piece—an Ellice Islandgrass skirt—very stiff kind of skirt. And eachof the palm leaves is backed with paper. Andthe paper is from a handwritten, SamoanBible. You know, they had stripped it downand used it as a backing. It’s just marvelous—


some poor, old missionary had painfully writ-ten this thing out; [laughter] somebody hadfinally clipped all the pages off and used it toback a grass skirt! So that was another one ofthose touching moments—you know, gettinga gift like that.

So that was the end of that trip—theEllice Islands. And somehow or other we gotback; I forget whether we made . . . . Oh, wedid make another stop. We had this terriblyheart-rending stop by Tahiti. [laughter] Wehad to go there for some reason. I think we

were taking a route to get away from reportsof submarines, and we were taking a south-ern route around to come back. And weanchored in the bay of Papeete, but wecouldn’t go ashore. [laughter] I could see thismarvelous place that I had wanted to go to,with little Papeete over here and a few build-ings, and we passed Muroroa and all that. Butwe only spent one day there at anchor. Andthat was enough to make me want to slit mythroat. And then I think we came back toSan Francisco.

34SHIPBOARD HIERARCHY

O WE LEFT that remembered para-dise and headed for home still withreports of sighted submarines all along

attitudes about themselves and about theworld.

Briefly, I suppose I should sort of enumer-ate what the divisions were on the ship.There was first the bridge, which includedthe captain and three mates and often apurser, whom we saw as representing the com-pany; and Sparks, the radio operator, wouldbe somewhere in between. The Sparks’ quar-ters on any ship were usually on the bridge,along with the officers. But Sparks was a kindof a free-roving character and could movethroughout the ship and be sort of accepted,particularly if his personality was the kindwhere he wanted to identify with the crew.But on the other hand, I can remember therewere radio operators who spent all their timewith officers and didn’t really come downamong the crew. However, most of them did.

The crew was intrigued by them, becausethey were technicians. Also, they had theirear to the news, and they’d had sometimes akind of a vocational education, which gavethem a certain prestige, an intellectual pres-tige, I suppose. And they were often a littlefunny and screwy in their behavior. They

Sjust north of our route. That’s why we hadspent the day in Papeete, was to wait forreports that things were fairly clear on theroute that we’d be taking—a sort of an east-erly route and up, oh, some distance fromSouth America and Mexico, north to SanFrancisco.

But I think I should say something aboutthe structure of shipboard hierarchy and atti-tudes about that, because I was becomingmore and more aware of these kinds of divi-sions among groups on ships and what thatmeant in terms of the social situation at homein the United States. A ship is a little micro-cosm; and certainly this ship had been a verylarge microcosm with hundreds of troopsaboard when we went down, and with a guncrew and with the regular crew. But I think Iwas doing a lot of thinking; at least the fewjotted notes, the garbled notes, that I havefor this trip indicate that I was thinking aboutwhat it meant to become aware of the waywork situation and position affected people’s


were either reclusives or philosophers orranters and ravers or sea lawyers, as we allcalled them—people who always were cor-recting our irrational view of things with arational picture of things; correcting us withregard to astronomy, geography, navigation,how ignorant we were.

And we didn’t even know half the timewhere we were, what latitude or longitude,and Sparks always had a pretty good idea. Wedidn’t know what was going on in the out-side world most of the time, and Sparks hadthe news. He knew in this particular periodon this ship, for example, on the Floyd, thatthe Japanese were being slowly driven north-ward. The battle of Midway and the CoralSea had gone on with some successes on ourpart, on the Allies’ part. And although Japanhad New Guinea and a good part of theAleutians, they were being driven backslowly, and that MacArthur and Ridgwaywere pressing northward. [General MatthewRidgway commanded the 82nd Airborne Divi-sion and the XVIII Airborne Corps duringWWII.] And all these things most of us werenot really aware of: We didn’t have newspa-pers, of course—and I suppose our interestsweren’t there. Our interests were on our ownreminiscences and our own interrelations onthe ship.

So here was the bridge, on the one hand,with the officers, and then somehow thisanomalous position of the Sparks, and thenthe working crew, which was made up of sortof three major divisions. The black gang, orthe engine room crew, who, of course, keptthe ship going and were essential to our wholeoperation, and whose work was always for uson deck, sort of mystifying because they spentso much of their time down there in that dark,hot, noisy, almost frightening kind of envi-ronment of the propeller shaft with the soundof the screw and the boilers and all those dials,

the mysterious dials, and iron ladders goingall the way down to the bilge, the bowels ofthe ship. And the few times that some of ushad to go down to get the deck engineer orthe chief engineer or tell him something, Ialways found it was like going into Hades. Imean this was the depths. So it was really aseparate world. However, the engine gang atewith the deck gang.

The deck gang were the men who wereon watch and were responsible for work onthe surface of the ship—the decks and therigging and, oh, anywhere on the ship thatwe might be asked to work. We also took ourturn in watches at the wheel and on thebridge, where we came in closest relation-ship to the officers, because there was alwaysan officer, a mate, on duty. And the captainwould come up periodically to check thingsout—the skipper. But at the wheel with justa mate was sometimes a chance to converseand to communicate with the bridge—Imean after a long trip we were curious whatthey were thinking, what they were doing,and they were very curious about us.

There wasn’t much direct socialinterreaction between the bridge and thecrew—except individually, you might get toknow somebody. And, you know, one timewhen my friend Bob Nelson was a third mate,and I was the delegate on the ship, which I’lltalk about a little later. We would share allkinds of information about what was goingon and created a lot of havoc because of that.But, nevertheless, there was this division ofnot only one’s work, but orientation due toone’s place on the ship.

Now, you said that the engine room gang had adifferent union. Is that right?

Yes. The MFOW—Marine FiremenOilers, et cetera. I don’t remember the full


name. They had a separate union, and I thinkat that time they had become CIO—I’m notsure. A little later they were all in the CIO,along with the National Maritime Union,which was another seamen’s union.

And also the steward’s department hadits own union, the Marine Cooks andStewards. And they had not only differentwork and the galley as their main place ofwork, they had their own section of the crew’squarters. And the number of them varied.There was always a chief cook. There wasthe steward, who was really something of anofficer and lived in the officer’s quarters.There were the cooks and the scullion help-ers and the mess men. And they were usuallymixed—Filipinos, sometimes blacks, some-times Caucasians, Hispanics. This was aunion that very early had diversified its mem-bership and was in those days considered aprogressive, red union, like the NationalMaritime Union.

And then the deck gang, which the shipsthat I was on at this point, was Sailor’s Unionof the Pacific. So they not only had differentunions, different sets of regulations and rulesabout their work, but they had a differentorientation about the ship—but not com-pletely.

There was a sense of being a member of acrew, the working crew, that included thethree departments: engine, steward, and deckdepartments. And we felt in a sense like anation. I mean we were the crew of a par-ticular ship. Nevertheless, within that, therewere these differences and tensions, havingto do with the requirements of our jobs.

And always the steward’s department gothell from everybody. And it was built in; itwas a kind of a way of life to see the steward’sdepartment as the “belly robbers,” as theywere considered as never turning out ade-quate food. They seldom did, and when they

did, they were never praised. Just that no-body would say anything! [laughter] Most ofthe time it was the place to raise your beefs.And I would say most of the beefs on theships that I was on had to do . . . not most ofthem . . . a lot of them had to do with food,the quality. Well, like on the John B. Floyd,when we were going down with the troopsin that terribly tight, sardine-like morass offlesh that was on that ship, there were two orthree weeks when everybody on the ship wassick with the runs.

But this isn’t really fair. There were somany possible things to which the sicknessescould be attributed; it is mind-boggling—from the way people had to live and thesharing of very tight air space, the fumes com-ing from the engine room, the sewage wasonboard, and all those things. But thesteward’s department was singled out. It wasthe food, of course. And there was some rea-son to think so, because not only with thedeck gang crew, whose galley was different,it was not the same as the galley in the messfor the troops. Nevertheless, there was a sortof sharing of food to some degree, of passingmaterials back and forth. But for the troops,in particular, I have one of the dispatcheswhich the Sparks on that ship put out to ev-erybody on the ship, saying that, “It is thefood, and it is the unsanitary conditions cre-ated not only by the cooks on board this ship,but by the food served us and the way it sitsout for two or three days, festering in theheat,” on and on, but probably the main thingis that the troops have to wash their owndishes. And they go through the galley, dip-ping their plates and cups and things, all inthe same water, and rinsing them off and wip-ing them off. And undoubtedly this is one ofthe things that has spread whatever this bac-teria is that is affecting the crew.” And, ofcourse, then the deck gang on the ship and


the engine gang began to say that that’s whatwas happening to us, because people weregetting ill. And so the poor, darn cook andthe steward were constantly berated withaccusations that they were poisoning theship, and they were belly-robbers, and thatwhen we got back on port, all of our unionswere going to get them. [laughter]

And, as I remember, it took a great dealof either strength or an ability to distanceoneself from what was going on to be a stew-ard and a cook, or even a mess man, becausethe mess man got it first. I mean, everybodywould yell at the mess man about what wasgoing on in the galley and what was comingout of the galley. And particularly, when oneof the cooks served—this was one of two orthree times that it has happened on ships—what was called “mountain oysters,” whichare sheep testicles. [laughter] And it alwaysseemed to be the last resort, when food gotshort, out would come the mountain oysters,as they were called. And, of course, a few ofthe crew thought they were great, becausethey had been used to them by living inColorado or Wyoming or where it is thatsheep testicles are removed by the ton. Butthis was, of course, cheap food, and the warshipping administration was obviously allow-ing this kind of thing to come aboard ships.

So, we had that and sometimes the worst,most horrible liver that one could ever imag-ine. I mean it was old tough liver. And that,along with the mountain oysters, was some-times too much. That happened once on thisship, and people threw it over side, and therewere big arguments and screaming matchesbetween and the galley gang.

Things like that would erupt all the timebecause of the differences. You know, eachgroup had its own needs. And sometimes theblack gang would bring up their soiled, oily,greasy clothing, and their footprints would

be all over the passageways, and the deck gangwould have to swab that and clean it up, andwe would be angry at them for this. Theywould say they couldn’t help it. Sometimesthey’d leave the ventilators open so that wewould get the smells from the engine room.If the wind was blowing the wrong way, weblamed it on them, because the oilers shouldbe up adjusting those ventilators. So therewere these little tensions that would go onall the time.

And, oh, the deck gang was consideredby the two other departments to be uppityand to believe that they were superior be-cause they were up there in the air, “beingsailors,” you know. I can remember one deckengineer or an oiler (I forget which), whohad tasks on the upper deck, oiling thewinches to keep them from rusting and tak-ing care of the machinery on deck. Andhearing our complaints, I remember him say-ing something like, “You guys are living in adream world. You’re up here; you’re not do-ing a goddamn thing, except chipping paintand thinking you’re steering the ship, and allyou’re doing is handling the wheel and tak-ing orders. And you guys are just automatonsup here, believing that somehow or otheryou’re real seamen. The real seamanship isgoing on down below, where those enginesare that keeps you going, that keeps thisgoddamn ship moving! And all you can do iscomplain about what goes on down there.All you do is sit up there and do your watch,go back and bunk, read the dirty stories, andall that sort of thing.”

“And as for the steward’s department,well, yeah, we need the food, but we don’tneed what they put out.” [laughter] And, youknow, “Next time I come on board any ship,I’m going to bring a bunch of sandwiches andbread and bologna of my own, and I’m notgoing to eat that goddamn crap,” and on and


on. These kinds of minor things were builtinto the situation.

But there was a real hierarchy. There wasthe bridge and the rest of the crew, essen-tially. And always there was the grumblingabout the bridge. Either the captain was com-petent, or he wasn’t competent, or he was abastard and hard to get along with and had itin for the crew and seamen and was onlythinking of the company. And that was trueof most of the mates, except now and thenthere would be a mate who had just come upfrom being an able seaman or from the en-gine room and had just gotten his papers andwas now a new mate, like a third mate or asecond mate. And now and then there wouldbe one who had a strong feeling of identitywith the crew and would come and visit usand talk and all that. But that was rare, be-cause once up there, they were linked in tothe operation of the ship, the responsibilityfor really keeping it going where it was goingand seeing to it that things were orderly.[laughter]

Nevertheless, there would be a reactionto authority. “Those guys up there, they’remaking their big pay; they’ve got their con-nections, all of them have got homes ashorewith wives, and they get regular pay”, and allthat sort thing. And, “They’ll get pensionedoff when they get older, whereas the guysbelow, they won’t get anything—not evenlike the army or the navy. We’ll get nothing.”And that was one of the beefs, of course, ofthe CIO unions, was to get some kind of rec-ognition for merchant seamen at the end ofthe war, which didn’t happen.

But, anyway, there were these beefs aboutnot only different status, but different emolu-ments that came with it, and who got morepay and who didn’t, and who was doing howmuch work? And “what was that goddamnthird mate doing? He didn’t have anything

to do except stand his watch.” Except a lotof time the third mate was also the doctoraboard ship or the first-aid man, who mayknow absolutely nothing. [laughter] And Ithink I mentioned earlier something aboutthe lancing of a swelling on the groin of oneof the members of the ship, carried out by athird mate who acted as though he was a veryproficient surgeon and was absolutely igno-rant, didn’t know anything about anything.And it was a wonder that the man lived,but . . . .

Not only lived, but he was grateful.

He was grateful, happy about it, yes.[laughter] Well, there was nobody else whowould dare to mess around. And then therewas also among certain members of the crewa strong feeling about class divisions and castedivisions elsewhere. For example, old-timersagainst newcomers aboard ship. That was al-ways there. It was the essential difference.Those who had been on the ship, on a shipor that ship in previous trips, and were theolder members of the crew who were compe-tent, efficient, the old-timers. They’d beenaround a long time, or they were old unionmen that I’ve talked about earlier. So therewere the old-timers, who sometimes includedmen who had sailed for a few trips and knewtheir way around a ship and all that—theymight be included as old-timers.

But the newcomers were people stilllearning how to get along on a ship, oftencalled “stump jumpers” or “lubbers:” Stumpjumpers because they’d come from the Mid-west or the South or somewhere in Californiaor Oregon, where they had been on farms,and so they were stump jumpers. [laughter]They clambered around on farms and overstumps, and they didn’t know anything aboutships. They were the “gazoonies,” the “land


lubbers,” or the “lubbers,” and the lowest ofthe low.

Nevertheless, they had to be trained; theyhad to be brought in, not by any great efforton your part, but by allowing them to learn.[laughter] Allowing them to live. [laughter]And this was where, of course the distinc-tion on deck was made between able seamen,ordinary seamen, and bosuns. A bosun was amember of the deck gang, but he was sort ofa foreman. Not always with the crew, some-times his orientation was to the bridge.

A good bosun, we thought, was one whoreally had the crew’s interests in mind andwho would take on the crew’s side in a majorbeef or something of that kind or would actas a kind of a go-between between the crewand the bridge. But good bosuns were few andfar between, because a lot of them were reallyauthoritarian and somewhat vindictive char-acters, who hated themselves and hatedcrews! [laughter] There were some good bo-suns, and a good bosun was a good thing tohave. But there were the bosun, the able sea-men, and then the ordinary seamen.

An ordinary seaman has not yet gottenhis green ticket or papers. I don’t know, three,four, five trips at least were necessary, andtaking an exam to become an able seaman.So able seamen had a sense of being supe-rior, on deck, I mean. They had the credentials.

And here come these gazoonies. Onboard every trip would be a new ordinary sea-man or more. And the ordinary seamen wereseparated in terms of watches. I mean, thethree watches—four to eight and eight totwelve, twelve to four. Three four-hourwatches around the clock. So you each hadtwo watches in a twenty-four-hour period.

So you had an eight-hour period, whereyou could always be called outside of watch;you could be called on deck for emergenciesand all that, for which you’re supposed to get

overtime. But it was hard to get, and you hadto argue with bosuns and argue with mates.And that’s where the ship’s delegates camein to argue whether or not overtime shouldor should not be paid.

And so the ordinary seamen were splitup. There were three ordinary seamen aboard,one on each watch. So you’d generally, havetwo able seamen in a fo’c’s’le and one ordi-nary seaman—three men to a fo’c’s’le on awatch. And when you came aboard, you triedto get the watch you wanted. And you didn’talways get what you wanted; it was whateverwas open.

Later on, I always liked the one that no-body else wanted, you know, the four to eight,because you had a lot of time to yourself andthings were quiet on deck. The four to eightduring the day, in the afternoon, was afterthe work day was really over, and so you hadsome mop-up work to do, all that. And Ifound that desirable, but I didn’t always getit. Not everybody wanted that. Some wantedthe twelve to four; some wanted the four toeight, and that sort of thing. But, anyway,you often had to take what you could get withan opening in the watch.

And so the ordinary seamen would comeaboard, and they would be assigned to one oranother fo’c’s’le. And they, of course, werethe butt of a tremendous amount of ribbingand tricks. [laughter] One of the classic trickswas to send an ordinary seaman for a skyhook: “Hey! Hey! Go get that sky hook! Gotell the bosun we need a sky hook.”

And the poor guy would run to the bo-sun, and the bosun would say, “Oh, well, now,where did we put those sky hooks? Check upat the rope locker. No, look in that hatchlocker. No, you better run after and checkwith the gun crew,” and on and on and on.They’d keep the kid running until he wasexhausted and till everybody got tired of the


joke. And then he would be told, “There ain’tno such thing as a sky hook. What is a skyanyway?” And usually they didn’t know; theyjust took it for granted that sky hook meantsomething, you know, and that’s a legitimatemisconception. And so that was a classic one,where you would haze somebody and, oh, adozen other kinds of things of this sort—sometimes sending a very inexperienced kidaloft, which was against regulations and rules,but it was done, you know.

Because it was dangerous?

Oh, very dangerous, particularly in aheavy sea. But the idea of seeing how scaredthey got and all that; you’re not supposed todo that. But it was done all the time. Or tak-ing their clothes and hiding them so thatthey’d have to run out on deck in emergencyhalf naked.

You know, on and on and on. There wasthat kind of thing. At the same time, theywere the “kids” in the watches, and so youdid try to help them, if you could get alongwith them. But there was sometimes justsome impossible character like Cowboy. I’llnever forget Cowboy, who was a kid fromTexas who came on board with his cowboyboots on. And he loved those boots, thosecowboy boots. He was a skinny, ratchety-looking kid, a little . . . well, I can’t say hewas dumb. He just acted very wild and dis-tracted and was sort of a crazy kid. And heseemed to have no idea at all where he was—that he was on a ship, and that there werecertain things required of him, and that therewas a certain kind of behavior that he had tolearn. And, oh, he would complain.

The ordinary seaman should not com-plain about things, like the food. That’s leftto those who know what food ought to be.And he would send stuff back to the galley!

“Take this crap!” or, “I want something orother!” And pretty soon people would justnot serve him. The mess man would justignore him or throw something entirely dif-ferent than he had asked for, or the thing thathe didn’t want would come back piled high,or something of that sort. And he would telltall tales about how important he was andall the great things he’d done, all the womenthat he had slept with, and he couldn’t havebeen more than eighteen, you know! [laugh-ter] And all these women who loved him, andhe just thought that he was out of this worldwith the boots.

Then that got to be a thing on the ship—this guy’s boots. “We got to get those bootsoff that crazy kid.”

And we went to the slop chest. It wasopen, I don’t know, once or twice a week,something like that, and you could buythings, the steward’s slop chest. And therewere some shoes there; they weren’t quite theright size, but there were some work shoes.[laughter] And we all chipped in and boughta pair of work shoes, and while he was sleep-ing, we threw his cowboy boots over side. Ieven took part in this. There was this strongfeeling that something had to be done. Be-cause his boots really caused him a lot oftrouble. He’d slip all over the deck.

Well, a hazard, yes.

Well, he had the high heels on them andall that, and he would slip and slide, and ifthe sea would come over, they’d get full ofwater, and yet he loved those damn boots.Well, we threw the boots over side and leftthese new shoes—those shoes that were atleast a size or two larger than he would wear—left them by his bunk.

There was a day or two of absolute may-hem. He went wild. “Where are my boots?


What did you guys do, you dirty, rotten bas-tards? I’m going to sue you when I get back,”on and on. And we loved it. I mean, the morehe ranted and raved, the more we enjoyed it.And we didn’t tell him that we’d thrownthem over side. We just said we didn’t knowwhat happened to them. He knew. He knewthat something terrible had happened, thatwe’d stolen them or something! So then hewent to the captain; then he went to themates. And they just said, “Well, we can’t doanything about that. I mean, you know,maybe you misplaced them,” that sort ofthing. [laughter]

It was terrible! But here was this ordinaryseaman. The idea is, anything goes, and hewasn’t the careful, intent, questioning kindof guy that a good ordinary seaman is, whowants to learn, who wants to become a sea-man. He seemed to be totally disinterestedin becoming anything except what he was. Imean, he claimed that he was a great pokerplayer, and turned out he’d never held a packof cards in his hand. You know, that kind ofa kid.

Well, being on a small ship, a small world,that becomes a cause célèbre. I mean, youwould talk about him all the time. He wasgreat entertainment. And it took days for himto get over it. And finally he had to wearshoes to go to work, and he put on these greatclodhoppers, the kind that you tie up and hadcleats on them, and they were above hisankle.

Oh, the poor guy!

[laughter] And this scrawny kid would bein these great big, oversized shoes runningaround deck, tripping over himself. He finallygot pretty good at wearing them. [laughter]But he had his first lesson about becoming amember of the crew. OK, I just tell that little

anecdote, because it’s one of the types ofthings that helps you to see how that worldwas organized.

And most ordinary seamen were young.Every now and then someone would comeaboard—a middle-aged man or something—who hadn’t been to sea before, was trying toget to sea. They were treated with greatrespect, but, also, a degree of contempt—quiet contempt. You know, who do they thinkthey were? How are they going to become aseaman without having started earlier? Andyet, some of those guys would go on and be-come able seaman. So there were thesedivisions.

And then there were the attitudes aboutrace. The Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, as Ihave said before, was a very reactionary unionfrom this point of view. The idea was, youhave to fight against having checkerboardcrews. I mean, “It’s always been a whiteunion; it’s going to stay a white union,” thatkind of a view. And a lot of the old-timersagreed with that. They may not even be anti-minority or anti-black or anything else, butthey didn’t want to live with them. “It justain’t right. It’d spoil the ship. This wasn’t theright way. It’s never been that way, and itshouldn’t be that way.” And I remember verywell, more and more it firmed up my viewthat I was in a very, very strange and reac-tionary kind of environment.

Oh, and attitudes toward Jews, a greatdeal of anti-Semitism—even though therewere Jews on board. But nobody paid any at-tention to the fact they were on board,because they were quiet, but all sorts of anti-Semitic statements—even to the point ofsaying that there’s one good thing that Hitlerhad done, you know, that sort of thing. And,“You know Hitler was a bastard, and lookwhat he has done generally. I mean, we’regoing to have to beat him and see to it that


he gets his dues, but, nevertheless, he did acouple of good things, and one of them wasput the Jews in their place”—that was ex-pressed by a lot people.

But you said before, too, that at that time, andcorrect me if I’m wrong, there wasn’t much com-prehension as to what Hitler really was doingabout “the Jewish question.”

Not really. The enormity of the genocide,if it leaked through with the controlled presswe had and all that, it wasn’t enough to stoppeople in their tracks, as it was later, afterthe war. There was always the idea that thingsweren’t as serious as anybody implied, that,“It was just a war, and he was a dirty, bastarddictator, and he and Mussolini . . . get rid ofthem as soon as possible, because they’remaking war against us.” People were not somuch aware of the implications of fascism—and people even said they were anti-fascistwhen they were saying these things—whatfascism was and what it did and what kind ofsocial system it created in Europe and a simi-lar kind of development of militarism inJapan. Oh, they were clearer about Japan ormore definite about Japan than about Europe

and Hitler. I mean, Japan, the “damn squint-eyes,” you know. “They had this emperor.”The emperor, of course, was the flag—I mean,the flag of how terrible it was to be ruled byan emperor who claimed he was God.

Did you know about the kamikaze pilots at thattime?

Oh, yes, because all through the war wewere hearing about kamikaze raids. However,that increased toward the end of the war,the sort of desperate last stands of theJapanese. But, we knew the word kamikaze.“Kami-crazy,” the people would say. “Thekami-crazies.” But, yes, we heard about that.And we heard about the atrocities in China.We didn’t call them “war crimes” in thosedays, but we heard about the handling of pris-oners, the atrocities against prisoners. Andhara-kiri [ritualized suicide to save face], youknow, the Japanese propensity to kill them-selves for honor, and the kamikazes were partof that. Yes, we heard all that. But on a shiprolling around the Pacific or the Atlantic,people didn’t pay too much attention to thosethings. They just came up now and then.

35BOB, TROT, AND CARLSON

OB NELSON and I began to have areal friendship on that ship. Never-theless, when I look back, he was an

And Bob, more as a devil’s advocate thananything, but, nevertheless, it was part of hisway of thinking at that time—he was a cynicand a pessimist, a true Nordic cynic and pes-simist from Minnesota, Lake Minnetonka,which we used to joke about. And he wastelling the captain, “Well, after all, are therest of us going to support these people andtheir descendants for time immemorial? Eachone of them will have descendants, willspread these characteristics through society.Do you want that? Is that what you want?And should we support those who don’t wantto help themselves, who are just the dregs ofsociety, like some of the people on this ship?Are we hard-working people going to sup-port them?”

And the captain, being something of ahumanist, and very shocked, I remember, say-ing, “Well, after all, not all people who aredeclared to be idiots have idiot children. Andnot all people inherit the characteristics oftheir parents. That may be acquired by theirexperiences and the way they had to live.”

Bincipient racist and fascist. But he was sucha nice guy. [laughter] This is where you learnthese kind of things, that I disagreed with afriend about everything that he stood for onthat level—his social view. He was an innatesocial Darwinist and a Malthusian; [laugh-ter] I mean, “We got too many people in theworld anyway.” I remember a big argumentthat took place, on the bridge a month later,on the bridge of the Alvarado. Bob was thirdmate, and the captain was on the bridge, andI was at the wheel. And Bob and the captaingot in this long discussion about eugenics.The captain was saying how terrible it wasthat the Germans were out there sterilizingpeople, because they either were mentallyretarded or they had some kind of infirmitythat was considered to be heritable but thatpoor people generally, the dregs of society,and in general incompetent should be steril-ized and removed from society; and the Jews,and all that.


And Bob would say, “Well, you’re just anidealist, because it ain’t that way.”

And I remember talking to Bob about thislater and arguing with him at length. Bobhelped me sharpen my viewpoints. I mean, Iliked him, and I trusted him, and he and Iwere very friendly, and he was very smart. Hewas able to converse and argue in his pessi-mistic, mournful, Ibsenesque way.

Well, you said he listened, too.

Yes, he would listen. And later on, hechanged remarkably. Not just because of mebut of experiences we had and because ofTrotsky. [laughter] Trot. Trot Ikenson—thisyoung kid on board who was some kind ofMarxist. As I say, we called him “Trot,” forTrotsky, just as a joke, having no idea whetheror not he was a Trotskyite or member of theCommunist Party or whatever. But he wasvery far left, very red. And Trot was a greatinfluence on Bob. He would argue with himand call him all kinds of names. “You’re adamned reactionary.” And he’d call menames. “You’re just a goddamned liberal.You’re just a damned liberal.” And I had tolook into this, what a liberal was, from thatperspective. In a sense I was, you know, stand-ing apart from all this and being a humanistand all that kind of stuff. And he just calledme a “wishy-washy liberal,” you know. [laugh-ter] And it didn’t hurt me.

He was Jewish, wasn’t he?

Yes, a Jewish kid. And he’d say, “I’m aJew, and look what you’re saying, Bob. Whatkind of ass are you, anyway? Look at you.You’re just a big, dumb Swede! And you thinkyou know everything. You think because yougot a white skin, you come from Minnesota,your ancestors come from Sweden,” he said,

“you’re just like Hitler! You’re just like thedamn Nazis,” and on and on.

These arguments would take place, whichwere when I look back, kind of marvelous. Ilearned a lot. I was being honed in a way.And my sloppy kind of quasi-political viewsbegan to take shape with those kinds of con-versations mainly because these were twopeople I liked and got along with; we couldtalk. And there was no way for anybody todo anybody else harm. I mean, we couldn’tharm each other! [laughter] We could justdisagree. And Bob could at least argue. Andthen sometimes he’d just get mad and go intoa funk for a day or two, where he wouldn’ttalk to you; wouldn’t talk to anybody. Hewould withdraw. And then he’d slowly comeout and raise the question again after he’dthought it over.

So you were on the John B. Floyd together.

Yes. Trot and Bob were both on that ship.And then later, we sailed together a numberof times on ships out of Seattle up to Alaska.Yes. And, you know, I didn’t know them toowell, but then later we determined that weshould ship together again. I know how thathappened. Bob would tell these long, longstories. He had shipped the Alaska run a lot,and he had done fishing; he was a fisherman.So we’d get these wonderful stories from himabout the Alaska run, shipping Alaska Steam,and of the Inside Passage, up into Alaska andthe Aleutians and all that. And what a won-derful country it was, and how he was savingup his money and he was going to get a littlecabin up in the woods in Washington, wayback in the wilds of Washington or BritishColumbia, and he was going to settle downwith about three or four hundred acres, wherenobody could get to him. [laughter] And hewas going make his living on the land, and


all that sort of thing. All these wonderfulthings to us out there at sea, lonely, wishingwe had someplace.

And then he might get married; theremight be a woman who’d be willing to dothis, but not many women are willing to livelike that—he’s got to find one. All the oneshe’s known, they all want to live in some kindof middle-class way. They don’t really haveany adventuresome spirit, and he’s lookingfor a woman who had . . . . Eventually hefound a woman who put up with him for acouple years. [laughter]

Anyway, that’s what he was going to do.And then the other thing was fishing—get-ting a fishing boat and fish for salmon in theSound, and living a free life, continuing go-ing to sea, but doing it in your own way, andyou’re in charge. Or a cabin in the woods andliving off the land, and all those wonderfuldreams, you see.

Well, of course, the guys would listen tothis; we loved it. That was what we wantedto do. And that’s really what turned me onto going north out of Seattle and shippingout of Seattle, which I did for a good part ofthe remainder of my shipping life. But par-ticularly after I got married, had kids, it wasbeing closer to the shore, shorter trips insteadof these very long ocean voyages, though Idid take a couple of those.

But, anyway, these two guys . . . . I thinkit was Carlson that I mentioned before, whohad gotten out on deck and brought the crewout and challenged God to strike him down.“Strike me down now, so to prove to theseguys that you exist. Otherwise, shut up andget out of our lives and leave us alone,” youknow. [laughter]

And I think of that, because along withthis business of a growing class consciousness,I guess it would be called, on my part—I meanI had a social consciousness, a kind of secu-

lar, humanistic view of things, up until thattime . . . . I think what was beginning tohappen was that the kinds of partners likethis that I had on ships—some of them ex-tremely bright, intelligent guys—werebeginning to shape in my mind a concept ofclass division, class struggle; differences basedupon authority and access to the goods ofsociety as against those who have no access,and workers, the people who drudge and workfor very little in order to supply a great dealof wealth to others. Those kinds of ideas weretaking shape.

And some of my reading . . . . I remem-ber Trot had a pamphlet of Lenin’s On Dialectic,I believe it was, at sea. And he told me toread it, and we argued this whole business ofdialectical materialism and the negation ofnegation and the struggle of opposites, andall that sort of thing. And all those sort ofgerminal, early things were taking place atthat time. And Bob, of course, being ex-tremely cynical and calling us “just a bunchof phony reds, just phony reds. I mean, youguys, you all go for any big idea, any big talk.And the facts are before you. Look at theworld as it really is, and you’ll see some arealways going to get everything. And thestruggle in this world ain’t the struggle of theworking class and the capitalist class. Thestruggle is to find some little niche insidewhere you can stay alive.” [laughter] “AndI’m going to go in a cabin in the woods. I’mgoing to have a boat of my own and fish forsalmon.”

So he was something of a nihilist, some-thing of, I felt, an anarchist, in a way, thoughhe was a young guy and, I suppose, fit intothe late Wobblyesque orientation to theworld. And yet he was terribly curious anddid a lot of reading. As I said, he read PeerGynt and Ibsen plays, and all that meant alot to him. Grieg’s music would throw him


into a deep, marvelous, melancholy funk fordays, particularly Peer Gynt. He saw himself,I think, as the reincarnation of a picaresquecharacter like Peer Gynt. And anythingmournful, anything pessimistic and mourn-ful was pure poetry to him. [laughter]

So, anyway, these two guys, and I . . . .Though there were others, as I said, they sortof shaped the beginning of a kind of a morefocused social consciousness and what laterwould be my interest in a Marxist orienta-tion.

Oh, also, there was the constant input oftrade union values and concerns and work-ing class struggles, on that level—the tradeunionist, the syndicalist kind of values thatexisted among the older unionists on thoseships. And I say syndicalist and trade union-ist as against an ideology, a philosophical orsocial ideology like Marxism or anything elsethat was to them, “red” and “commie.” Andyou know, their idea was, “Trade unions, ifanything, were good, and you fought for yourrights; but as to where trade unions are goingto go and what kind of society you’re goingto build unless you have one great big worldunion, well, that’s too big for us to thinkabout. [laughter] We just want our union tosee to it that we get some rights and we getsomething to eat.”

And, of course, Trot then would rant andrave in the mess room about, “You guys arejust a bunch of slaves. Your whole world isthis little ship or ships like it. You got nothingelse. You haven’t got wives; you haven’t gotchildren—if you do, you pay nothing; you’reaway from them all the time. You’re makingnothing. Is that all your labor is worth?” Imean, these wonderful speeches. And “Is thatwhat you’re worth? Are you worth what youget every month? Thirty-four and a half centsan hour, basically? Is that your life? Is that alife? Aren’t you as a human being worth more

than this? Isn’t your labor of value? Doesn’tit stand for something? Haven’t you any kindof respect for yourself as a human being?”

And everybody would laugh: “Trot’s at itagain. Oh, the little commie’s at it again.”And then sometimes later in private theycalled him a “little commie Jew,” you see, soall that was there, yeasting.

But after Carlson had made this greatspeech on that ship going down, when hetook the four or five members of the crewout on deck and said, “Look,” arguing reli-gion, “We’re going to settle this here and now,about this God business.” And, you know,that thing about the speech, throwing up hisarms and calling upon God to strike himdown now. “Now, strike me now.”

Well, that’s the other thing, religion.Religion wasn’t talked about very much onships. But at the same time, that had an im-pact on me, that event, because I remembertelling Carlson later, talking about what hehad done, you know, “A lot of these guys arekind of shocked, because you don’t do that,you know. I mean, some of these guys areprobably religious. They probably go tochurch when they’re back, or they mighteven pray. You don’t know if they do that.They believe that there’s a God—some ofthem. Some of them don’t; some of them areatheists or claim to be atheist. Like my friendBob said, you know, ‘If there’s a God, he suredid a lousy job of it.’” [laughter] And, youknow, there was all this range. But I was justtelling Carlson! “What did you do that for?”

He said, “Look, the world is made up ofshock, you know. Everybody is shocked.You’re shocked when you come out of yourmother’s (I won’t use the word) . . . comeout of your mother’s vagina. The world is al-ready hurting you, always giving you hell, andit gives you hell all along. What kind of hellcan I give to those guys? I mean, if they can’t


take that, they ain’t heard anything. I cantell them more, too.” [laughter]

And I wrote in my journal, I remember,and I don’t know if I told Carlson, just thatit bothered me a great deal. Because what itmade me think about was my grandparents.I was thinking of my old grandfather andgrandmother, who believed in God and weresaved in the blood of Jesus Christ and whowrote tracts, and my grandfather gave themout and stood on top of a mountain inCalifornia, waiting for the end of the world.And their kind of faith, which made itpossible for them to come over here as immi-grants and bring up a family of seven or eightkids, and help out a lot of other driftwood inthe world around them; always gave food andwhatever they had to people. You know tome, what Carlson had done was too much.

But I was also intrigued by it. I mean, Ialso sympathized with that view. And it waslike reading Ingersoll when I was a kid, youknow. [Robert G. Ingersoll was a philosopherof positive atheism.] Here was a dead to rightsatheist, you know, letting you have it betweenthe eyes.

Oh, and then I think Trot also told meabout Ludwig Feuerbach writing on religion.But, anyway, all those things are in my mind.I wasn’t religious in any kind of regular sense.I had, I suppose, a propensity to a spiritualorientation, to a mystical orientation, in oneway. However, I was becoming more andmore a materialist, and essentially, if anythingmaybe a secular humanist might be the wordnow, but I think essentially an atheist.Though I always felt, not even as an agnos-tic, that there were things so great andwonderful in the universe beyond our com-prehension, that I wanted to leave open witha kind of respect, the possibility that all sortsof things are happening in the universe thatwe can’t even conceive of, and if that’s God,

that’s God. But, you know, an old man witha white beard kind of thing, I don’t thinkthere was anybody even on the ship who sawGod that way.

But, nevertheless, a concept of God, be-ing saved in Christ, and all these things threwme back metaphorically and emotionally tomy grandparents. Those poor damn people—that was important to them. It kept themalive. And, oh, yes, I did mention this toCarlson, yes, “You know, what about peoplelike that, for whom it acts as a tremendouspower for them in the little, constrictedworlds they have, that helps them live, toget along?”

He says, “The sad thing my good friend,Whitey,” (I think I was called “Whitey” bythen), “is that they have to have it.” He said,“The sad thing is that they are encouragedto have that.” Of course, this is what I beganthinking later. This was Feuerbach andothers, Marx Engels and all sorts of . . . .

Yes, the opiate of the masses.

Yes, the opiate of masses kind of thing.And Carlson . . . I don’t think he was aMarxist, he was just a philosophical dissenter.He said, “Look, you know, your poor grand-parents, I respect them, what you tell meabout them; that’s great. But isn’t it awful thattheir lives have to be put into the mold ofthat when they had so many other poten-tials. Look at the minds they had that werecramped, pressed into the skulls, and theywere given the sop of these attitudes andthese beliefs.” He said, “If that’s all they had,thank Christ they had it, you know, but isn’tthat a sad goddamn thing, d’Azevedo? Youknow, face it, face it, you know.” [laughter]Those were wonderful conversations. Soeven on that trip, this was beginning tohappen.


And I was having this philosophicalstruggle in my head, not about belief in godsor anything of that kind, but trying to under-stand the powerful drive of religion.

Where did you think your urge to be good camefrom? I mean to be good and to do right? I mean,a moral sense to be fair and to be good.

Oh you mean a humanistic, orientation.It came from my family. I think I grew up inan environment that was diverse, in bothfamilies. And that diversity and the need toaccommodate to it on the part of my parents,who had to accommodate to an extremelycomplex stew of ideas and feelings andthoughts and traditions. And then mymother, though she was extremely religious,wasn’t really an active churchgoer or any-thing. But she had a very strong humanisticorientation. And I think my dad did, too, tothe degree that he expressed anything—fairness. They believed that people should betreated with a degree of equality, andalthough they had racist views in a way, theydidn’t defend them; they didn’t press them,and they were critical of them to some degree.

For example, both my mother and fatherdidn’t particularly like the Chinese. Theydidn’t particularly like Germans. But this wasnot in terms of direct, face-to-face relations.They had friends of this kind. It was just thatthe idea of Germans, particularly, since theFirst World War, which they had been in-volved in . . . Germans had become a kindof anathema. You know, they were the peoplewho had very, very authoritarian ideas, whobelieved they were superior. At the sametime, they always criticized anybody whodenounced people based on their race or theircolor.

And yet they didn’t have many friends,close friends, of these groups, and certainlydidn’t have any Chinese friends. Well, mybrother later on married a Chinese woman—my dear, accommodating, conservativebrother. I think they had trouble with that,and certainly my Aunt Edith did.

But they surmounted it. You see, I thinkthat’s the humanism. They did struggle withit and managed to at least deal with it asthough it wasn’t there, you know. [laughter]And though you were aware that they haddifficulty, you knew they had struggled withit.

Do you think there’s something—and I’m jump-ing around a little bit, but I had a couple of thingsthat just surfaced—inherent in fascism that leadsto racism, or was that just the form that it took?

Oh, no, I think fascism is a symptom, youknow. I don’t think fascism is a cause. Fas-cism was a symptom of a social disease inEurope and still is throughout the world.

And so is racism.

And so is racism, anti-Semitism, and allthose “-isms,” I don’t see as causes . . . .

I don’t think I meant it as a cause. I think whatI’m really asking is, is that the two somehow areintertwined inevitably.

Yes, I think fascism was sort of theepitome of racist ideology and also of reac-tionary political ideology. National socialism,I think, was one of the blind alleys of devel-opment of capitalism. And the Soviet Unionrepresents a whole other current, which, as anation, failed. I think the failure of the Soviet


Union was a failure of the people who ran it,not necessarily of the ideologies or the ideas.

Did you say that fascism was a blind alley ofcapitalism?

Oh, I think so. Yes. The whole idea wasone of the cul-de-sacs. Those cul-de-sacs areall over. But, yes, national socialism I see asone kind of capitalism that is highly authori-tarian, centralized, directed. I think thiscapitalism is quite different from socialismwhen it goes on to manipulate and control:And where everything is directed to largecorporations, which are linked to govern-ment directly; and the government and largecapital are hand in hand. Socialism tookanother track.

You know the old saw about socialism andfascism—the Soviet Union’s form of social-ism and fascism—being the same, essentially.That’s a lot of bull because it isn’t. Differentvalues motivated each entirely. If the SovietUnion went wrong, it wasn’t because theideas wrong; [laughter] it’s because the peoplerunning things were wrong, and that theycame from a tradition that in a sense, as Marxwould say, had within it the contradictionsthat brought about its own destruction, theseeds of its own destruction. And that doesn’tmean that other systems could not succeed. Istill believe that sort of thing.

And China? Is China a so-called commu-nist country? Is it communist? Is it Socialist?Where is it going? What form will the sys-tem take, as it struggles to maintain itself inthe world and to develop and produce? It mayalso be a great failure. And that would meanthat what they tried to do was wrong, or whatthe originators tried to do was wrong, as inthe Soviet Union.

Well, also, does it mean that it wasn’t the onlything that could be done at the time?

No. There may have been other roadsthat could have been taken, but that was theone that was taken.

So, I don’t know if I was thinking likethis at the time we’re discussing here, but,you know, I came slowly to that kind of view.In the first place, I defended the SovietUnion. Most people were, since they wereour allies. And there was something wonder-ful about taking Stalingrad back—thedefense of Stalingrad. And then finally, aboutthis time—in fact, just a few months later—the Germans being driven not only out ofStalingrad but driven south into Germany,and the Russians coming down throughPoland and being the first into Berlin.

I mean this was a great, romantic episode!“Uncle Joe” and all that sort of thing. Well,it had within it the seeds of its own destruc-tion and England and the United States werea little bit uncomfortable with this. [laugh-ter] And yet, as I was becoming more andmore identified with left thought, that was agreat heroic moment.

I know this is a digression from what we weretalking about, but I just wanted to ask you, too,about where you put the Swedish social systemin this spectrum?

Oh, I see the Swedish as probably one ofthe most benign forms of capitalism andsocialism that has been developed so far.[laughter]

But it is a hybrid of the . . . ?

Oh, I think Swedish socialism, demo-cratic socialism, democratic capitalism—


whatever one wants to call it—is very goodfor a relatively small and a relatively homo-geneous population. I mean, it’s a greatmodel.

That’s probably a key, though—the relativehomogeneity of the culture.

Maybe. It could be. That’s one of thethings that sociologists would say, is that ifyou have a homogeneous constituency andpopulation . . . as Germany tried to makeitself. The Swedes had homogeneity already.They were already “clean.” [laughter] Theywere squeaky clean to begin with, so they justadopted that sort of a system, which worksvery well. However, they’re having all kindsof strains in it; things are changing now. But,no, I always looked upon the Swedes and,oh, even the Danes and the Norwegians asbeing rather enlightened socially. So, youknow, it’s a very complex thing to thinkabout—why is it there and not somewhereelse?

And now to take us back to where we were.[laughter] I wanted to ask you, when you startedtalking about religion, if there were any otherbeliefs—if you wanted to call them superstitions,if you just wanted to call them customs or what-ever—that were sort of held by the deck crew asa whole, that were maybe unspoken, but theywere certain beliefs about doing things certainways, that if you messed up, you would be . . . .

Oh, yes. Oh, gosh, of course. And thatwould probably be true in any intensive worksituation. But, yes, I’d say especially at seathere’s a long tradition of ideas that might belaughed at, and yet nobody wants to breakthem—like spitting into the wind or whis-tling. On board they were always first-tripgazoonies.

Oh, you weren’t supposed to whistle?

Oh, no. It whistled up a wind. I canremember ordinary seamen, or even acciden-tally somebody on ship would start whistlingsometimes, just spontaneously, and everybodyyelling, “Hey, quit that. You’re going towhistle up a farter!” you know. [laughter] Andthey might even be joking, and it’s somethingthat is not necessarily a belief, just that youdon’t do it. It’s not sea worthy. You don’t dothat.

There were lots of others, as you’re in acrew and certain traditions mean somethingas part of your identity as a worker in thatsituation. And if old-timers say these things,you might laugh and take it as not serious.But you take it as part of your work ethic. It’spart of the way you behave—to be the kindof person you are on a ship.

It’s part of the culture of the sea. And,you know, somebody might say, “Oh, it’s alot of shit,” or something of that kind, but atthe same time they’ll stop whistling, or theywon’t spit into the wind. Oh, there’re so manyother things; right now they escape me, but Imean, your whole world is full of this lore.Oh, yes, being out on deck at night on thebow as lookout, you’d watch the hawseholes,where the anchor chains go through, becausesometimes there are creatures that crawl upthat thing (in fact that was in my story, “DeepSix for Danny”). Creatures that crawl up—probably dead sailors or, you know, all kindsof things down there. And that’s where youmight see them, the mysterious things of thesea. It’s just lore, you don’t believe it, but it’spart of the culture of a ship. And if some ordi-nary seaman goes out and starts whistling atune, everybody’s screaming at him, becausehe most of all, has no right whistle! [laughter]

He’d bring flotsam from shore—the flot-sam from shore life. He’s bringing that


corruption aboard ship; he doesn’t know noth-ing, you know! [laughter] So, yes, there’s a lotof lore and superstition. But I hesitate to callit “superstition,” because it’s more like cul-tural tradition.

Well, in one of the books that I was just glancingat, the author was discussing the idea that cer-tain captains were identified with certain kindsof luck, and there was this whole idea thatsomebody’s luck had run out, or there was anuneasiness, because maybe this person . . . .

Oh, it could be. But, see, that’s very gen-eral throughout the society, the degree ofluck. You know, you want a skipper to besomebody who is not only lucky but knowshis business. And sometimes they figure theyget by just by luck, not by what they know,

you know? But I’m not aware of any specialorientation to the idea of luck that’s not justin the general population. But, oh, well, thereare things like . . . oh, yes, the full bottlething. You got just so many beans in thatbottle, and when you spill them out, you gotto keep aware of how many are left, becausethat’s going to last you all your life. If youspill it all, too bad for you, bud, you know.[laughter] But I’ve heard that elsewhere, notjust at sea. There is some specific sea lore,and right now I can’t remember much of it,but, yes, it was there. And you just take thaton, you move with it. You accept it as part ofyour life and part of the romance. It’s part ofthe poetry of life at sea. Oh, yes, oh, yes. Theidea of luck goes into things like some stormsand where that wave is that may hit you. It’slike the bullet that’s got your name.

36THE ALASKA RUN

ELL, WE GOT back from thattrip docking at San Francisco,where, of course, I saw Kathy and

that time had a very strict set of laws aboutincoming literature. Circle was banned forthat issue in Australia.

There was a beginning of an opening inthe United States in literature for the use oflanguage that had been considered to be im-moral and distasteful before. So I don’t thinkthere was any trouble in the States with that.And little by little people were beginning touse a wider range of vernacular. I would sayHenry Miller had some impact on this, but italso was true of other young poets and writ-ers who pressed the limits of language in thisway.

But I didn’t feel the need to use too muchof it. There were so many alternative terms,so many colloquialisms that were just as use-ful. But now and then you felt you had to,because that’s what people did, and that’swhat they said. And I was writing, I suppose,“Deep Six for Danny” at that time. I havemy notes in my journal on it, and it finallycame out. In fact, my notes are better thanthe story. But that got some attention—wasthought to be a good story.

Wsaw a number of my friends. I guess I was feel-ing more and more separated from people thatI’d known, my friends. I was writing, and atthat time I had written a story—I think I’vementioned it—“Blue Peter,” that in the nextfew months, I think in 1945, got into Interim,that magazine. It was a good story; in fact, Igot a seamen’s story contest prize for that, andit got some attention. In fact, it was men-tioned here and there by newspapercolumnists and critics. I forget the one in SanFrancisco who had mentioned that.

And “Deep Six for Danny”?

That was later, in Circle magazine. That’sthe story that was banned in Australia, be-cause I had used what was considered to be apornographic word, a scatological term,though I spelled “fucking” with an “f-o” inorder to slightly cover it, because that is theway it’s often pronounced. And the theme, Isuppose, was a little heavy, and Australia at


I was also painting or drawing, and I wona seamen’s art exhibit contest and sold a fewdrawings and a painting or two. These werereally wash drawings and paintings. I didn’tuse oils; I was using color wash in water, andbrush line. And some of the work, I guess,was kind of good.

But at the same time, the war had reallydispersed so many of the people that I knew.George Leite had started Circle, and it wasquite a success for a small mag, for a small,avant-garde mag. So I was seeing him and afew others around. But Kathy and I spent alot of time together, and she had met BobNelson and Trot.

After that particular trip, I had decided Iwas going to go Seattle and ship out in thisglorious Alaska run. I don’t think . . . no weweren’t talking about marriage at that time;I was thinking about it. But I was a little bitscared to bring it up. I wasn’t sure of myself.At the same time, I thought if there was any-body, it was going to be Kathy. And I guessthat was the preparatory getting together withher, after that trip to the South Seas on theJohn B. Floyd.

So, anyway, I went north. I think it wasthat time that I went north right away. Yes. Iwent north to Seattle alone; I don’t believeKathy went up with me. She did later.

Did you go north with Bob Nelson and Trot?

I don’t know if I went with them, but Imet them up there. And I stayed at that mar-velous Pembrook Hotel, which was aseamen’s service hotel. I forget the street thatit was on. But all the seamen stayed at thePembrook, and so you’d always meet some-body that you’d shipped with or were goingto ship with. I don’t know if it’s still there. Itmay be there, but changed to some other kindof building altogether. It was cheap. I don’t

know, seventy-five cents a day, a dollar aweek, or . . . I forget what it was, but it wasridiculously low. And there was a wonderfulhofbrau right next to it, underneath it, aGerman place where we could get sandwichesfor fifty cents, and beer and all that. And itwas near the SUP hall, which was down onthe waterfront on old skid row.

So I went and signed up. And I think Boband Trot were also on that trip—I’m not sureabout both of them, but I went with Bob,partners on the Joseph Henry. And we sailedout of Seattle in July of 1943, and it was aremarkable trip.

We went up the Inside Passage on thattrip—absolutely beautiful country—pastBritish Columbia and Vancouver Island,Queen Charlotte Islands, Prince of WalesIsland, all the way up as far as Skagway, pastJuneau and Ketchikan and all those marvel-ous places. And we stopped at so many littleports with lumber, oil drums, and all sorts ofcommodities for those little frontier townsof the time. Just mixed cargo of all sorts. Foreach of these little towns, there would besome cargo taken off.

Were you aware of the high proportion of nativepopulation there?

No, not so much in the towns, except Iwas very interested in seeing Eskimos, youknow, so-called Eskimos. And sometimesthey would be the longshoremen at the littleports. And later on I saw the Aleut longshore-men, which was a thing in itself.

Oh, coal was usually the main thing—sacks of coal. I’d forgotten the main one.[laughter] And that was my breaking-in toreally hard work. I mean, work beyond whichI don’t think I could ever do and that I havenever had to do again in my life. But we putin weeks and weeks of stopping and unload-

311THE ALASKA RUN

ing coal, mainly, along with these other sortof general commodity parts of the cargo.Those were fifty- to a hundred-pound sacksof coal. We would be in the holds loadingthem on pallets, because we would do thelongshoring on the shipside. And there’d beanother bunch who were sometimes Eskimosand other roustabout types of characters whowere the portside longshoremen. We wouldload the pallets with these sacks, and thatwould go on for four hours straight, some-times longer. In fact, because we had to getin and out of port fast, we’d sometimes workfor sixteen hours, with a break of a half houror so for chop or to rest. We couldn’t all restat one time; we had to take turns, go off ondeck, have a smoke, and we’d be black withcoal dust.

When I think about the concern todayabout the effects of the work environment, Iwonder how we survived. Like on the tank-ers, how we survived working down in thetanks to clean them after oil was unloaded—I don’t know. We’d breathe this stuff, faintfrom it; would just put some wet cloth overour noses. I just wonder how many guys Iworked with died from that. Fortunately, Idon’t think I have any effects.

But we were covered with coal dust; ournoses were stopped up with coal dust. Ourthroats were full of coal dust. And we’d dothat for sometimes twenty-four, thirty hours,with sometimes a two-hour break for a napand go on. And lifting these sacks of coal!You just do in the most mechanical way.

I got a great respect for groups in a gangworking together. You could tell somebodyyou wanted to work with; you just knew whoyou wanted to be with in terms of the sensethey had of the rhythm and awareness of theirpartner. Where, if they were helping you, andyou were passing sacks or working on thesame pile of sacks, this sort of intuitive under-

standing of movement developed, becauseyou had to after hours of working, even whenyou were absolutely exhausted. And anybodygetting in your way or interfering, it wouldbe like you’re climbing another mountain. Imean, that created problems that you’d getfurious with, particularly an inexperiencedordinary seaman or somebody stumbling andgetting in your way when you’re lifting up aload.

But there’s something about an experi-enced person you’re working with—likepeople drowning who are helping each otherget to the surface. I mean, you just under-stand, you feel the movement in a kind of adull, exhausted way. You’re feeling good aboutthis other person, and you want to work withthat person again.

That went on for weeks at a time, andthen we’d go out to sea to the next port. Wemight have twenty-four hours between whereeverybody would just fall asleep. Sometimesnot even clean up—you’d be filthy black, youknow. [laughter]

But somehow or other I remember thetrips up there with a very positive feeling.There was something wonderful about thescenery. You’d go up on deck, and no matterwhat else was going on, you’d look out at theInside Passage with all those islands and thebeautiful coastline and the sea itself loadedwith fish and dolphins, and at night sparklingthings in the water. And the cold, the senseof really being north and away.

Usually the food was good. That wasAlaska Steam, and their food was pretty good.They better feed their people, because theyworked the tails off of us.

And yes, I remember the Eskimos. Theywere hard workers and little guys. Usuallythey had very heavy coats on, some of thatseal skin stuff, and mukluks and things of thatkind. But we didn’t have much to do with


them, except one port (I forget where it was),where the longshoremen wanted to eat onthe ship. They had no food so wanted to eaton the ship. And this happened once againway up at Point Barrow, when I was delegate,on another ship.

Anyway, there was this very strong feel-ing among the crew, that they didn’t wantthese Eskimos eating with us. And they didn’twant them eating off of the same plates. Andthey brought out some kind of War ShippingAdministration directive about cleanlinesson ships and the fact that disease could becarried and contaminated, and people hadto watch that. They brought that out to say,“We are following the rules. We are not go-ing to have them eat off of the same disheswe do and the same plates.” And I rememberbeing very upset about this and arguingagainst it. At the same time, I saw their ratio-nale, because there was diphtheria andtuberculosis ashore, and it was a relativelyserious thing.

So here is where a kind of ethnocentrismand racism, I suppose, was expressed thatbothered me and maybe two or three othersvery much. But on the other hand, what wasthe alternative? So I remember we set up aseparate mess for them, eventually, becausethere was very good reason to feed them.They were working as much as we were, andthey had no way to get food, and nothinghad been arranged for them. It was one ofthose ports where we had to move fast.

And then I remember that two or threeof us brought our food over to them. Theyweren’t getting as good stuff as us. They weregetting, I don’t know, maybe something theyhad chosen. It looked awful, as I remember,to us—whatever they were eating. And Idon’t know if it came out of our galley or not,or a separate place. Nevertheless, I remem-ber we brought a lot of stuff on our

plates—filled our plates after we ate andbrought it over to them, and sat around sortof looking and trying to talk to them. Butthey weren’t interested in talking to us, andthey were eating their food with great gustoand slurping up coffee and I remember theystank of seal. [laughter] This fetid, rotten sealodor that comes with the not fully curedmukluks and seal skin.

But I happened to like it; I thought it waskind of like later on in my life, in Africa, theso-called smell of other people, of Africans. Ialways thought it was kind of pleasant; it wasa good smell—except for people who werejust dirty. But anybody who just had a natu-ral odor . . . . Well, these guys, seal was partof their natural odor. And there was some-thing very fresh and open and arctic aboutthat smell that I still remember.

I brought Kathy home some mukluks thatwere made from hide softened by beingchewed by women. They were beautiful—furon the edge and white seal skin—beautifullymade. And they had a slight odor to them,[laughter] but when they got down here inthis climate they actually rotted, and theystank up our house, and we had to get rid ofthem. I just felt awful because they were sobeautiful. She wore them for a while, but af-ter a while we couldn’t stand the smell!

But I remember clearly that there was thisfeeling among some of us, of being very up-set by this but not knowing what else to doexcept dealing with it by bringing some foodto these guys. And, oh, I remember theirwomen and kids sometimes would come tothe dock on that particular trip and bringlittle things for them to eat. But they hadn’tbrought much; they were far from any placewhere they could get a lot of food. So theywould be given snacks—probably dried fishor dried seal or whatever. And in that portthere had been no provisions made for them.

313THE ALASKA RUN

I remember that. Anyway, that trip up there,up the Sound, on the Joseph Henry was amarvelous thing.

Now, were you more protected on that run fromfear of Japanese submarines?

Oh, yes. There was still a threat but theInside Passage was fairly safe. However, get-ting up there, going up to British Columbia,subs had been sighted there. And this was,yes, 1942, and the Japanese were still in ac-tion in the Aleutians. So up north was reallya problem, and out to sea. There had beenships sunk outside the Sound . . . I don’tknow if there had been any ships sunk insidethe Sound . . . I mean, the Inside Passage.Maybe so, but I don’t recall that. We felt fairlysafe there and were kind of easygoing aboutlookout and all that.

Was that a particularly sought-after run?

It was for northern seamen, northwest-ern seamen. Oh, this Alaska Steam wasconsidered a prize.

Well, you said the food was good, and . . . .

Well, yes, it was better. [laughter] Yes. Butit was sought after because they were gettingback and forth a lot—there along the coast,and come back often to Seattle and to BritishColumbia, so they weren’t long trips. It hadto be better. If it hadn’t, we’d have raised hell.But, no, these were desirable trips, becauseyou weren’t going for a long stretch. I thinkthis trip lasted two months or something—July to October—yes, two, two and half, threemonths. So we were just going from little portto port.

And so I came back and almost immedi-ately got on the Henry Failing for another trip

up the Inside Passage. That was different.That was a . . . .

So when you sailed off immediately, you didn’tgo back to the Bay Area. You just stayed inSeattle?

No. I made another trip immediately be-cause it was good pay, and I didn’t want tolose my place in line. I got the Henry Failing,because it was a higher pay because it wasgoing to go way up north, past the Aleutians.And there was going to be some danger-zonepay. I was thinking of sort of putting awaymoney at that time. Also, because I’d goneup the Inside Passage, I was in a higher placein line to get on another northern trip.

But I got on the Henry Failing in Octoberof 1943 and that was the beginning of twotrips that I took up there to the Aleutians.We went up to Dutch Harbor and UnalaskaIsland and Attu in the Aleutians. Not Kiska,because the Japanese had that. The Japanesehad the two furthest islands, and they oncehad had all those islands, but we had driventhem back, and they were on the twowestern-most islands. Kiska was one of them.But we just went up to Dutch Harbor,Unalaska, and I think we hit Attu. And thosewere miserable places, as I remember.

Oh, yes, we hit two or three of the Aleu-tians—Unalaska, that’s Dutch Harbor, andAttu and Adak, where the Americans had abig base. That was an experience, becausethere were thousands of men up there onthose little islands—Adak, for one, that hadbeen Japanese controlled and was still beingoccasionally attacked by planes fromJapanese-held Kiska and the far islands. Andsubs were everywhere. But the Japanese werebeing driven back elsewhere in the Pacific,so they weren’t as active as they had been.Nevertheless, we really were on the alert the


whole time, and ships were being sunk upthere.

But Adak, I think it was, was where thou-sands of men were quartered in Quonset huts,and it was very cold; they’d gone through awinter. They were a miserable bunch of guys.I mean, it was terribly isolated. They werealone and drudging around in the mud andthe rain. There was ice slush. And I remem-ber, on the crew, we felt very sorry for them.There was a real feeling of camaraderie aboutthem and what they were putting up with.And here is the war, as seamen, we were rightin middle of the situation, bringing stuff upthere.

And then one thing that I do recall veryvividly is a USO show; these USO groupswere going around to various fronts. And itwas supposed to be a lot of fun. You know,they had a crooner and two or three starletsand chorus girl dancers and a little band andthings of that kind. And they had a Quonsethut they used as a theater or a meeting hall.And god, there were hundreds of guys packedinto this one night. They had nothing elseto do. And here they were.

And one of the young women was a con-tortionist, and she was a very skinny, thinyoung lady, who could move her arms andlegs in the most outlandish pretzel positions.I would say it was not only bizarre; there wassomething wrong with it in that group. Bythat, I mean they were looking for ordinarywomen . . . [laughter] of which there were acouple who sang and all that, and they wouldwhistle and yell and scream. And, you know,god, these poor guys, I mean, you just felt thatyou wanted to cry, watching them react tothis. They hated the crooner; they booed andhissed this guy who sang. They would yell,“Get out of the way. Bring out the women.”Then they brought out this young contor-tionist! I remember there was stunned silence

in the room, in this great room. They reallydidn’t know how to react, you know. It waswrong, and she went through her act, andeverybody was terribly uncomfortable.

In the first place, it was sexy, but in aweird sort of way, and not what anybodywanted, you know. [laughter] And I’m surethat later on there were all kinds of jokes andhorrible stories about it among them. But atthat moment, it was a stunner.

And then, of course, a couple of the girlscame out—good-looking, young women whosang. And they would clap, and everybodyscreamed and yelled and asked for more,“Take it off, take it off,” you know. [laughter]These guys, that’s all they had. And thatwould have to be enough, because theywouldn’t see anybody for months. Then thestories I heard. One young soldier that I wastalking with said, “They really shouldn’t havethese shows, because it just gets the guys allupset. They’re lonely enough, but then theysee this. It’s OK when its happening, butwhen the people go away, it’s worse. You justfeel like hell,” he said, “They shouldn’t allowit. It’s terrible.” I don’t know if they all feltthat way. And he said, “Did you ever hearabout this guy who a few weeks ago fell forthis girl when a troupe went through? Shewas a singer or a dancer. And he went out ofhis mind. He just went crazy. He followedher everywhere, and they had to take himback to his own Quonset hut, because he washanging around so much.” And he says, “Onenight they found him dead in the snow. Hehad been trying to chew his way through herQuonset hut.” He said, “Yes, his mouth wasall chewed up, and his teeth were broken,and his fingernails were all gone. And theguy was dead in the snow there trying to getinside.”

Whether this is true or not or just part ofthe lore of that place, I don’t know. All I

315THE ALASKA RUN

know is listening to this guy, I just had chills.“You poor son-of-a-bitch. Oh, you poor guys,what you’re putting up with here.” It wasawful. The surroundings were barren, thebarren Adak, and there had been bombingand all that. Everything was desolate looking.We hit a couple of the other islands thatweren’t as bad. But you know, those guysreally had it tough, really rough.

I’ve always wondered what some of themmust have been like afterwards, what theywould say about it, as against being, you know,at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa or at any ofthe battles of New Guinea or anything. I justwonder if this was any better, because theremust have been psychiatric problems beyondbelief over a period of a couple years or moreout there. They had no place to go, nothingto do.

They couldn’t get away from each other, it doesn’tsound like, either.

No, they couldn’t get away from eachother—nowhere to go. And then these showswould come, with sometimes inappropriatecrap. And they would partly enjoy it, and yetthey knew these people were going away, andthat was that, and they’d be back to . . . .

I’ve always felt the same way about entertainingpeople in prisons.

Maybe, but that’s more frequent, and atleast it’s close to home, and it’s near theirsociety. But these guys didn’t know whenthey’d ever get out of there, you know. Theywere not just prison; it’s an isolation onanother planet.

No, it sounds grim.

Terrible. Anyway, Attu and Kiska hadbeen taken while we were on that trip, justbefore we came down. That’s right. Therewere real battles just a few hundred miles tothe west on Japanese-held islands. It was adangerous period. Yes, there were kamikazesup there. Not while we were there at Adak,but there had been kamikaze attacks at theother islands.

So, anyway, I had two trips on the HenryFailing up to the Aleutians. And I got lettersfrom Kathy at Dutch Harbor or wherever itwas, and she and I were beginning really tocorrespond a lot. And things were shapingup in some sort of a way. She saved some ofmy letters. I have a hard time reading them.I was such an egoistical son of a gun, so fullof myself, so full of the romance of my adven-turous life and of what I was going to do inthe world, but also there were rather gooddescriptions of what was going on. I had agood sense of place and environment andpeople and all that. And then there wouldbe a little place reserved at the end about howmuch I thought of her and what we’re goingto do, because I had devoted a lot of time tomyself, what I thought of myself. [laughter]And she wrote me wonderful letters, tellingme all the news and what was going on. Andwe were able to communicate quite a bit.When I read them now, I just think, “Whywould she be interested in this preening littlebastard who was out there at sea doing histhing?”

On that trip is where some of us on thecrew talked about work a lot, because it washard work. And it would be whenever weweren’t too exhausted to talk. I rememberBob and I and some of the crew, sittingaround talking about, “What kind of life isthis to work like this all the time? We’re justdoing it for a short time. But, you know, there


are people who work like this day and nightall their lives.”

I just knew I wouldn’t have the stamina,the ability, the strength, to go on and was ina state of wonder about men who had doneit for a long time. There were some old-timers—young old-timers, middle-agedguys—who had been on the Alaska run formost of their lives; their ability to work withseeming endless energy, to continue for four,five, six hours, humping coal, you know,when I’d be almost dead. And yet there wassomething about the way they worked thatkept you going, so I was able to do it.

I remember feeling how grateful I was towork with one old guy that I liked very much.I forget his name—Larken, I believe. Therewas something about the way he worked, thatI felt he had turned himself into a machine.He must have switched something in hishead, which I think happens, and you don’tthink about anything except the next load,and you just do it, and you do it, and you doit, and you keep doing it. And I would bepractically dead. And once or twice I think Idid have to just sit down—I couldn’t stand itanymore—get rest, which was allowed. Andthen somebody else would go in for you. Butyou know, you didn’t want to do that. Youwanted to keep up.

Well, I probably got in better shape atthat point in my life than I have ever beensince. I mean, I was just one tight wire fromhead to foot. [laughter] And by the secondtrip that I made up there, I was able to keepup, but I still had this admiration, amazement,wonder at the work ability of some of theseold guys—some of them sixty years old—whocould do this kind of work.

And then we’d talk about that—not nec-essarily with them, but some of the youngerguys. And we’d talk about, “What kind oflife is this, anyway?” And Trot was with us

on one of those conversations and, he said,“Well, what’s life worth?”

“Life is worth what you pay for it. Life isworth what you give people for it. Labor isworth what the rewards are. These guys gotnone. They got none. And that’s exactlywhere we all are right now. Our labor is notrespected. They use us; they exploit us; theyabuse us; and it all goes under the heading of‘doing your job.’” And he said, “Look at someof those guys. They don’t know anything else,and they believe this is life. They believe thisis their life. They’ve got no other life.” Hewas a marvelous guy when I think of it!

He says, “You know, their blood is beingsucked. They’ll end up without a pension.They’ll be on the dole. If they haven’t savedup a little out of this lousy pay they get, they’llbe flotsam on the beach. Some of them mightbe able to get a little rooming house and liveand wander around, you know, punch drunkfor the remainder of their lives, sewing theirlittle canvas and making their little curtainsfor their windows.”

It was rather common for two or threeold guys to live together. They would retire,when they couldn’t work anymore and werejust worn out. “Hey, look at that. Nobody’sdoing anything for them. They’ve beensucked dry and tossed out.” He said, “That’scapitalism. That’s what you guys think is sogreat. You’re not getting any part of it, andyet you have this weird notion that it’s good.Why? What’s it done for you?” [laughter] Onand on.

And then somebody would bring up tradeunions. “Oh, fine! Trade unions are great! Butyou got to have a long-range view. What arethe trade unions going to do with the wholesystem?” And these wonderful argumentswould go on, and Trot, I remember, was won-derful on this. He talked about the value oflabor, the value of work. I struggled with this

317THE ALASKA RUN

quite a bit and didn’t know if I agreed; but,nevertheless, it sounded great to me.

Bob would bring up things like, “Trot, Iwant to ask you one thing. Would you dosomething for me, one thing for me? Wouldyou just say once, ‘Fuck the working class?’”[laughter] I remember he said, “I’m so tiredof listening to you talk about the ‘great work-ing class.’ What is the working class? You justsaid yourself, ‘Look what they’re doing, whatwe’re doing. This is a way of life?’ But theytake it; they like it; it’s their way. That’s whatthey see as their value in the world—beingjust this kind of crap. This is what they are.”

And Trot would say, “You, man, you area real basic nihilist.” (He’d use all thesewords.) “You’re a nihilist,” he said, “andyou’re pessimistic,” he says. “Your reaction towhat’s been done to your system is to with-draw from the world and become a recluseand go up to a little piece of land up on themountains where you can sit there and con-template your navel. Well, go ahead! You’reno use to us!” [laughter] Oh, they were won-derful. I wish I could really reconstruct someof those wonderful arguments.

And then somebody would yell, “Ah,shut up, you guys! You don’t know whatyou’re talking about. You’re all full of shit.Shut up! Shut up! We’re playing cards; bequiet! You’re making too much noise.”[laughter]

So it sounds like you were probably too exhaustedto write? I mean, your writing . . . .

Not much. But I do have some scrawls inone of my notebooks from those trips, aboutwork. A lot of it was about work, about scen-ery, about things that people said. And thingslike what Trot just said, I would note downsomething to remind me about that, and

Bob’s deep, melancholy pessimism and hisview of women. [laughter]

He had a very dim view of women in gen-eral, though he had probably more sexualactivity ashore than anybody else that I knew.I mean, women liked him very much so healways had some young woman with him—picked up at a bar or met somewhere. Andyet none of them were worthy of him. [laugh-ter] He didn’t say it that way. He said thatnone of them were the woman he was reallylooking for. And they were all lost womenlooking for brief encounters to get themselvesthrough a few days.

I met two of the young women at thePembrook Hotel. We had adjoining rooms.And I had one room, and he had the other.And I had to listen to his relationships withat least two. They were very nice younggirls—lost, sort of seaport girls—young, rela-tively inexperienced, very bright these two.Betty was one, and I forget the other’s name.And I liked them both very much, and we’dgo around together, all of us. And one at atime he would have them up to his room,and they were satisfied with that brief rela-tionship. They were very loyal to him whileit was going on, and then he’d move on. Sohe was that kind of guy. But when he wastalking about women in general, he had againthis deeply chauvinistic view that womenwere only looking out for the immediategoods of the world. They would take anybodywho could supply them with what theyneeded now. They didn’t have any long-rangeviews; they didn’t have, you know, his greatview of the world. You know, on and on.

There was arguing about that. I, of course,being a great humanist, was always on theother side of the argument and raising hellwith him about his deeply chauvinistic viewof the world and his attitude toward women,


and that he’d never find the kind of womanhe says he wants, because he wasn’t worthyof it. I mean, he sounded just like a bastard.[laughter] What woman would want to hearthat about women?

And I said, “They would know exactlywhat you think of them—you wouldn’t tellthem, but they’d learn it. They’d learn prettyquick.” I said, “You can’t really stick it outwith a woman more than three or four daysbecause she catches on to you. [laughter]You’re afraid that they’re going to learn whatyou’re really like.”

But on the other hand, he was very niceto women. He was very good to them directly.Kathy thought he was great. She was takenin by him. [laughter] But, no, he was not justkind; he was very understanding of women,when he was talking to them, when he waswith them. But way down underneath he hadthis contempt for all womankind, as he didfor the rest of humanity, you know. There wasthis deep pessimism about motives; you neverknow what people really think, and all thatsort of thing.

Those were interesting days, because thisis part of learning; this is part of growing up,you know. You’re in your early twenties, it’sthe sort of thing that becomes a kind of food;you are nurtured by these things.

And it sounds like somehow the lessons that youwere learning, or the things you were observingin that setting, in the context of being a seamanand working, were somehow more real or morevalid than the social lessons or the relationshiplessons you were learning like in the Berkeleysetting.

Oh, yes, they’re entirely different. Youwouldn’t learn these things in that setting.Oh, no! Oh, then and later I just knewworking with people as a worker made a

tremendous difference in one’s view of theworld and one’s understanding of it. I beganto look upon what I had been and thoughtbefore, that I was a kind of a dilettantish, pip-squeak intellectual, you know. Middle-class,liberal ass. I began to really feel very bitterabout that whole world and that everybodylike I had been ought to get out and get towork, have a job, work with the other people.

And so it was a sort of class interest thatwas developing, and I was beginning to char-acterize my other acquaintances and oldfriends in terms of their work, their class orwork identity.

Well, did Kathy sympathize with those ideas orfind them interesting?

To a considerable degree. She was work-ing in the shipyards. Her father had been ahard-working guy in foundries, and she hada certain sympathy for that world. Her fam-ily had been poor, honest, lower middle-classpeople, hard-working, and all that. At thesame time, she went through this early war-time experience of working very hard andwith work . . . . You should talk to her aboutit sometime.

She learned about things that she hadnever dreamed of—other women in otherframes doing different things—that she neverknew that such people existed. The samewith me. I was finding out that there werepeople who existed that I never dreamed of,who I found extremely compelling, loadedwith new wisdom about the world—thingsthat I had never thought of, new angles, newways of looking at things. Sure. That was partof what was happening, in 1943 and 1944,for me.

All right—Trot. One last harangue thathe made: “Any of you guys who don’t knowwhat you’re worth aren’t worth living.”

319THE ALASKA RUN

[laughter] And I thought that was a marvel-ous line. He was quite a guy—crazy, little guy,but a nice guy. And so I made two trips onthe Henry Failing.

37MARRIAGE

HAD GONE DOWN to San Franciscobetween the two trips. I’d gone to SanFrancisco to see Kathy, and we spent a

was out to sea. And my own folks, by theway, I hadn’t told them. They knew that Iwas going with Kathy, and we may have evenvisited them once, but we hadn’t said any-thing. And Kathy’s folks, all they could thinkwas, “Here it’s wartime, and our poor daugh-ter is running around with this guy, who isnot only going to sea but thinks that he’s awriter and has no idea in the world what he’sgoing to do with himself,” and all that. Butthey were nice, but they didn’t like it. Kathy’ssister was the only one who was really niceto me. She still is. But that all changed later.

But, anyway, so we went up to Seattle,and I remember sitting one night; we werehaving a drink or something, and I said,“Why don’t we get married?” And there wasa long pause. And that was my proposal. Sheagreed. And within two or three days we . . . .[Kathy d’Azevedo joins session] For whateverreason, Kathy did agree, but it was very nice,and I felt very good about it but also veryscared. I wasn’t sure why I felt that I couldhandle being married and all that sort ofthing, but I wanted to be, and it seemed tome that Kathy wanted to be. And she says

Ilot of time together. I only had, what—October, November—about a month and ahalf before I had to go back to sea. And I hadtalked her into going up to Seattle with me.Now, we hadn’t told our folks really. I guessher mother and father knew that she wasgoing with somebody, and they probably hadseen me. I don’t think they had much use forme. [laughter]

Kathy agreed to go up, and as I remem-ber, typical of me, I was finishing writing astory on the way up on the train, and I wasreading it to her. She had such enormouspatience. That’s one of the reasons, I suppose,I enjoyed being with her. She listened withalways great attention and quite critically.

Were you writing on your typewriter on the train?

No, I was writing by hand and readingher selections from it. It was a very nice trip,and we stayed at the Pembrook Hotel, theseamen’s hotel. Trot was in town, but Bob


even today that she wanted to be. So we de-cided to do it right away.

Kathy was beginning to feel a little guiltyabout her mother and father not really know-ing what we were doing. So we both agreedshe should call home and tell them. And hermother, in characteristic fashion, said, “Don’tyou do it; I’m coming up. Wait till I come. Iwant to be there.” Very forthright woman—very, wonderful woman. Actually, I liked hera great deal. And she said, “Please promiseme you’ll wait till I get there.” And she andKathy’s sister, Shirley, arrived the next day.

We held off, and they came, and I remem-ber it was a little strained with Kathy’smother, who was very nice, but I could tellshe was thinking, “This is a terrible way toget married, and even in wartime one shouldnot do this,” and very worried about Kathy,as she should well have been. But I do recallKathy’s sister, Shirley, being very sweet andnice to me. She is to this day—even thoughshe has gone through some terrible times, andshe’s not a very well put together lady at thispoint in her life—I have this very warm feel-ing about her, because she made me feel asthough I at least had one friend in Kathy’sfamily and was very up about everything.[laughter]

And so then I managed to line up an oldjudge who would come up to the room andget us married. We dressed up in what littlewe had, the best we could. Trot was in town,and he came as our best man, my best man.And he brought this wonderful, little gift—a reindeer-handled wine bottle opener, silverwine bottle opener, that he’d gotten at someflea market down on the waterfront—just theright thing. And there was a bottle of brandythat I had bought and put on the dresser forus to celebrate afterwards and have a drink.And I remember the judge, a poor, ratherblowzy old guy with a big, red nose, couldn’t

get his eyes off the bottle. I gave him a drinkbecause it was obvious that’s what he wanted.He would have gone on drinking the wholebottle, had I not said, “It’s time for us to getmarried!” [laughter] And he went throughthe routine, and we said the vows. AndKathy’s mother and sister were there as ourwitnesses. As I remember, I was feeling rathergood about it. But Kathy, I’m sure, felt that itwas a very poor answer for getting married,for a wedding. [laughter] But that’s the wayit was.

Kd: Right.

So I think Kathy’s mother and sister madeit very good. It was good that they came. Itwould never have occurred to me to ask any-body. I called my folks, who I’m sure wereshocked down to their boots.

You called them after you got married, or whenyou were going to?

I think after, I believe . . . or just before.Anyway, it was not more than, you know, afew hours.

Kd: If even that.

You know, I felt I had to let them knowand tell my brother and all that. And, again,you know, when I look back, how tolerantpeople can be and how controlled. I was talk-ing, I guess, to my mother and then to myfather. They both, I know, just thought, “Oh,he’s done it. He and Kathy are just going tobe miserable, it’s going to be awful,” and theywere partly right, [laughter] “and this is justwrong.” And they felt hurt, because theyhadn’t known, and they had no chance eitherto be there some way or to do somethingabout it, which to them, in their world, was

323MARRIAGE

very important. And I guess it was to yourfolks, too, something you . . . .

Kd: Yes.

You know, you do something about mar-riage. You don’t just, you know, do it this way.However, in my kind of crazy, dissident frameof mind, I thought it was just the right thing;it’s wonderful. I felt it was just the way to doit. But there really was no other way. I mean,we weren’t able to tell our families. In fact,we weren’t clear enough on what . . . I wasn’tclear enough on what I was doing. I knew Iwanted to get married, and I knew I wantedto marry Kathy. But I wasn’t sure that I hadany idea what came after or how to handleit, or who I was or why I was. [laughter]

Well, when we touched on this before, not ontape, one of the first things that came out of yourmouth was that you didn’t know what you weregoing to do to be a provider, and you felt con-stantly under scrutiny to answer that question tosomebody.

Right, sure.

Primarily to yourself, I think more than to any-body else.

All I knew was I was going to sea. Ofcourse, at that point, I had to because thewar was still on. But, you know, things weregoing to come to an end there, and I had noidea what I was going to do when the warwas over, how I was going to get along. All Iknew it was marvelous to be married; then afew weeks later learning that we might havea kid—Kathy was pregnant. I guess I learnedthat at sea. You wrote to me about it. But,you know, we expected it, and that’s whatwe wanted. And I just felt everything was

just marvelous. But it wasn’t marvelous, be-cause the reality of the world was that thingswere very difficult. [laughter]

Well, the reality of the world then was this expec-tation that you would be the primary providerand . . . .

Oh, I don’t know, because Kathy hadbeen pretty well a provider for herself, andshe’d been working. However, from not onlythe point of view of that era, that period, butnow I mean, if the wife gets pregnant and isgoing to have a child, it does change thewhole chemistry of the situation. And I thinkwe were much more aware of that kind ofthing than people are today. I mean, havinga kid and being married meant responsibili-ties of an enormous kind if you were doing itright. I wasn’t really prepared to understandor accept those responsibilities. They scaredthe hell out of me. But I just decided, “Wegot to do it.”

Well, don’t you think during the war that someof the bets are off on the way things had beendone, because you honestly didn’t know how theworld was going to be later?

Kd: Yes, I think so.

Oh, sure. Oh, yes. There was a great dealof uncertainty. But when you’re that youngyou take on all kinds of things, and you makeall kinds of leaps and risks, you see. But Iwasn’t completely oblivious of the fact that Iwas up against something that I might notbe able to handle very well. And yet I wasglad to have done it. Also, I had escapes. Icould get away to sea, and Kathy could not.That’s the other thing, Kathy couldn’t getaway.


So you had about a week after you were marriedin Seattle?

Kd: Couple of weeks I think, close to twoweeks.

Yes, I would say about three weeks, al-most a month. And we had I think, a verynice day or two with Kathy’s mother and sis-ter. And I got to know them a little better,and as I say, Shirley was just wonderful tome. I’ll never forget it. She was sweet andencouraging, and she liked me, and I likedher. And they helped relax us to a degree.

And so I was there another couple ofweeks and had to then ship out again. Thatwas the second trip on the Henry Failing upto the Aleutians, until March. I got back onMarch twenty-fifth, and took the SS Alvaradoimmediately—three days later. And I nowremember why, because Bob was a mate onthe Alvarado. I got back, and I was able toget a placement on a ship immediately anddecided to do it, because it was going out inthe Pacific and probably would have a fairlygood payoff.

Kathy and I were writing. We wrote a lotof letters during that period. My letters fromthe Alvarado were kind of great, and Kathy’sletters to me were marvelous. We had a goodletter-writing thing going. We were newlymarried and thought the world was going tobe all right and didn’t see all the breakersahead, or the rocks. And I was beginning tofeel really very good about it. Things weregoing all right; it was going to work out—Ihad no idea why and how, but I knew it wasgoing to go well. [laughter] And then Kathywrote in one of the letters that she was preg-nant, and I remember feeling wonderful atsea learning about that. I got that letter inHonolulu, I guess. And we wrote back andforth, and the world seemed to be takingshape.

However, there was that great gloweringblack hole in the future of what I was goingto do when the war came to an end. And forthis period, at least, going to sea was an ob-vious escape from problems, which, of course,it is for everybody who does it. You can thinkabout them, but you don’t have to do toomuch about them.

38BECOMING SHIP’S DELEGATE

HE ALVARADO turned out to begoing to Honolulu. That was thewonderful ship that would go some-

good on one side. And it wasn’t a liberty ship;it was just an old scow.

We stopped, I guess to get cargo atLongview, Washington, on the ColumbiaRiver near Kelso, Washington, which is a fa-mous old port on the old coastwise run. Andwhen we were trying to turn around, the en-gines were so feeble that when we weretrying . . . I was on the wheel, as I remem-ber, and we were trying to get the ship to goastern so the tugs could pull us to the port sothat we could turn around down the river. Inthe process we ran into this great sewer mainand the very large culvert, split right downthe middle. I mean, we just rammed right intoit. And I recall that there were probably ahundred people up on the bridge nearby andalong the waterfront looking down on us—local citizens—watching us destroy theirculvert, and yelling at us and cheering, andtelling us what great seamen we were and allthat sort of thing. [laughter] And that’s whatthe ship was like. We had a great start, andthen we headed off and went to Honolulu.

Ttimes just as fast backwards as it did forward,because if it hit a real current or a storm, itjust didn’t have the power to go. I think wemade about four or five knots, which was veryslow. And it was a terrible old rust bucket, theAlvarado. Though I remember it with a kindof an affection, it was terrible to work on.

My friend Bob Nelson was third mate,and I was, of course, immediately electeddelegate because I had a typewriter and Iknew quite a bit about ships by that time,and I knew the beefs on the Alaska run, andI had some idea what to do.

And you’re still with the Sailor’s Union?

I was still in the Sailor’s Union. And Ithink it took us three weeks to get toHonolulu. We just did a snail’s pace acrossthe Pacific. There were stories about how wemight split in two, because there had beensome tales about the welding not being very


And in Honolulu, that was a very sad tripthere. First place, I couldn’t find FrancisMotofuji. He apparently was somewhere else.And Peter Buck, Te Rangi Hiroa, was awayon some trip. And so, nobody that I reallywould liked to have seen was there. AndHonolulu was a very depressing place.

Was it markedly different from the first time yousaw it?

Well, it wasn’t so long between trips, ex-cepting it was toward the end of the war, andthings had gotten very shabby. I don’t knowif there was much military there at that point;I think a lot of them had left. Again, I didn’tgo out to Pearl Harbor; I didn’t want to seeit. And we only were there just a day or two.

This is in 1944 now?

The Alvarado, yes, March to May, 1944.And it was quite different there. Yet it mighthave been me. I just didn’t go ashore much; Ididn’t really want to go around. And weweren’t there more than a day or two, andwe headed back.

The Mahi Mahi on the Honolulu pine-apple run was one of my first trips, and I wasstill full of gung-ho spirit and the romanticview of going to sea. But by the time theAlvarado came along, I just remember thatall of us on that crew, including the officers,were irritable and out of sorts most of thetime. And there was a feeling that we wereon a ship that might not even make it. [laugh-ter] And here we were out alone, and reportsof subs and all that, and there was just a feel-ing of being sort of lost in the ocean, lost atsea. And the days would just go spinning byslowly, and we were rolling on the waves.Sometimes the waves would bowl the shipover at what seemed to be a forty-five-degree

angle. The screw would come out of waterand the whole ship would shudder, and youwondered whether it would hold up, becausethe ship was really a rust bucket.

And it was not a liberty ship?

No, the Alvarado was . . . I guess theywould call it a steam schooner. And it wasvery old. It had been around a long time. Infact, a couple of the old men on board saidthat they had shipped it back in the 1920sor . . . [laughter] or before, and that it hadbeen running coastwise up and down. It wasa shuttle-run ship that they were now send-ing on the Hawaii run during the war.

I was the union delegate on the ship,because the three gangs had finally agreedon me to represent the ship. I was beginningto get very conscious of trade union policyand being a union man. And I read theagreement—the union with the ship own-ers—carefully and tried to follow all the rules.

My friend Bob Nelson was third mate.He had passed his exams for becoming amerchant marine officer, and as far as I know,it was his first trip as mate. He was a thirdmate. And so, you see, that was rather inter-esting—the fact that I had a close friend whowas now on the bridge. He and I would havelong talks and arguments about conditions onthe ship. There were others who took part inthese bull sessions we would have in the messroom, but Bob had to keep a little distantfrom the crew, in the sense of hanging around.Nevertheless, he and I would talk a lot.

And the crew was getting more and moreimpatient and irritable. The ship was so slow,and everything was wrong. The captain wasa heavy drinker, and there were days in whichyou had the feeling that you were being ledby the blind. [laughter] The officers didn’treally have enough to do sometimes on those


long days when we were plowing through theocean at six or seven knots, or backwards, aswe would sometimes say, depending upon thecurrent.

And so a lot of beefs arose, having mainlyto do with food—of course. The steward’sdepartment always gets this first thing. Butthe food was rotten. I mean, whatever theyput on that ship, it was as though they hadkept it around since the beginning of the war,and it was still in the half-frozen state in theship’s lockers. That was bad enough. But, also,the garbage stank; it was often left inside inthe galleys.

I remember a big argument between oneof the deck hands and a member of thesteward’s department who was chopping upsome just-thawed chickens with their headson, still had some feathers. And they smelledand looked rotten, and this scullion in thesteward’s department was chopping them upwith a cleaver for dinner that night! [laugh-ter] And I remember the deck hand asking,“You’re going to serve us that slop? That rot-ten slop?”

In almost proverbial fashion, the guypicked up a cleaver and held it up and said,[laughter] “You’re going to be part of the chopif you don’t shut up! You’re going to get whatwe serve you, and this is what we’ve got, andthis is what it is.” And I remember lookingat that pile of chicken parts—they stank; theywere real rotten. But they were made into akind of a stew which we had to eat! [laugh-ter] And I forget exactly what form it cameout in, but we had it!

And, plus the fact that the eating uten-sils were often filthy—they’d come out of thewash basin in the galley full of grease, some-times with bits of food on them. We wouldcomplain, and the steward would tell us,“Shut up. What do you think we are on? TheRitz? We’re on the Alvarado out in the middle

of the ocean, about to be killed, and you guysare worried about a couple of little specks onyour forks and knives!” [laughter] And therewere cockroaches galore, as there alwaysseemed to be on those older ships, particu-larly ones that went to the islands. This shipwas just a fetid hole.

So here I was delegate. And there werearguments, also, about overtime, because themates would sometimes turn watches outwhen it wasn’t their watch, which is some-thing they can do. Officers can turn you outif there’s either an emergency or some extrawork that has to be done. But then you’resupposed to get overtime! Then there werealways arguments about how much overtime.This went on every ship I was on—how muchovertime should actually be paid? And thecrew, of course, took this terribly seriously asdid the officers. I mean, a few hours over-time, even though it might mean just a fewbucks, went on their record as something theyhad approved of. So if you were on the bridgeyou want to turn in a low budget for crewtime. And to the crew, every hour that youspent outside your scheduled work is by agree-ment something that overtime should be paidfor. So one of the delegate’s responsibility wasalmost always arguing with mates about theamount of overtime for each of the men.

I took this very seriously. I took all thebeefs up to the bridge, and Bob and I wouldtalk about it sometimes, off watch, when hewas not on the bridge or he didn’t have dutiesand when I was free. We’d go out on deck,and we shared this information between thebridge and the deck, which is unusual to havethat kind of communication. [laughter]

And Bob, as I have already shown, was avery serious, somewhat conservative, morosekind of a guy, most of the time, but very pro-union. Yet at the same time, he was verycynical about the working class which I’ve


already talked about. And he and I wouldargue about this all the time, and with TrotIkenson. I’ve mentioned those three-way dis-cussions with a communist-Jewish guy aboardthe ship [laughter]; and Bob Nelson, a moroseScandinavian from Minnesota and verybright, very able, very much a loner in hisown way of behaving, and in life; and thenmyself, constantly curious and pushing intothe lives of these people to understand whatI was doing and who I was with.

Between Bob and I, we developed a kindof program. We were going to make this atrue union ship, you know. He was in a newunion now; he was Masters, Mates and Pilots.We would joke about that: that he was nowa masturbating pilot. But he had also been amember of deck gangs for years on ships.

Is that very usual for people to go through theranks that way? To become officers by . . . ?

Oh, yes. In fact, the older way was that ifyou were sailing for companies, you wentthrough all the jobs. During the war that wasbroken. Lots of people got just a couple ofweeks orientation, like I did as a cadet. Andthey would come aboard with very little ex-perience, and, of course, they were lookedupon as the lowest of the low. But they hadto be treated as officers.

In fact, that was one of the things thatcaused me to feel so uncomfortable as a ca-det. I didn’t feel that I had come up throughthe ranks, I didn’t know enough about ships,and here I was with a little wartime monkeysuit, as a merchant marine cadet. And thatbothered me a great deal. It was one of thereasons why I resigned when I got back toNew York on that first trip.

But here was Bob, who did it in a legiti-mate way. He came up through the ranks,passed his exam, and got a raise in pay. Yet

he was very vulnerable to the joking thatwent on. He didn’t like hearing, “Now you’rea company man, Nelson. From now on wecan’t count on you for anything.” So he wasunder that strain of showing that he was agood guy. But here he had a friend that hehad sailed with, myself, who was deck dele-gate and ship’s delegate, and so he and I wouldsort of confer. We dreamed up ways, strate-gies, for bringing up these beefs in ways thatthe officers and the captains would not reallybe able to contend with. And most of thiswas put upon me, because I was the delegate,and I was the one that had to go up and doit.

But Bob said, “You know, if you take thiscaptain on, he’s basically a real stupid ass; hedoesn’t know his ass from wild honey. If you’refirm with him and hard, this guy is going togive way. And the chief mate is the same kindof guy. These two guys are drinking buddies;they’re up there drinking their brandy andtheir loganberry wine and all that up there.And you get them when they’ve just had afew drinks, and these guys are vulnerable, youknow. We’ll take the position that they’rebreaking the union agreement.”

So I would do that. I’d go up with thesebeefs, and I was fairly firm, and many of themthey agreed to, and sometimes not. And thenI’d say, “Well, we’ll put this down for the pa-trolman to handle, the union to handle,when we get into port.”

I had my typewriter, and, gee, I wish Ihad some of those records that I had. [laugh-ter] I mean, I took very full records of everylittle picayune beef that there was on the ship.There were many safety violations. I mean,that ship, when I think of it . . . . [laughter]I’m not sure what company it was, but it wasobviously a ship ready for the graveyard, forthe burying ground of all ships.


Everything was wrong. They didn’t havethe proper tools for work, so that it was veryhard on the crew, particularly chipping.There was rust a half-inch deep on most ofthe ship. You were afraid when you went af-ter the rust that you were going to go throughthe bulkheads. It was that rusty. It hadn’treally been chipped or cleaned or painted fora long time. And a lot of the ropes from therope locker had laid around so long that theywere already frayed and beginning to rot inplaces, so that if you went aloft, you know, inthe bosun’s chair or something, you wouldsee these places of wear and wonder whetheror not it was safe.

And so all these things were beefs, andyou’d go up and complain about them. Youcouldn’t do much about equipment on-boardthat was no good, because that’s the way itwas. And that was a trip where one of theold-timers used to throw things regularlyoverboard! [laughter] Anything that didn’tlook right he’d throw, so pretty soon we didn’thave much to work with at all—not even badtools and bad stuff. The paint was lousy paint;if you had to paint, it didn’t cover. Everythingwas wrong on that trip. So all these little beefswould add up—particularly beefs that had todo with overtime. That was always the mainbeef.

And then I became the “bad boy,” as faras the bridge was concerned. I was a trouble-maker; I was inciting the crew. This wasalways the old charge, always against shipdelegates—if things didn’t go right, they wereinciting the crew. The crew here was just push-ing, and they were using me, too, as a kind ofpatsy. [laughter] And then my friend, Nelson,who was giving me advice about how to ap-proach the bridge, what to do . . . and itwasn’t long before things were in really badshape.

I remember one day, we’d had a ship’smeeting that I had presided over about whatwe were going to do about this when we gotto port: “Let’s all stay here and be here whenthe patrolman comes on, and we’ll lay outall these beefs, and we’ll nail this damn skip-per, this damn chief mate, the phony bosun,and all these company stiffs.”

Two of the guys, two of the, oh, not oldseamen—two older men, but they hadn’tbeen at sea very long—were real what wewould call “phonies.” I mean, they wereeither pro-company, always cozying up to themates and telling tales . . . which, by the way,is the worst thing you can do, be consideredto be a snitch on a ship and take tales fromwhat’s said down below up to the bridge. Andwe thought they were giving information. Ofcourse, I was doing it, too, to the third mate!But he was on our side! [laughter]

Yes! [laughter] Now, the bosun wouldn’t be atthese meetings?

The bosun could be but not always. Thebosun was supposed to be a union man, andusually bosuns kept kind of quiet during thesemeetings. These were crew meetings, and inthat bosuns had a certain kind of special posi-tion in the crew, usually they kept kind ofquiet, but not always. And I don’t rememberwhat this bosun’s position was. I don’t thinkwe liked him too well. But, nevertheless, atthis meeting I was trying to get them to deter-mine that they were going to stick togetherand be there when the patrolman cameaboard.

Now, would this happen in Hawaii?

The meeting would be when we got back,and I think on that trip we got back to Port-


land, Oregon. And there was a patrolmanwho would come down from Seattle. So weweren’t quite clear what kind of receptionwe were going to get, as far as the union wasconcerned.

My view, and that of others, was that weshould not leave the ship until we had regis-tered these complaints. I had them all writtenout and all that. And these two old guysstarted to say, “Hey, Whitey, you’re startingtrouble on this ship. We never had troublebefore on this ship until you got here.”

And I felt like saying, “How long haveyou been on this damn ship?” It was all newcrew, as far as I could tell. And they’re mak-ing little remarks of this kind. Then we heardthat they were also talking to the officers andthe skipper when they went up to thewheel—that’s when you had a chance to talkto the officers and sometimes the skipper,that’s where there was some communicationbetween the bridge and the crew. So that wasgetting around.

So most of us—the majority, I think—backed this business of, “We’ve got follow theagreement. We’ve got to do something here.Even though it’s wartime, goddamn it, wehave to protect the union.” I took this veryseriously. To me that was important. And Iwas beginning to feel at that point, very mucha part of the union. I had a very strong pro-union feeling, which was growing. I’d alwaysbeen that way, but now I had an opportunityto exercise it, to implement . . . .

Had you thought that the delegates on the shipsyou were on before had done a good job? I mean,you’d seen other delegates do their thing on otherships.

Yes. And some of them were consideredtotally useless, and were elected to be totallyuseless, you know, on some ships, and there

were times when a crew would just chooseanybody who would take it, because it wasconsidered a dirty job or one that could getyou into trouble or one that you had to workbeyond your hours and all that sort of thing.And other times they would be a very care-ful, depending on the crew, to elect somebodywhom they thought would do something, asI think was the case of the Alvarado; it wassuch a lousy ship. Oh, about two or three daysout when we had a ship’s meeting, their ideawas that I had a typewriter, and I talk like asea lawyer, and . . . . [laughter]

A sea lawyer? That’s great!

Oh, a sea lawyer. Oh, yes. See, that couldbe an epithet, and it could be a compliment,depending. Or a motor mouth, you know!But the point is I showed an interest in theagreement and things of that kind.

So normally, are these delegates elected afteryou’ve been at sea a couple of days?

Well, I don’t remember exactly when thishappened. Not usually in port, because thingsare too disruptive in port—people comingand going, and cargo coming aboard—usuallyin the first day or two out. I forget just when,but early in the trip, this happened. So I waselected. I took this very seriously. I had beena delegate once before—forget on whichship—and things were fairly quiet and ordi-nary. But I’d learned something about theprocess, kept long records. When I was dele-gate, I’d have a sheaf of papers, you know,two inches thick of ship’s meetings and beefsand things of that kind. I turned it in to thepatrolman when I’d come in.

So, anyway, I was doing this, and at thismeeting, I was taking notes, saying, “Well,so are we all agreed? Let’s have a vote.”


And these two guys voted against it, say-ing, “What do you mean keeping us? As soonas I hit the dock, I’m going! The heck withthis,” you know, and all that.

And so the majority, I think, began tofeel, “These guys are real stool pigeons;they’re disruptive assholes, and we got towatch them.”

So the meeting was over, and everybodywas leaving, and I was getting up and put-ting together my stuff, and one of these guyssaid, “Hey, Whitey, you’re a commie. You’rejust a commie! What are you doing? Startingsome kind of ruckus here.” He says, “We’regoing to report you to the union.”

And I said, “I hope you do, because I’mgoing to make a report to the union!” Andthey made a couple of other remarks.

I got very mad. I only had a few fightswhen I was aboard ship—I mean, seriousones. But these guys really made me mad, and,you know, I told them to shut up, and I wasyelling as loudly as they were, you know. “Justshut up. You’re a phony son of a bitch. Shutup.”

And they stood up, and I stood up, andthey started coming toward me. Oh, no. Istarted saying, “You guys sound like real pho-nies! What kind of union men are you? Willyou just shut up!” And as I said that, firstthey looked as though I had quelled them,and they were going to be quiet and leave.

But I went too far, and I kept makingthese remarks and yelling at them, and finallyone of them slowly stood up and said, “Well,that’s enough. That’s just too damn much!”

And he started moving toward me. Andhe was much bigger than I and I thought,“Uh-oh, I’ve really done it now.”

And so I got myself ready, and I thought“I’m going to have to duke it out with thisguy.” And just as he was about six feet fromme, moving toward me, I saw him suddenly

look up and slowly move backwards. And Iwas thinking, “Why? What have I got? Whatis this power I got over . . . ?” But I saw he’sstill looking up behind me, and I turnedaround, and coming down the little stairway,the gangway, into the mess room was BobNelson, who was a great big guy! [laughter]And he was coming down and looking atthese guys, didn’t say a word—just looked andstood there. And he says, “Whitey, you oughtto go back to the fo’c’s’le. Go back to thefo’c’s’le. I’ll take care of these guys.” [laughter]

And he stood there, and I said, “Well,OK, but these guys are real phonies, realphonies.”

He says, “That’s all right. That’s OK.”So I left. And he told them to go back to

their fo’c’s’le; and apparently he told them,“If there is any more trouble, we’re going toput you in irons.” [laughter] I never saw any.I was the only one I ever saw put in irons andthat was on a later trip. But that was alwaysthe threat, you know. “We’ll put you inirons!” [laughter] “Down in the bilge, wherewe can keep an eye on you!” And so theseguys just turned into meek, little lambs andwent back to their fo’c’s’les. I didn’t have anytrouble with them the rest of the trip.

You were actually put in irons?

We’re not there yet. Oh, god, yes. But,anyway, so I remember thinking about that agreat deal. I was very vulnerable in those days,and I still am—everybody is vulnerable insome ways—but I was very vulnerable to thecharge that I was pushing the crew, that Iwas causing them to do things. I wondered,you know, to what degree the fact that, as adelegate, I was forming policy and makingsuggestions, that in a way I was arousing feel-ings and dissent that would not have beenactivated. I was thinking about that. But, of


course, the charge of being a “commie” didn’tbother me. I mean, it’s just the way it wassaid—it was meant to be an insult. At thesame time, the fact that someone was acommie didn’t bother me that much, just thatit was part of this whole antagonistic way thatthey were talking.

And I thought about that, you know.“Gee, am I acting like a communist? [laugh-ter] Am I being a communist?”

I had done a lot of reading by this point,and I was identifying to some degree with theleft of the CIO, reading their literature onboard ship. And the fact that the NMU haddone away with discrimination and hadmixed crews, and that they were very mili-tant, those things attracted me, and I was veryinterested in it. But I was a member of theSailor’s Union of the Pacific, and I had a cer-tain feeling of loyalty to that organization,and I wanted to be a good ship’s delegate andfollow the agreement. And I was thinking,“But maybe I’m going too far. Maybe I’mpushing too hard. Maybe my personality isn’tthe right thing to be a delegate. Maybe I cre-ate the problems.” All these doubts.

And Bob didn’t help too much becausehe was telling me, “Hey, Whitey, what youdid is fine. You got to do things like that, youknow. And a lot of these guys wouldn’t do agoddamn thing if there’s somebody didn’tgive them leadership,” all that kind of thing.And these two things created pulls in differ-ent directions. I remember that I wentthrough a lot of soul searching on that tripabout what . . . .

There’s a really interesting parallel in that phe-nomena you’re describing with what I thinkanthropologists sometimes fear that they’re cre-ating a cultural phenomenon by writing about itor . . . .

Oh, god, yes. I mean, to what extent areyou intruding or imposing something into asituation because of who you are?

Yes, by trying to provide structure or even byjust trying to . . . .

By asking questions. By the kinds of ques-tions you ask, you might be affecting thesituation. Yes. But that kind of concern, whenI had it later in life, came under differentkinds of conditions, where one could con-template it and think about it. Here it waswhere I could get into a fight in two secondsover it; either that or be accused by the offi-cers when I got back to port of being atroublemaker and a commie.

But you did feel—you must have felt, or maybethat’s what you’re going to talk about—that youwere representing a common good or that youwere representing union regulations of whatshould be done and protecting rights that . . . .

Oh, yes. That’s why I felt so assured indoing it. I was very idealistic. I believed thatthere was such a thing as the proper way todo things, and an agreement is an agreement,and I did have the sort of characteristic atti-tude toward the bridge as company men, and“the company versus us,” and all those thingswere at work. And I had some political no-tions about the relationship of officers andmen and companies and governments andclass and caste and all those types of things.And so I was very idealistic about my role:that I had to go out and struggle to defendthe rights of the union men. And to be a goodunion man, you did that. You fought; youstruggled. And, you know, I felt very heroicat times about this, that this was an impor-tant job to be done and that I was one of the


cogs in the great wheel of trade unionism andthe seamen’s struggles for rights and all that,particularly even in the Sailor’s Union ofPacific, which is a very reactionary union thatI didn’t really fully understand at that time.But even there, the history of unionizationhad been a very militant one in the past—Andrew Furuseth and his mixed role indevelopment of labor unions after the turnof the century.

All those things I had begun to get awareof and felt part of that tradition, part of thattrade union tradition, and idealized it to aconsiderable degree. So, you know, I wouldgo up to the mates or the captain with theidea that this was my historic role and rightto do this!

I was here representing a union, repre-senting the crew of this ship. I must have beena little poppycock in many ways. I probablywas an annoying bastard and probably wasvery full of myself and maybe a bit patroniz-ing—lord knows. [laughter] I mean, I couldhave easily been. But all I know is that inthis case, the chief mate and the skippercouldn’t abide me. “Here he comes again!What’s the beef now?”—you know, this kindof thing.

Well, did they suspect the relationship betweenyou and Bob Nelson? Did Bob Nelson have anytrouble because of . . . ?

Not that I’m aware of. But he was a prettytrue guy and a good seaman. He knew his job.He did his job. And they would have had ahard time getting at him.

I don’t think that we made so much ofthe fact that we were friends or knew eachother, that that would become an issue, be-cause often that’s the case. Often you sailedwith particular officers before on the shipsand got to know them and be fairly friendly

with them. This wasn’t unusual. It wouldhave been had we made too much of it, andif it was obvious that we were conferring andconspiring. But it wasn’t that way. It wasmuch more informal than that.

Was there a standard schedule? I mean, was itlike every Tuesday and Saturday that you’d goup to the bridge to, you know, to present thebeefs, or did you just continually . . . ?

No, it would be by appointment andwhen I was off watch, and either the mate orthe skipper had time, and I would just say,“How’s getting together?” or something.Then we’d get together in one of their state-rooms or in the officers’ mess or somethingof that kind. And they were pretty informal.These weren’t like court proceedings or for-mal meetings. We’d just get together and talk.But sometimes we would get very argumen-tative when I’d present my view aboutovertime or a beef and they would take excep-tion and accuse me of padding the records,and then we’d get a little hot and argue andall that. But I don’t recall on that ship thatthings ever got into a shouting match, ex-cept with those two phonies on the crew, whoshut up the rest of the trip, I’m glad to say.

But part of this business of ambivalenceon my part had to do with this feeling of uti-lizing a position or a kind of minimal powerto foment problems. I kept questioning my-self about this: “To what degree am I workingout my own problems about authority”? Be-cause I did have problems about authority,having been a cadet, left the cadet service,developed a kind of a contempt about theofficer class in general, and certainly aboutcompanies. I picked up very quickly fromcrews, even on that first trip as a cadet, thistrade union orientation to relationships andall that. And I asked myself always whether I


was making more out of it than others, and ifthis wasn’t part of my problem. I give myselfsome credit for being a reflective person eventhen.

Oh, yes. Especially while you’re in themidst . . . .

Well, this wasn’t on my mind all the time,but I can remember lying in my bunk think-ing, “Why is there so much dissension? Is itbecause I’m here? Did I do it?” A misplacedsense of power, by the way, because nobodydoes anything that they don’t want to do.[laughter] But I guess I had some feeling thatI was particularly potent or something, be-cause I was a good delegate and I was likedby most of the crew.

And disliked by the bridge?

In this case, disliked about certain things,and particularly by the skipper, who justwanted to be left alone, you know. He justwanted to be up there drinking and steeringthis poor, damn rust bucket through theocean. I remember him running down onetime in a panic, because he heard a kind of athump or a rasping noise, and we went downand searched through the ship. I had to gowith him along with my watch. We had togo through what we could of the hulls, be-cause he was wondering whether or not thereis that crack in one of the seams. And therewas. That could have been what he heard.But, oh, we’d hear a crack or something likethat, and ships make a lot of noise, theywheeze, and they scrape, and they whine. Notonly the engine room, but you can hear thebulkheads moving. You might hear a verystrange, loud, crunching sound. He had heardsomething like that, and we searched thewhole ship. And we found what had been

there before, a little crack in one of the seamsin the bulkhead about midships. And he wasterribly upset about this, and in fact, he wascomplaining that the company knew betterthan to do this. I remember saying to himsomething like, “Well, you know, the samewith us. We got some beefs, and theyshouldn’t be that way.”

And it was the only time we had had anagreement. [laughter] He said, “Well, that’sright. That’s right,” he says. “You know, theseships, they shouldn’t put them out like this.But it is wartime. You know, it is wartime;we got to do our part.” And I couldn’t arguethat. [laughter] But, you know, here we wereon this floating, rotten cork in the middle ofthe ocean, and bobbing around and makingstraight . . . .

Were you still sighting submarines, having alertsa couple of times a day on that run?

Oh, yes. Yes. But I’ll tell you, the lookoutsystem and the security system were soratchety! [laughter] These guys were yellingall the time they saw something, but it got sowe didn’t listen anymore because, you know,we had a strange crew. I mean, they wouldyell, “Hey, look! Three points to the star-board! Look at that! Look what’s over there!”And it turned out just to be a wave or some-thing. But we’d have alerts when we thoughtwe saw something.

This was still going on.

But this was a dull trip. I mean, nothingvery exciting happened. We just went wal-lowing through the ocean over to Honoluluand back.

Anyway, these concerns were growing inme—a kind of sense of uncertainty aboutleadership or power or patronization—feel-


ing that you knew more than other people,and trying to organize people to do a particu-lar kind of thing that they wouldn’t ordinarilydo, like go as a group up to the mate and makea complaint. Things of that kind, whichsometimes I would invent and say, “Look, ifthree or four of us go up, it’s much more pow-erful rather than just this guy, this damndelegate, making things up.” And sometimestwo or three, four guys would go with me.But this isn’t something they ordinarily did.

And the beefs weren’t that terrible. Imean, if there were really serious beefs, some-times the whole crew would confront anofficer or the captain. And on one or two

trips I was on that would happen. But, youknow, I thought at times, “My god, am I mak-ing more out of these minor beefs than Ishould? Maybe I should just list them andreport when we get back.”

And the attitude that had developedabout me on the part of at least the two mainofficers, I always wondered to what degreethat was my fault—my demeanor, the way Ibehaved, and all that sort of thing. So to methat was a learning experience, and I lookback on that as a kind of an important stepin my own understanding of myself at thetime.

39MEN AT SEA

OW, JUST A FEW weeks earlier,before this trip, well, when I was stillon the Henry Failing, I had gotten

know. If it’s a boy, here it is. I remember call-ing it “Snapper.” Or “Snapper” was the namefor whatever the child was she was carrying.“Maybe Snapper’s name should be this. Or ifit’s a girl, it should be this.” And I would playwith these names. I had all kinds of fantasiesabout how we were going to live that suitedmy romantic orientation at the time. Thingsthat I’d picked up from men I’d sailed with,like Bob Nelson and others—“Let’s just goget a stump farm way out in the woods or upin the mountains someplace, with a littlecabin. I’ll build it; we’ll fix it up, and we’lltake little Snapper. [laughter] Maybe up inthe high mountains, Snapper will learn toplay in the snow and swim in the cold water.And we’ll have very few visitors, and we’llhave a chance to be alone, in this wonderfulsetting.” Or, since Kathy was looking forhousing at the time, “You know, try Orinda.”Now, Orinda if anybody knows the Bay Area,is outside of Oakland toward Walnut Creek,and in those days was still very undevelopedcountry. There were trees and farms andgroves of eucalyptus and other things. It wasa very beautiful stretch beyond Oakland,

Nthe letter from Kathy that she was quite sureshe was pregnant. And this was a very power-ful experience for me. Not that I thought itwas totally unexpected, but just that it was avery profound experience. I remember feel-ing very happy about it, at the same time veryworried. It somehow made me aware that Iwas going to be a father and that I was a hus-band in a very real sense; that I had to facethis very sharply, and it was very hard for me.You know, what was I going to do? Here thewar was still on, and I was sailing. And I mustsay that getting away from shore, getting awayfrom problems, even after Kathy and I gotmarried, was like for other seamen, often agreat relief, even if combined with a sense ofseparation and loneliness. You didn’t have toface problems directly.

But here I had word now that we weregoing to have a child. And it was a very ex-citing thing. I remember writing letters toKathleen in which I was ecstatic and alsoalready making up names for the kid, you


going toward Walnut Creek. Today it’s justone long housing project after another. But,you know, I said, “How about out in Orinda,where those old farmhouses are? We couldget one of those cheap, and we’d fix it up.”You know, we wanted, I wanted, to get away.I had stump farm fever, as they called it, whenwe were at sea. You want to get your ownlittle . . . .

Now why did they call it the “stump farm”?

Because that’s also a comical name forfarmers or guys that have cleared land orcleared forest for agriculture. A stump farmeris a guy who runs around, slogging in the mud,jumping over stumps. [laughter] But it alsohad this other nostalgic view of how nice itwould be to have a little stump farm you couldretreat to and all that sort of thing. A pio-neering stump farmer. And Bob Nelson wasalways talking about it. He wanted this littlecabin in the mountains. He wanted threehundred acres of ground where he’d shootanybody that came in. [laughter] He and hisdogs and maybe a woman, and they’d be outthere all alone, living off the land. Well, thatkind of thing was a rather common view atsea.

Seamen have this mixed orientation togoing to sea. If they’d been long enough, go-ing to sea fulfilled a tremendous need to getaway and to have this period of lonely re-flection and separation from everydayconcerns: “They’re back there somewhere.Lord knows what it’ll be when I get back,but at least now I don’t have to worry aboutit.” And, “So maybe my girlfriend has turnedinto a seagull.” “Seagulls” are girls who hangaround the beach waiting for the men to re-turn, and they get into all kinds of trouble;they sometimes become prostitutes or gas

hounds. And maybe, you know, “But whatcan you do”?

What’s a gas hound?

A heavy drinker.

These are great vernacular . . . .

Oh, gas hound—I thought that was stillin use. A heavy drinker, drunk. So, you know,who knows, at least it’s back there. And thencoming back there’s, of course, that kind offever? Port fever or something. We had a wordfor the excitement of returning—being gladto return, at the same time, a deep anxiety,always a deep anxiety. What’s there? Whatare you going to run into? Now all the prob-lems start. And, “How long can I stand itashore?” kind of thing.

You’d get that kind of thought. “Howlong can I stand it? How long can I stay thistime? And what in the hell is my girlfrienddoing now, or my wife or my family? Whatabout my kids? Ah, well, haven’t had to thinkabout them for three or four months. And,well, there they are.” Port fever, I guess it wascalled. It was something like that. And itreally made a change. You could feel thechange in the crew.

I think I should say something about ship-board sexuality. People ask about it all thetime, and it’s very interesting. It’s sort ofassumed that there are real problems aboardships—sexual aggression and homosexuality,all this sort of thing. I mean, I’ve had peoplethat I know say, “What do these guys do?What do they do, men without women?” and,“Oh, it’s like prison,” you know. And it’s aninteresting thing, because I may have a biasedview, and maybe I just denied or put thingsout of my mind.

339MEN AT SEA

There was an awful lot of talk aboutsexuality. But very interesting was theprivatization; always you’re telling tales aboutsomeone else. Someone else did these horri-ble things. I mean, absolutely unbelievablesexual exploits and funny stories.

Sometimes terribly depressing stories,sometimes extremely hilarious stories loadedwith the most extreme kinds of pornographyand perversion. [laughter]

It almost sounds like you’re talking about coyotestories.

[laughter] Yes, right. You know, perversestories. But always told as stories. You know,“I had a friend who did this.” And, “Did youever hear about Red Murphy? Did you everhear about this?”

That was part of our mess room conver-sations. Seldom did anybody use themselvesas an example of behavior of this kind. It wasalways what somebody did when they gotback, or on a ship. “There was a ship I was onwhen such and such happened, when thishappened, or that.” However, in my view, asI think back on it at the time, I saw very littleovert sexuality aboard ship or any homo-sexual activity.

Though there were homosexuals oftenaboard, sometimes open one’s. I remember asecond mate. When we’d go on watch withhim, he would tell long stories about him-self, as though he had a need to talk.[laughter] A very nice guy, young guy. He wasa navigator, and he would tell these elabo-rate stories about his friendships andrelationships and sexual exploits with men.And I remember I’d hear them, and otherswould hear them, and nobody took it seri-ously. It was just as though, “That’s aninteresting story,” and “So the guy’s queer.He’s not bothering me, and you leave him

alone.” There was a lot of this “Leave peoplealone. That’s their business.” Unless theybother you.

And there was a lot of homoerotic humor.Why wouldn’t there be, you know? Theirimages begin to turn to one another. I don’tever remember there being direct homosexualadvances or any rumor, even. Oh, sometimessomebody joking would say, “Oh, you know,those guys are asshole buddies; they’re in thesack together.” This kind of joking was com-mon. But nobody believed it or took itseriously. It was just a joke; nobody got madif it was said about them.

However, if anybody said anything abouttheir actual behavior and what they weredoing that implied homosexuality, a personwould get extremely angry, because this wasa closed world. Not only one’s identity butperceived identity, one’s status, was extremelyimportant. Anyone who allowed themselvesto be pegged that way were considered to bethen that way. And they might be the buttof all kinds of jokes. But seldom did you hearstories about something going on on the shipyou were on. It was always somewhere else,where these weird and marvelous thingswould happen on board ship. Much too inter-esting to relate here. Much too interesting.

But I mean, my journals are loaded withthese wonderful stories of what happened.“Did you ever hear what this old skipper didto his cabin boy?” and all that sort of thing.These were our tabloids. And a lot of chau-vinistic talk about women. I would say thatthe attitude toward women, as expressed, wasabysmal. And the few guys now and then whohad wives at home and were young and inlove and all that, and wartime guys, they weremiserable with this, because they couldn’tenter in. And they would be ribbed and pum-meled with stories. [laughter] You know,“How do you know what’s happening to your


wife? You know who’s with her right now?”And all this kind of thing. And, “You don’tknow her that well.” [laughter] “And you lefther there. I mean, do you expect her to go onwithout a man for the next two or threemonths? What’s wrong with you?” And onand on. One or two times, I remember guysjust getting so mad they’d start a fight. They’djust get furious; they’d throw things andstomp off.

I remember one young kid, very nice,young kid, he had just gotten married—andme, too, so I really identified with him—hesaid, “You guys just shut up. I’m going to killsomebody on this ship.” [laughter] “I’m go-ing to kill somebody on this ship, I swear! Idon’t want to hear another word! I don’t wantto hear another word. I don’t want any ofyou to talk to me. I don’t want you to say onemore word to me! I’m ready to kill!” And hestalked off and was quiet for days, and every-body knew they’d gone too far and tried tosort of make it up to him. But I felt a verystrong identity with him, you know, think-ing this was a very legitimate response andthat there ought to be more of it. But thatwas part of the release of tensions on ship.

A lot of sexual talk, sexual innuendo,homoerotic innuendo, that you better nottake seriously, because most of these guys werevery, very heterosexual. But in these circum-stances, it was just the natural thing to do, tosingle out somebody that they’re going to nowrib for the next few days about what a finebutt he had, or “Boy, he’s a whore’s wet dreamwalking” kind of thing, you know. [laughter]And, if you weren’t aware of the dynamics,you’d think these guys were all homoerotic.It’s the kind of joking that goes on. I’m sureit goes on in the army, the navy, and any-place where men are somewhat isolated. Andit doesn’t mean that they’re going to act it

out. It just means that this is the way to bringit to life in a group, you know. You chooseyour targets, and you play with things in thisway. So I am glad to say a word about thatbecause I think that that’s not always under-stood. I don’t think it has been written aboutmuch. In fact, I don’t recall much discussionof this.

Well, it seems to be avoided as a topic just in thefew books that I’ve looked at. And perhaps peopleconsider it an undignified thing to even discuss.But it is an interesting aspect, because one of thethings when you were talking that I was thinkingabout was wondering if there was a degree ofmore tolerance in that culture for homosexualitythan there was in the land culture.

Well, that’s a good question, but I don’tthink it’s a matter of tolerance. I think it’s amatter that under those conditions, one’sboundaries of what’s permissible to talk aboutexpand. I don’t think that it is a matter ofany of the groups on a ship like that beingtolerant, let’s say, of either homosexuality orthe very perverse kinds of activities that theydescribe in these wonderful stories—I mean,really, as foul as you could get, sometimes ex-tremely funny, nevertheless. None of thoseguys . . . I don’t know, some maybe, but noneof those guys that I was aware of, would dreamof even talking this way ashore—even think-ing that way ashore. That stuff becomesdenied; it’s another world, that free and open,nutty world of going to sea, where the bound-aries are somewhat let down, but not if thetone is such that somebody is suggesting it’sreal. If somebody suggests it’s real in some-body else, it can erupt into a terrible . . . .

And it’s so interesting, as that can be such asubtle, fine line, in terms of if you were trying to

341MEN AT SEA

describe to a Martian who had just landed on theship, how to tell the difference or how to com-municate the difference.

Yes, you have to feel it.

You probably couldn’t do it, and yet probablyeverybody on that ship would know the differ-ence.

They could tell. You could just tell by thetone; you could tell by the circumstances.And if somebody goes beyond it . . . well, Ican think of an example. There was an elec-trician—the same electrician who had hisgreat boil in his groin lanced by the thirdmate, who was quite a guy. I liked him. Agood guy. And he probably had an advancedstage of gonorrhea or whatever, which wasnot so uncommon in those days on ships andelsewhere. But I remember one time . . .everybody used to joke with him, because hewas always telling stories about his exploitswith women. What a lance man he was, youknow.

What was that word?

Lance man. A lance man. [laughter] Youknow, he really was bragging about his parts,you see.

OK, got it. [laughter]

So, you know, he’d tell these wonderfulstories about the things he had done, and hislanguage was marvelously colorful, and, oh,I wish I could repeat some of it. I mean, theywere just beautiful. Wonderfully colloquial,but also artful and poetic ways of describingthings like experiences he had with prosti-tutes in Panama.

Couldn’t we do another series on coyote sea tales?[laughter]

On another tape, another tape. Or some-where else. I have them in my notes.[Laughter] But anyway, he would tell thesestories about various kinds of experience thathe had with prostitutes at various ports. And,you know, he obviously allowed himself tobecome the butt of jokes. I mean, people weregoing to try to cut him down. You know, abig shot and all that sort of thing.

So I remember one time a group of guyswas sitting in my fo’c’s’le, and I had this bigpad of paper, and I was doing a sketch of oneof the guys. I used to do that—make sketches.They were intrigued by them. I wasn’t bad; Idid some good sketching. They said, “Hey,let’s give this guy . . . .” What was his name?I forget now. But, “Let’s give him something.You draw something.”

So I drew a terribly pornographic woman.I mean, I’m ashamed of it now. But I mean,it was in every way a stupendous depictionof women’s parts, and rather well done withcharcoal. And it was shocking. Oh, theythought, “That’s just the thing for this guy.We’ll tell him when he is alone we’re goingto give him this, so he can have it in hisfo’c’s’le and put it up and look at it.”

And so we went as group, and we wentand said, “Hey, guy, this is for you. We wantto present this to you.” So we handed it tohim.

And I remember him sitting there on hisbunk looking at it for a long time. And hewas thinking, and he was feeling. And hethrew it down on the deck, and he looked atme; he says, “You guys are filthy.” [laughter]And he was deeply hurt, offended, shocked.It was to me interesting. And I learned a lotfrom that. This guy was a talker, and he’d


tell all these stories, and it was all out thereand put in a frame, you see. But somebodyhad come to him, part of the crew, with some-thing direct.

Yes. Well, you confronted him almost.

Well, confronted him and showed himsomething that he thought was pornographic,was dirty. And it was, you know. It was. I wasashamed. I just felt awful. The other guysdidn’t. “Ah, well, you know that’s what hedeserves. That’s what he wants; that’s whathe has got,” you know.

But I thought about that. This guy toldme something about the way certain peoplereact. He had been blowing his top off,working off his energy, talking, telling mar-velous stories. And then suddenly somebodygave him something that turned it into some-thing else. Made it rotten and real in someway that he didn’t want it to be. And I triedvery hard the rest of the trip to sort of makeit up to him, get to know him, and eventu-ally became good friends. But he was veryhurt by that, deeply hurt. So these are thingsone learns.

And, by the way, that says somethingabout sexuality aboard ship and its expres-sion. You can talk like hell, say all kinds ofthings, but be very careful about what youdo. Because you’re personhood and your sta-tus is involved. The kind of person you wantto be seen as and thought about. So that’ssomething important to learn about whatpeople do. I saw very little activity aboard shipthat I would say was acting out of sexual be-havior. Everybody knew that everybody elsemasturbated. That was sort of taken forgranted. In fact . . .

Were there jokes about that, too?

Oh, well, yes. In fact, the curtain that youhave above your bunks is called the jack-offcurtain. [laughter] And there were a lot ofthings of that kind. See, there was the cur-tain . . . oh, there were a number of termslike that.

These are things for privacy. And so ofcourse it was given what was considered anappropriate, colorful name. And, oh, butthere’s another one for the physicality ofbunks and sleeping, you know. Your bunk wasyour cunt sack. [laughter] And the curtainwas your jack-off curtain. So, you know, allthese kinds of things went on all the time.But I think anybody on a ship who had beencaught, say, at watch when you’re awakened,and somebody comes bursting in, and heturns on the light—“You guys, it’s watchtime,” you know, something like that. If any-body would pull aside a curtain unexpectedly,even . . . .

This intense sense of privacy, of space, is,of course, extremely important. And we knowthis throughout human societies. It variesfrom place to place and in different condi-tions, but on a ship, personal space becomesintensely important. But if anybody shouldsee one in the midst of masturbation or some-thing like that, and talk about it in thatinstance . . . . You can talk about it in gen-eral, or about something that happened overthere or on another ship or something, butmentioning a specific incident was consid-ered extremely, oh, insulting and couldproduce deep anger. And the person who doesit gets characterized as a peeper or has some-thing wrong with him or something like that.

It was not condoned at all?

Not at all, no. It’s the idea of your space.The whole ship becomes eroticized in

terms of language, in terms of names. I mean,

343MEN AT SEA

the names for block and tackle, the namesfor portholes. [laughter] I mean all thesethings can be applied to in terms of physicalparts or sexual activities. It just becomes partof the language and the culture of the ship. Imean, food, you know—bologna is horsecock. There’s no other word for sausage, youknow, particularly a big one. And, you know,one of the cooks would be slicing bologna;everybody would scream, you know, “Aahh!”[laughter] I mean, this goes on all the time.Taken for granted.

In fact, when you think about it, it’s justpart of the language on board ship. But every-body . . . there is an understanding. Ifanybody gets out of line, they are dealt withby just the way they’re accepted or notaccepted in the group. Nobody steps out ofline in terms of activity. If somebody isaccused of being overly fondling to somebodyelse, it’ll be joked about sometimes.

That would happen sometimes. Some-body was always laying on hands or puttingtheir hand on your butt or something likethat or on your knees, and you suspectedsomething was going on. And this would benoticed by others. And little by little, littlejokes would be made that would warn thatperson. If it went on, that person then be-came the butt of a lot of jokes and sometimesviolence. Not big violence, but, you know,kicked around.

And the whole thing was a defense ofone’s self, of one’s masculinity on the onehand, and also one’s right . . . the freedomto say anything you wanted, as long as youdid your work and behaved properly directlywith others. A very complex set of dynamics,and I think I understand it and feel it, but it’svery hard to describe it. You just know it. Itdoesn’t take you long. A few trips, you gotthe whole picture—what is allowable, wasnot allowable, how far you can go, how dra-

matic you could be about stories. You haveto be very careful.

I can remember guys telling these mag-nificent, really powerfully funny or insightfulstories about others, sometimes in a mono-tone. You know, you didn’t make too muchout of it. And the cooler a person presentedsuch a story, the greater it became. [laughter]But anybody who just loved to rant and raveand get dramatic was somehow laughedabout, you know. Anyway, that’s enough ofthat.

So in the midst of all this, here I was be-coming a parent, just married, identifyingwith a guy like that electrician and thinkinghow right he was, and also began to be moresensitive to and less tolerant of anti-womantalk, which was very common. I mean, thisis the way it is. You get a group of men at adistance. What is their target, the thing thatthey care most about, that they’re going toderide and denigrate? It’s women. There’s alittle bit more to it, though, because theseare often men who spend a lot of time awayand have to rationalize the fact that they’realone and who have very poor relationshipswith women—many of them did; not all ofthem. Many of them had very poor relation-ships. Some didn’t have any consistentrelations at all. Just in port, out of port, newgirlfriend or “seagull”, you know, “any old portin the storm” kind of attitude about women.This could lead to some pretty ugly kinds ofepithets and stories and things of that kind.

Well, at a minimum, I think it provided sort of atruncated view of what the possibilities of a rela-tionship are, what women are. I mean, it wouldpermit you to maintain whatever . . . .

It allowed some men, I’m sure, to ratio-nalize their long absences, their lack ofconnection with things ashore, their feeling


of being lost and out of place when they gotinto port, not having any place to go excepta bar, a flophouse, to find a woman. Noteveryone was that way, but that element hada lot of prominence on a ship, because theyoften were the ones who talked in this wayand had a lot to say, sometimes most stronglyabout how women were no good and youcouldn’t trust them, and how they could ruinyour life. And I remember a guy was talkingabout how, “Women just ruined your life andjust wore you down. All they were lookingfor was for you to take care of them and buythem drinks or do this. But they got nothingto give you, except their . . . a night in thesack and all that. Women could ruin you.”

I remember one guy saying to somebodylike this one time, “How could they ruin you?How could anybody ruin you, man? You wereruined from the start.” [laughter] There wasa lot of this kind of wonderful give and take.

Well, did you feel at the time any twinge at allthat your status as a husband and father in anyway kind of limited your ability to identify withsome of your crew?

No. At this point it was a very new thingfor me. I mean, it was just this trip when Ijust learned of that, that Kathy was pregnant,and we’d just married. No, I think it wasrespected.

Yes. So there were enough other people . . . .

Oh, yes always. The idea was that yougot a good woman; “Oh, wow, you lucky sonof a bitch,” you know. “Oh, how lucky youare.”

Not always. Some guys were cynical aboutthis, “Just wait and see. Give yourself achance. I mean, don’t get in too deep.”

[laughter] All kinds of things would go on.But usually it was a kind of nostalgic, warmacceptance, because some at least believedthey had such a relationship. And if some-body was going to have a kid—though manyof them had—they would say, “Well, the realtough times are yet to come, man. You justwait till that little guy or that little gal getsolder, well, then see what happens. You don’twant your daughter to be a seagull.” [laugh-ter] And that was also, kind of, I would say, adefensive activity too—this being cynical andjoking about somebody who seemed to havea good relationship, just like that young kidwho just had been married.

And, you know, there was the view thatpeople couldn’t help but rib them. Part of thatwas because you didn’t want to sound senti-mental about such things. You wanted toexpress your cynicism about life and long-range doom, which was always in the picture.But more than that, rationalizing one’s ownawful problems in life. “Could it be that thispoor son of a bitch is really getting somethingright in life?” So it’s very mixed, and you feelit, and you know that.

That part of the interreactions on shipswas very real. As I remember, what I havebeen saying would fit most ships that I wason, most crews—which were very diverse. Imean, not everybody felt one way, but allthese ideas and feelings get expressed in oneway or another by all sorts of people. Andthey’re shared; they’re shared.

Is it overstating the case that maybe underlyingpart of this, too, was some idea among the sea-men in general that they were more inherently atrisk being at sea? I’m not talking about the war;I’m just talking about the life of going to sea.Was there an idea that you were more at risk atsea than if you had a job back home, or not?

345MEN AT SEA

During the war, to some degree. However,everybody, also, was very aware that otherswere even worse off. And although it wasn’ttalked about much, we figured the army overthere on those islands—in the Solomons andat Okinawa and all these places—were hav-ing a hell of a time. And our fears, thoughthey were real . . . we were still alive, andthese guys were getting killed. And if youwere on a troop ship, you just . . . “Oh, we’retaking these guys to slaughter.” I felt that; theothers did, too. Every ship we saw these guysget off, like at Samoa, and later at Okinawa,we felt three-quarters were going to be deadin a few weeks. So there was that feeling of,“You know, we may not like what’s happen-ing here, but we got a job to do, and it’s notas bad as some others.”

However, we also felt contempt forsome—the navy [laughter]. It was not true . . .well, partly. But we just felt that the navywas contemptuous of us, you know: “Thedamn merchant marine and all these guysdown there on those dirty, old rust bucketsearning their big pay in big boats.”

And then we’d argue, “They go aroundin these neat, little sailor suits, afraid to getany dirt or grease on their pants, off-watchmost of the time.” And except for a few casesof confronting the enemy and all that, thatthey were getting a pretty good deal, and thatwe weren’t getting much better than they.So there was a lot of this kind of feeling andtalk.

And the sense of danger—yes. I mean, itwas more dangerous. Nevertheless, if peoplehad gone to sea, and they were seamen intheir own image of themselves—as againstthese newcomers, landlubbers and all that,who did feel this sense of loss, of being awayfrom shore, and intense danger, the dangerfor somebody who kept going to sea was builtin. It could happen during wartime or anyother time. You could run into a storm whereyou capsize or run into a coral reef and onand on and on. It was just a little bit moredangerous during the war.

So you just took that for granted. No, thesense of danger was built in, certainly duringthe war. That’s what you did.

40READING, WRITING,

AND THINKING

N TERMS of the question of my ownfeelings about being a person who proba-bly eventually would come ashore and

difficult to read, because they’re scrawled andall that. But I’m able to read some of them.Nevertheless, that was one side of my quan-dary.

The other side of it was to always be inter-esting and different; to get away from anykind of normal way of life. And my letters toKathy are full of that. “We’ve got to buildour own house. Our house has to be us. Please,let’s never live in one of those rows and rowsof stucco houses, those goddamn tract houses.That would be destructive and suffocating.We won’t live that way; we’ve got to havesomeplace where we can express our ownlook at the world and what we believe in.”And that was on my mind. If I came ashoreand stayed, I’d have to live in some very spe-cial, significantly different kind of a place thatmeant something to me, that accommodatedmy way of looking at things in the world.

Then there was a sort of a third issue, ofbeing more stable, of having a job ashore, areal job ashore, having a steady income,which was something Kathy felt. And she wasvery careful. She was wonderful in her let-ters. She never really laid it on me. She was

Ibe working ashore, what was I going to do?And I was very mixed on this. I had moments,later on even, where I thought, “I’ll go to seaforever. I’m going to be a union person. I’mgoing to work for the union. I’m going to goto sea.” And then, of course, immediately theidea would come, “Well, how can I do that,have a family, and Kathy wouldn’t put upwith this, and nor should she.” And that wasone sort of idealized, escapist kind of thingthat occurred to me. [laughter]

You know, you have lots of fantasies whenyou’re at sea, a lot of time spent lying therewith nothing else to do but dream up . . . .And I was at my typewriter, writing in mynotebook. I have the weirdest notebooks.They’re almost as bad as some of my fieldnotes. [laughter] They’re just full of thingsthat go through my mind or that I heard orthat I saw, and very little about what wasgoing on in the war. Mostly in terms ofhuman beings and their interreactions andwhat they said and what they did. And very


always very supportive. Even at my craziest,she was supportive, partly because it was war-time, and she really couldn’t do anything else.[laughter]

She told me later at times some of myletters scared the hell out of her, because itsounded like I was just going up to Pluto, youknow, on a space ship. I was not on thisplanet; which happened on my next trip, areturn to a kind of a mystical orientation,deep interest in metaphysics and spiritualexperience and all that. These kinds of thingswent back and forth with me, sometimes con-currently, but sometimes I’d move from onesort of sphere of feeling and thinking toanother.

Well, just off the top of my head, it sounds itwould have been really hard even for you tomaintain an identity, to be this active union dele-gate while you were pursuing mystical . . . .[laughter] Those two activities don’t seem . . . .

No. Oh, no, because if it’s your job, youdo it. But I’m talking about a more interiorkind of experience, the things one feels andthinks about. I’ll be talking about that on thisnext trip, because that’s when it happened.

But it sounds like this experience as a delegatewas a very internal one, also, for you.

Oh, sure. But it didn’t mean that otherkinds of thinking would be excluded. I mean,I still was—not struggling with—but still re-flecting upon my earlier religious experience,which wasn’t formally religious, but more interms of a kind of a metaphysical, spiritualorientation, an interest in various kinds ofmind-expanding experience and orientation.Concern about astronomy and the cosmosand the meaning of life.

Well, is this the time period, also, that you werereading Aldous Huxley and . . . ?

Yes, in there, all along in there. And alot of other things, too. Oh, my god, I did somuch reading, I would have to go back andreconstruct the various things that I was read-ing. But I was reading a lot of metaphysicsand spiritualism—out of a curiosity, mainly.

Where would you get these books?

Oh, I’d get them at libraries, you know,or a bookstore. And sometimes little book-stores in ports that I was in would have allthis literature I could hardly keep my handsoff. I had to keep myself from buying books,because even though they were cheap inthose days, I didn’t have the money. But, yes,I always was picking up some oddball bookin ports here and there.

Well, in ports there must have been this realsmorgasbord of weird stuff.

Oh, yes, some of the bookstores along theSeattle waterfront were absolutely marvelous.[laughter] Everything. A lot of pornography,a lot of cultism . . . sometimes in second-hand books, serious books of all kinds. And,you know, I’d browse and pick up two orthree. And I have lists of the things that Iwas reading. But all these things . . . youknow, this was a period of, “Bubble, bubble,toil and trouble.” All kinds of things weregoing on! A lot of political stuff; what littleinformation we got about the war was highlyeffective not only on me but others. Whatwas going on in Europe, what was going onin the Pacific, questions in our minds aboutthe meaning of the war. And the end of thewar was beginning to loom now in 1944,

349READING, WRITING, AND THINKING

1945. And what did that mean? What did itmean for us? What did it mean when theSelective Service Act would come to an end,which we knew it would? And what wouldthat mean to the merchant marine or meanto seamen? A lot of these things were partsof our discussions.

Was it of significance, do you remember, beyondother political events, when Roosevelt had diedand Truman was going to take over? Was thereany discussion about what that was going to meanto how the war would be ended?

Not on ships. I was ashore when thathappened. Truman’s vice presidency andpresidency was in late 1945 and 1946. But,oh, yes, those things were talked about a lot—and later, certainly talked about in terms oftrade union problems and a very, very reac-tionary set of movements on the part of thegovernment to restrict . . . . In fact, the mer-chant seamen were not included in the GIBill, as they’d been promised. And all thosethings became political issues later. But thiswas just on the edge of that.

So, anyway, all this was a deep concernto me. I would say that these issues—“Whatam I going to do?”—distracted me consider-ably. Just like a young kid being asked, “Whatare you going to make out of your life?” Imean, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what myoptions were and what I could do.

When you would be thinking about being awriter, did you consider that that would be partof your interesting and different identity, or yourjob and income identity?

Oh, yes. Yes. I’d go off and write. Writeand sell my work, which I realized probablythen and later was not very likely.

Did you have an inkling of what you might do ifyou were going to take on the real job and steadyincome identity?

Not clear. I thought maybe trade unionactivity. Maybe that would be one kind ofjob, which, by the way, I thought of seriouslyfor the next year or two, particularly duringand after the strike, the big maritime strike,in 1946. But that was one part. The otherwas—and I denied it, but I had still had thisvery strong feeling I needed and wanted toget back to school—that I felt that my edu-cation had been severely interrupted andconstricted. And although I always felt thatI knew everything in those years, I also knewthat I did not. [laughter] And the more Ithought about things, the more interested Igot in various kinds of problems—politically,socially, metaphysically, in terms of literature,literarily. I felt that I needed more of that kindof experience. I needed more information. Ineeded more grasp. And even though I did alot of reading, it was scattered. I didn’t feel itwas focused and hard-working, diligentreading in terms of a specific amassing ofinformation. And so I felt that this was aproblem, or something I yearned for. Iyearned for more knowledge, basic knowl-edge.

Was the other thing you wanted to be amongother people who were seeking this kind of knowl-edge in the same way? Or was that not part ofit? I mean, to be socially among people who werechallenging themselves intellectually and ques-tioning?

All my friends were such people, hadbeen such people. And Kathy, certainly. Andall the friends that she had and that we hadwere, I suppose, post-academic, intellectual,


literati kind of people, which—that’s veryinteresting—posed another kind of problemfor me.

I had begun to get a kind of repugnancefor dilettantism and “the literati” and peoplewhose main lives and thoughts were lived inabstract study and concepts and theory.People who had lived a kind of sheltered in-tellectual life, which I thought was true of alot of the writers of the time, a lot of theacademics and things of that kind. A kind offeeling that this was also a limited world andone that I grew more and more uncomfort-able about, even though I was writing.

Two of my stories were published duringthat period. One was in this little mag, Interimin the north, which I mentioned before, andthen in Circle—two stories, which I think,by my own view, were very good stories. Andso I was feeling, you know, that somethingwas happening, as far as my writing was con-cerned. Also, I had written an article thatexpressed part of this inner struggle, this con-flict—an article accepted by the New Republicin the spring of 1944, called, I think, “AReply to Henry Miller.” It was after a trip thatI made. It may have been just before this trip;I’m not sure, but while I was ashore, Kathyand I were living together, and I wrote thisarticle in response to a letter I had read inNew Republic that Henry Miller had written.

Now, I had a lot of respect for HenryMiller and admiration for him as an artist, asa writer, and as a ground breaker not only incontemporary American letters, but maybein Europe, too. And although I had otherpeople that I admired more as writers, as rolemodels as writers, I felt that he was a kind ofan inspirational and revolutionary figure inwriting. Like Joyce, only of a different kindbut with a similar sort of impact on litera-ture. Less of an impact than Joyce, but,nevertheless, it was there. And he’d appeared,

in fact, in the same Circle magazine that acouple of my stories had appeared in, and Ifelt very glad about that, and had admirationfor him at a distance; and also my friendGeorge Leite had gotten interested in himand I think knew him. He was the “bad boy”of American literature at the time, you know.And that, of course, made him very conge-nial, as far as I was concerned. But then hewrote this letter to New Republic, whichsomehow or other got under my skin. It wasafter The Air-Conditioned Nightmare had beenwritten, I think, around that time, his famousunderground book, denouncing Americancommodity culture, which I found very . . .I liked it. It resounded with me, and also wasdiscourteous and unseemly and full of allkinds of scatology. And his language was verycolloquial at times, and all those things whichI thought were wonderful. I thought this wasimportant; this was good, because I was work-ing with things of that kind in my own life,and in a quite different way, because I neverfelt that I would write like him, but I got cuesin Joyce, James Farrell . . . .

How about Sinclair Lewis?

Lewis’s work later when I became morepolitically oriented and focused. Oh, yes. Verymuch so. And Dreiser—people like that. ButI was reading, I think, Tom Wolfe at thispoint. Much more romantic kinds of things,and experimental writing. I was very inter-ested in new, experimental, and aggressivelyrevolutionary types of writing—I mean, revo-lutionary in terms of form and style andcontent. So Henry Miller was to me a veryspecial person.

And then he wrote this letter in whichhe, to me, seemed so puerile and adolescentand trivializing of himself, saying how disap-pointed he was in America. He’d come out


of France . . . driven out of France becauseof the war, and he came here as a kind of arefugee. I don’t know exactly the conditionsin which he came here, but in a sense he hadrun here and taken refuge, and apparentlyhad some hard times and all that. And thatwas admirable, and I thought it was great hehad done that. But he wrote this letter in akind of a pleading, nagging kind of a wayabout how badly artists were being treated,and particularly himself, in the United States,and asking for help. This was, you know, apublic statement by someone I considered tobe sort of an exemplary, almost giant kind ofwriter. And it was so, to me, embarrassing toread it. I thought, “He can’t mean this.” And,also, it aroused some little glimmers of patrio-tism in me, because I felt he was ignoring therealities of the war, ignoring millions ofpeople who were suffering, and in the UnitedStates millions of impoverished people, evenduring the best of times, who were having ahard time—racial problems, et cetera, etcetera. It awakened all these kind of antago-nistic feelings in me: “What the hell is thisguy doing?”

And then he ended it up with saying hewas painting “my poor, lowly paintings,” orsomething; “I keep painting away and sell-ing them for ten dollars apiece. I’d be sohappy if anybody wanted to buy them, mypoor efforts.”

And I thought, “This is ridiculous; it’sdemeaning.” And I had an over-reaction. Ijust felt all of the sudden, “Why, this poorbastard,” you know. “I have a new look athim, and I don’t like it.”

So I wrote this article, and it got acceptedin New Republic, in which—in kind of a sar-castic way—I said, “You know, it’s too badthis country hasn’t matured enough to accepthis language with open arms. That’s been trueall over the world in different societies, and

time will tell, and things will be better.”Which is true. “I mean, people will read hiswork in the future and wonder why anybodycomplained. And that is unfortunate, but,Henry, that’s the facts. That’s the way it is.And I’d much rather see you writing, and I’dmuch rather see you painting and out in thestreet with your tin cup, even, than writingsomething like that for a public journal.” Youknow, something like that. And ended upwith one of his own phrases, using asterisksinstead of the full thing, you know, and,“Indeed, Henry, you seemed like a dash-dash-dash-dash duck at midnight, indeed.”[laughter] So that got published, and it gotsome attention from people that I knew, alot of them . . . .

Did it get attention from Henry Miller?

Not directly, no. But I heard later. But tomy friend, George Leite, who had gotten toknow him and idolized him, I think Millerbecame something of a saint, a guru, behindCircle magazine and all that for George—which I understand.

And Henry Miller was down at Big Sur at thispoint, right?

Down at Big Sur. This was the Big Surperiod. And George really felt so close toMiller, like he’d never toward anyone else,and saw himself as kind of a presenter ofMiller in this country, which to an extent hewas. Circle magazine was one of the earlyoutlets for Miller, along with Anaïs Nin, andtheir kind of writing, and what a wonderfulthing that was.

But George was deeply incensed with meabout my article. I have a long letter he wrote,talking about, how could I have done this tosuch a great figure? To a man who had given


so much of himself, who had suffered somuch, and who really was a giant in modernliterature and all that—all those things thatI agree with. Nevertheless, George was myfriend, so I was really deeply troubled by thisletter.

And then I wrote him after a while, along answer, in which I just said, “I see whatyou’re saying, but I can’t agree with you. Imean, I still think that I have a point. I mayhave said it badly, but, nevertheless, I can-not react to something like that as though itis worthy of the person that it came from.The man is worth more than that. In fact, itdoesn’t do him any good in the world thathe’s interested in.” On and on. Rather a longletter. We used to write long letters in thosedays, all of us.

Do you happen to remember if this was going onwhile you were at sea, your correspondence withGeorge?

Part of it. I think George sent me his let-ter at sea. And I wrote my answer at sea. AndI’d have to check; I’m not sure . . . . I wrotelots of letters at sea and got letters from dif-ferent ports at sea.

And so, anyway, that bothered me forsome time. It was going on about this sametime I was wondering where I was going, whatI was doing, and all I knew was that I still feltvery strongly about this “posturing” of a manthat I admired. I also felt badly that my friendGeorge had reacted the way he had. It passed,you know. Nevertheless, that had happened.

I remember again, as part of my ambiva-lence about my motives and directions, thatI questioned was I really being self-serving inwriting that kind of thing about Miller? Didit need to be written? And why I had doneit—was that done as a sort of a self-aggran-dizing act on my part? On the other hand, I

knew that it was just something I felt anddid, but I didn’t have to do it, and I did it.You know, all those things—pro and con.

And so that had a rather deep effect onme about what I was doing. I had just writ-ten these two stories, had three or four in thehopper, and was about to be published andthings of that kind. I suppose I didn’t wantto have any problem within that world ofwriting and art that I admired and was partof. At the same time, I had criticisms aboutan element of that, about a kind of effete dis-tancing from social problems, and thearrogance of being really above the littlepeople. In fact, I remember that Miller usedto use the term “little people.”

Oh, really?

Sometimes, here and there. “The littlepeople.” Not only Miller, others did. And Iwas beginning to do a lot of churning aboutthis sort of thing, about the arrogance, andthe sense of superiority and patronization onthe part of a lot of the intellectual world, theliterary world, about large sectors of theirsociety that they didn’t seem to have any realinterest and concern about except as grist fortheir mill, as material for their writing, ratherthan involvement and concern.

And so, you know, here I was, on onehand, thinking in terms of trade union activ-ity and developing concepts of the workingclass and all that sort of thing. On the otherhand, what is my writing doing about that?My writing was very much in the area of ex-perimental, new writing and really concernedwith tone and texture and special circum-stances of characterization.

Who did you picture as being the audience foryour writing? Who were you writing for? Didyou have a sense of that?


I think that’s always a great question, andI don’t know if there’s ever a really goodanswer for it, other than writing for the uni-verse. [laughter] For myself as expression, forpeople I knew who were either writers or wereintellectuals, who read. It was that. Remotelyfor the people that I was living among, work-ing among, but I didn’t think they would havereally appreciated the way I was writing aboutthe world that they were in. It was highlyspecialized, very romantic and poetic. I feltthat I had an audience because I had won aprize in the merchant marine service seamen’sshort story contest. [laughter]

And who judged that contest?

People like Joseph Henry Jackson, whowas a critic in the Chronicle, and about fouror five others—various writers and critics whowere involved. I felt kind of good about that.

And so I felt, you know, I was sort of inthat world, entering into it, but I wasn’t sosure I liked what I was writing, even thoughI admired the formal aspects of what I wasdoing. I thought I was onto an importantstyle, that I was onto a way of expressing somevery difficult things to express about peopleand relationships, that I was doing a kind ofpersonal expression that was not necessarilyat that point usual in literature, sort of first-person observation kind of thing. I liked mywriting style, the grammar, the use of sugges-tions of colloquialism and the way I workedthem in, how I handled dialog, and things ofthat kind. Part of it I got from Joyce. I kindof admired his way of using dashes before eachperson who talked, rather than announcingwho it was. And you could have long con-versations where, you know, this personspeaks, then that one, then that one, thenthat one. And I liked the way it looked on

the page. And so there were a lot of thingsthat I was learning at that time, that I liked.

At the same time I was feeling, here I am,a kind of a literary person with literary pre-tensions and feelings and background; anacademic writing about this very real worldin which I was doing very real things. Andalthough I liked the emotional content ofwhat I was writing at that time, I wasn’t sureI liked it against the framework of the realworld I was in, that I wasn’t really getting atthat, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to andknew how, you see. It’s a very subtle thing. Ihave to think about it a lot. I’m talking veryeasily about something that I found very hardto figure out.

Did you also feel like maybe you had a sense ofresponsibility for somehow getting it right? Thatyou had access to an audience that the peopleyou were writing about didn’t have, and that youneeded to be able to . . . . You had this opportu-nity to kind of communicate some . . . ?

I felt that that’s something one should do.I wasn’t sure that I was doing it, that I wasn’treally talking about myself in the situation. Iwas talking about my own, my own emotions,my own observations, the way I felt andthought about things around me, which Ithink I did well. And that the style I wasdeveloping was a bit romantic, was a bitabstract, a bit—oh, gosh, what is the wordfor it?—voyeuristic in a way, standing apart.And even though I was in it and expressingit from within the situation I was in, I felt Iwas a viewer who was not like the people thatI was viewing at all.

You were mining . . . .

Mining it for experience. That wasn’tquite true of what came out, but that’s the


way I felt. I was heading in that direction. Iwas afraid of that; I didn’t want that. I felt alittle ashamed of that. At the same time Iwas very proud of myself for being able to doanything about it, and to be myself and tosay things in my own way. But I was wonder-ing where that was going and what I reallywanted to do with it. So I was doubting atthat point, questioning even whether Iwanted to be a writer.

That was coming up in my mind. Andwas I to go on in this vein, writing about thissort of thing? And did I really have a lot ofother things that I wanted to write about, orwas this it? Had this been the experience ofmy life in a sense for that period, and would

I want to go on doing this in other venues ornot? And was the literary world that I wassurrounded by, that I happened to be in inthat contemporary period, was it one that Ifelt was conducive to the kinds of aims that Ihad in writing? And did I know enough todo anything else? So there’s where the ideaof getting back into some kind of disciplinedstudy then came.

All this was churning, at the same time,and here was Kathleen pregnant, and herewe were married and, “What to do?” as theysay. What to do, what to be, and happy as Iwas about it, I was also, I think, deeplydisturbed and scared.

41BACK TO ALASKA

FTER GETTING off of the Alvarado,Kathy and I had a few weekstogether, which were very nice.

polite, and treated me all right. But I knew . . .[laughter] I had very good reason to knowthat this was not an easy thing for them totake.

And we spent some time at my home inModesto, which was very pleasant in a way.My folks tried to be very kind and my motherin particular—because Kathy was carryingher grandchild—was very solicitous and allthat, except very, very quietly concernedabout the fact there was no religion in us,that we were not true believers. And she dida lot of praying, quiet praying, and would leton about that to me.

Were your grandparents alive at this time?

Yes. Yes. They weren’t there. My grand-mother, later after my grandfather died, shestayed up there regularly. My beautiful, won-derful, strange, old, Swedish grandmother,Hanna, Hanna Fogde. But, no, we just wentup there and visited my parents. And wespent a lot of time—Kathy was very pregnantat this point; she was at least visibly preg-nant—swimming nude out in the rivers, the

AHad she found the Federal Avenue place yet?

In Seattle?

Yes.

I’m not sure she had that yet. I think Iprobably went down to the Bay Area. Let mesee how much time there was between . . . .May, June, July. Oh, I had two months. That’swhen I went down to the Bay Area, and thewhole idea was to get to know parents. Sheand I spent some time with my parents up inModesto, and then we spent some time withher parents.

I felt at that time that they were very leeryof me for a very good reason. You know, whatkind of husband was I going to make for theirdaughter? And yet they were very kind, evenher father, who was a grumpy, dour Scotsman,whom I learned to love and admire. He wasvery suspicious and careful of me, but very


Stanislaus and Tuolumne. We found littlebeaches, and it was very rural at that time,and there was a lot of wild country still left.Now, god, there are little towns all over theplace—places like Ceres and Knights Ferryand all that. But we went out there, and wespent days out on these little river beaches,rocky and sandy, very beautiful. We had agood time together and a chance for my par-ents to get to know Kathy.

And although that went pretty well, therewas at the same time the feeling she was anoutsider. She was still not family; she was anin-law, which is strange because my motherhad gone through this same thing. And Ithink she was aware, and she didn’t want tobe that way. But how could she help it? Hereher son had married a young woman, firstwithout even telling them much ahead oftime, had run off in a kind of elopement andnot really given the family a chance to doanything—or to complain, or, you know, todivert their poor, wandering son. And on topof that he had married a woman who had noreligion.

Kathy had very much a secular orienta-tion and was from a family who was fairlysecular. One side of it was Mormon, and theother side of it was Scotch, anti-papist kindof thing. [laughter] And so she never reallygrew up in a religious environment. Not nec-essarily an atheist or agnostic; it just had noplace in her life.

This was very hard for my mother, whothought, “Here I have a daughter-in-law; Ican now talk about these things and guideher and lead her.” Well, of course, this wasanathema to Kathy; that was the last thingin the world . . . . And it bothered her. Itbothered my mother, who had to sort of becareful about that. So that was a problem.My father did his best to be somewhat jovialand helpful. [laughter]

These days I look back, when I reconstructwhat was going on, I have a lot of admira-tion for my parents. They handledthemselves—and so did Kathy’s parents—very well with us. They tried; they did theirbest. I even got a few letters from my father—I totally denied and forgot about—in whichhe was trying to be kind and helpful, more sothan he ever was in direct relation with me.

But in letters he was being very helpfuland kind, and my mother wrote almostweekly while I was at sea. I didn’t open halfof her letters because I knew what was inthem. [laughter] I would just pile them up,and sometimes open them up and read themall at once. And I was creating barriers be-tween myself and them, at the same time,trying to maintain with them and needing arelationship with them. Every now and then,if I wanted help, I could get it from them.And I tried not to, but there were times lateron, when Kathy and I were struggling to getstarted in a way, I called on them freely, asshe did on her folks. When I was away for along time, and the checks didn’t come inregularly, she . . . we . . . she had to turn toher parents. I always felt very badly about this,but it was true. It had to be done.

So, anyway, that was a good summer, Ithink, before I got on this next ship, the YPOin July. I’d been ashore a couple of monthswhere Kathy and I had been together, and Ithink at that point, she was going to come toSeattle after this . . . oh, no. No, she wasgoing to have the baby after this. [laughter]I’m not sure that she came back to Seattlewith me when I took off on the YPO, andwhether we had the Federal Avenue place ornot. But, nevertheless, she didn’t stay thereafter I left. She went back to the Bay Areabecause she needed to have somebody withher.

357BACK TO ALASKA

So I, or we, went back to Seattle at thatpoint, and I got on a boat called the YPO,Alaska Steam. Alaska Steam was one of thefamous, old shipping lines between theNorthwest Coast and Alaska. By this time,because of the Henry Failing, I had gotten tobe known as an “Alaska stiff,” which is nice.The reason why I was doing this was that Iwanted to have shorter trips. Even thoughthe war was still on, it had simmered downsome, and I didn’t feel so guilty about shortertrips.

Was this July of 1944?

Yes. And I didn’t feel so ill at ease aboutnot taking ships out into the Pacific or aroundthe Panama Canal and all that. You know, Iwanted now to sort of get a run that’s closerto home on the Alaska run. So I’d takenenough trips up there before, where thepatrolman and dispatcher at the hall beganto see me as an “Alaska stiff,” and let meknow, give me hints about a ship that wascoming up, if it was any good and all that.And the YPO, he said, “Well, it’s not thegreatest ship, but it’s going to take an inter-esting run now. It’s going up north, and we’renot sure how far, but you’ll be seeing a lot ofthe country up there.” So I shipped on theYPO.

It was a very interesting trip. We wentnorth to places that I had seen before, buthere we went up the Inside Passage, stoppingat all kinds of small ports—the names escapeme now—small towns and villages, really,leaving off small amounts of cargo. This isone of those runs that involved, you know, asling load or two for this port, and a sling forthat port, and a couple of boxes for anotherport. It was really a kind of a UPS of . . .[laughter] of the northern run.

So you weren’t doing coal and . . . .

Oh, yes. And there was coal, and we dida lot of heavy work. But they were just shortstays—sometimes only a few hours at eachport—then we’d steam on. And at that point,the guys weren’t so worried about subs andall that. That problem had gotten less, sincethe Japanese had lost the Aleutians. But,nevertheless, they were still out there.

But we went up the passage, and then outalong the Alaskan coast, up through theBering Strait. And there we must havestopped at a dozen ports, little places—some-times couldn’t even see what was there.Looked like some shacks, and sometimes itlooked like little Eskimo tents or villages.And we’d drop off a few things, you know,like canned meats and sides of bacon, andoh, at that time Spam. Everybody got Spamin those days and various kinds of utilitarianthings, tools and things of that sort. We’d goup, and Eskimos would come out in skinboats, walrus skin boats.

And sometimes we’d just drop the slingover the side, and they would unload the slingat sea in the water, which was quite a trick.And there’d be two or three skin boats and alot of talk and waving and yelling and scream-ing. And the farther north we got, the morethe Eskimos looked like Eskimos, [laughter]wearing their traditional clothing and theirseal skin hides, and in the rain wearing thesealmost transparent anoraks made from . . . Iforget what part of the animal it comes from,but they looked almost like plastic, you know.[Seal or walrus intestines] Wearing those, andstinking to high heaven when they cameaboard, but as I said, I loved the smell.

And on this ship again, we had troubleabout feeding these people. When we wereoffshore a ways, and three or four skin boats


would come out, and after they’d worked, orjust before loading up, it was whether or notto feed them. I was the union delegate onthe ship again. And I remember writing let-ters to Kathleen, and I have looked them oversince—very interesting. I was in a deep quan-dary about this. The crew did not want toeat with the Eskimos, on the basis, said onevery bright sea lawyer among the crew, thatthe War Shipping Administration said—andthis had been used before—that men whocontracted communicable diseases would notbe able to go to sea until they were cured.And there were no cures for some of thesediseases in those days. I guess penicillin hadjust barely come into use. And the ShippingAdministration very forthrightly stated thatcommunicable diseases were going to be abasis for lopping people off the rolls. And thisgave certain members of the crew a real in.My view was “Why not?” you know. “Let’shave them aboard. Let’s feed them; they’reworking like hell, and we’re all in the sameboat together, literally speaking.”

And, “No, no, because if any of us getsick,” and, you know, this was unlikely, butdiphtheria, tuberculosis, all kinds of otherthings, were rampant ashore in these areas.

Some of us were saying, “Well, can’t wework out where they eat at different times?”

“Oh, they’re using our plates or spittingat our tables or doing this or that.”

“Well, what about having them eat ondeck?”

“No, it’s the same idea. We have to moveamong them,” on and on.

And there was real dissension in thatcrew twice on that trip. I was delegate andhad to think through this. I remember writ-ing to Kathy these agonizing letters, in whichfirst, you know, I took the position of theother men of the crew, and then I took theother position, you know, and I was worried

that Kathy would think of me as a real chau-vinistic bastard, because she was very sociallyconscious. I said very defensively in my let-ters to her, “Well, you’ll probably think I’mawful, but on the other hand, what can I do?Anyway, the problem is not ours; the prob-lem is the inadequate education and theirmedical . . . what the state is doing for themashore. Why don’t they strike, and then weall can strike together and do this and that?”

And I was just putting the problem off,you see. But I was very disturbed about that,because I had to sort of go along with themajority of the group, who didn’t want themaboard. I went up to the captain, and, youknow, the captain was saying, “We’re goingto have you guys fired when we get back, putin irons! You have disobeyed. We orderedthose men to come aboard and eat, and youhave taken the position they shouldn’t; youare disobeying a lawful order of the bridge, ofyour captain!”

And I said, “Well, Captain, why don’t youhave them in the officers’ mess?” [laughter]

He got furious. Absolutely livid with rage.You know, he said something like it was toosmall. [laughter] And I said, “It’s no smallerthan ours, and you got better food. Give themthe best that the ship has.” But at the sametime I was very disturbed by it.

But we didn’t do it. And the captainlogged us. He put it in the log that the crewrefused to obey a lawful order. Nothing evercame of it, but he took it seriously. And itwas. I thought it was a serious matter.

We ended up by giving a lot of food tothem to take ashore. They were just as happywith that. And they didn’t give a damn abouteating with us, anyway. [laughter] They didn’tcare about eating on the ship. They werecurious about the ship. They wanted to walkaround and look at everything.

359BACK TO ALASKA

They were hard-working little guys, andthose wonderful boats would come skimmingout and pick up . . . .

And their boats looked like kayaks, or werethey . . . ?

Yes, they were whaling boats. Some ofthem were large, thirty feet long, and open,paddles, you know.

And so those were the boats they were usingsometimes to unload right onto the boat?

Oh, yes. Yes. They’d come out there andwait and paddle, and waves moving theselittle boats up and down. Our ship was rock-ing sometimes if the weather was rough. Butthey could handle it. We’d lower the slingsover the side and had to be very careful be-cause it would bang against the ship. Andthen we’d throw them lines so that they couldkeep it away from the ship. They couldhandle it, and they were wonderful at this.Their little boats were jumping up and down.And they would just take things off the slingsand give us the signal, and up the sling wouldcome. Now and then they’d lose something,but not much. And so we had a dozen littleports like that we’d go into and saw thesewonderful little Eskimo boats everywhere youwent.

Then, one place . . . I think it was LittleDiomede below King Island in the BeringStrait. King Island is a little to the north.These are little rocky islands, ledges, in themiddle of the straits. You know, you can seeSiberia on one side and Alaska on the otherkind of thing.

The ice floes were beginning to comedown. I guess this was early October . . . no,late September, when the floes were begin-

ning to come down; we were beginning tosee the ice floes coming in. We were gettingwarnings that we were supposed to go all theway up to Point Barrow, way to the ArcticCircle. And we were getting warnings thatwe’d better move fast because if we didn’t,we might get stuck up there, or the ice floeswould be very dangerous, et cetera. But wehad to stop at Little Diomede (I think it wasDiomede), and we had some cargo, a sling ortwo, for that island. The ship only came thereonce a year. There was a teacher on theisland—a young guy, I think from Oregon orI don’t know where—a young guy in his thir-ties, and he was something of a missionarytype. I’m not sure whether he was a priest,but a teacher. He had a long beard, big, fuzzybeard, and a mop of hair, and he came onwith a group of, Aleuts, I guess, the LittleDiomede people that were part of his school.[Diomede residents are Inupiaq Eskimo.]They had villages on Little and Big Diomedelong before this, from way back.

But, anyway, here this guy comes in, inhis little skin boat, and he’s standing up andlooking very heroic to me. I saw this guy com-ing in this rough sea and coming up the sideof the ship first, you know, to check the cargothat was due him. We had it in a sling ondeck. And it turns out that not only he hadbeen there all that time, but he was adoredby these people. I mean, they treated him asthough he were not only a teacher, but aguide, an advisor. And they would look tohim for everything about what to do andhow . . . and treated him with more respectthan any of the people we had seen downthe line treating any whites. He was treatedwith this very special respect. There was akind of a religious quality to it. And I wasvery impressed by this. I had a deep envy forhim. [laughter] I thought, “What a life he’s


living out there out there doing some kindof good work, feeling good about himself. He’schosen this kind of hermitage.”

My friend Bob Nelson would have beenvery moved by it. He wasn’t on this trip, butthat’s the kind of thing Bob always felt hewanted—not necessarily doing good for any-body—but having the isolation in living thiskind of romantic, isolated life. [laughter] Andthis guy was doing it. He was a very ordinary,nice guy. And so he was checking the cargo.“Where are the mushrooms?” They weregone. Oh, the sacramental wine—that’s right,there was a barrel of sacramental wine.“Where is it?”

We knew where it was. [laughter] All theway up we’d been sneaking into the cargohold and taking out these wonderful cannedmushrooms with butter—mushrooms andbutter in cans. Well, you know, there wasnothing like it in the ship’s slops. And therewasn’t much of it—two or three cases—butwe went through it. And the wine—it gotjust slooowly drunk away! [laughter] And sohe had a half empty or three-quarter emptybarrel, you know. And, “Oh, the bottom musthave leaked. My god.”

The captain was very suspicious. Themates knew, but they had been in on it, sothey shut up. And this poor guy. At that pointI was very ashamed, but I wasn’t going to sayanything.

And he stood there, and he says, “Well,we’ve been waiting a year for that.” And hesays, “That’s the only piece of home I got,were those mushrooms. I looked forward tothat. You know, I’ve been eating seal meat,walrus, birds, canned beans, and all that.” Hesays, “I was looking forward to that.” And hesays, “The wine is sacramental.”

We thought, “Well, yeah, but . . . .”[laughter] “A lonely priest is going to drink alot of wine.”

But, anyway, that gave me a very strongimpression about this person, and I alwaysremembered that marvelous scene: watchinghim going back with his little cargo and twoor three skin boats, heading back to this rockycliff. I mean, some of the houses, like KingIsland, were built on stilts against the cliff—right overlooking the sea. Any storm, theycould just blow off. And the village was re-ally on the cliffs, on the cliff-side. And Iremember watching him going, thinking,“Oh, my god, how I envy the personal powerthis man has, a feeling of being together, be-ing something.” You know, he had dignity.That to me really was the epitome of a goodlife, you see, because I was at this time strug-gling with all those things.

As we went north, things got very heavyas far as weather’s concerned. We had willi-waws, strong storms, and then periods whenthe sea was like glass. And ice floes weremoving by the ship and sometimes bumpinginto us, and we’d have to carefully go throughthem. And sometime you could just hearthem scraping. We didn’t know if the shipreally had enough strength for the bulkheadsto handle this. And it was getting to the pointwhere we were going past King Island . . . .

King Island had a priest that was a clearlydefined priest, who came looking for his sacra-mental wine. His was gone, so we had gottenrid of the barrel. [laughter] I don’t know whatelse he got. But I didn’t have much use forhim. He was a little parroty guy—a highvoice, demanding, ordering his Eskimosaround . . . the natives around, and wearinga collar and all that. My anti-papist feelingcame to the fore, “The heck with him,” youknow. “Let him wait another year for hissacramental wine.” But, nevertheless, therehe was, living out there alone on King Island,which is another dramatic place with houseson stilts, plastered against the sea cliffs. I

361BACK TO ALASKA

really wish that I had been able to go ashoreand walk through. The village was on lad-ders, all kinds of ladders and little staircases,and a very rickety, ramshackle kind of place—King Island.

And there is where we heard how therewas such a problem with the Eskimos andAleuts going over to Siberia in the winter-time and then coming back to Alaska. Andthey had relatives over there and relatives inAlaska, and they were going back and forthin their sleds and trenching into Russia, alongwith the commies, and sometimes they’dcome back with hammer and sickle pins.[laughter] And, “What to do with them?” Itwas a real problem up there for the authori-ties, how to keep a boundary with thesepeople who could zip along not only in theirskin boats from one side to another, but acrossthe ice.

And I was thinking, then, you know,“Well, it didn’t take much for different peopleto get across the Bering Strait. And if thosepeople can get across in the skin boats, whywould people have had to wait for the gla-ciation or the Ice Age to get across the BeringStrait, you know? They were doing it in nowin their skin boats. Hell, this is hardly any-thing.” You could see both shores. It was somedistance; I forget how far it is—forty miles,fifty miles.

At this point we were seeing polar bearson ice floes coming down. So . . . I don’tknow. It’s kind of naive of me to suggest thatpeople were able to get across in any largenumbers without the glaciation or the bridge,but it’s a surprisingly short distance.

But at sea you could see both continents?

Oh, yes, going up by King Island, youcould look over and see in the distance theoutline of Siberia. And you had the feeling—

everybody felt it in a way—of being at thetop of the world. It was a marvelously mysti-cal trip for me. You just knew you were goingnorth; you felt the curvature of the earth. Youjust felt you were going into this great un-known expanse of the Arctic.

And then mirages. The most remarkablemirages. I don’t think I ever saw anythinglike it anywhere else in the world, althoughI’ve seen mirages—small ones. These werespectacular! Mountains upside down, youknow! [laughter] And very clear in the dis-tance. Sometimes what looked like a citywith things moving in it, you know, up inthe air. It could have been a reflection allthe way down to Skagway or something. Ihave no idea, or somewhere else in the world,reflecting there—moving things in the sky.

And, of course, at that time, I think itwas semi-dark for twenty hours a day. I mean,the sun just barely showed itself and thenwould go down. But there was still plenty oflight—a kind of a luminous quality to thewhole area—eery and luminous.

And these ice floes coming down, andsometimes large icebergs, and the lookoutsreally had to watch for those, so we couldavoid them. And some of them had polarbears on them, you know! [laughter] And itwas very, very dramatic.

Did you see any northern lights?

Oh, yes, during these half days, duringthe twilights, flickerings in the sky.

So there was a sense, really, of living inan enchanted place. I mean it was unbeliev-able, and I had all sorts of spiritual andmystical feelings. I wrote letters that soundedalmost as though I had reverted to my oldinvolvement in cult metaphysics, you know.[laughter] Just remarkable feeling of unity,and the cosmos, how small we were, but how


wonderful it was to glide over the top of theearth.

You felt that you were going through anarrow aperture to the top of the earth tothe North Pole kind of thing. And the seawas quite dangerous, and we had to have con-tinual lookouts all the time, watching justfor signs of submerged ice. And we’d hit thema couple of times, but nothing serious.

And finally we got to Point Barrow, aremarkable place. I have been to the top ofworld. It is the northern-most town, at leastin the western hemisphere. It wasn’t a town;it was a village. They say now it’s a kind of asprawling little suburb up there, to be reachedonly by plane. But then it was really sort of apioneer broken-down village with a lot ofEskimos. As I remember, there were evensome igloo-like structures. We didn’t goashore and see them.

We had quite a bit of cargo, because theyonly had a ship once or twice a year up there.And we were now right on the edge; theywere not going to get anything for practicallya year because of the ice. And we could see itforming. And we were supposed to have justenough time. In fact, the captain was hear-ing by wire from the company, was being told,“You know, you better just turn back if theice gets bad. Don’t jeopardize the ship. Don’trisk the ship.” And he was very concerned.And he was drunk half the time, but he waslegitimately concerned. [laughter]

[laughter] I thought you were going to say “legi-timately drunk.” [laughter]

[laughter] Legitimately concerned, andhad good reason to be.

But we finally got off of Point Barrow, akind of a large, wide bay, as I remember. Andthere were some other Americans up there.There was a kind of a camp, a company . . . .

I think there were some American soldiers—I’m not sure. I think there was a weatherstation up there, and there were some otherthings, and lots of Eskimos. And they cameout in their . . . some of them had motorboats, but some still in skin boats. And weunloaded, oh, five or ten slings of cargo. Andas we were there at anchor, the ice packs weremoving in right around us, and there wasreally a question whether we’re going to beable to get out. And the captain was yelling,“We got to get out of here! Get that stuff offthe . . . . Drop it in the drink if you can’t getit.” And if we had gotten stuck . . . I remem-ber some of us were saying, “This would be agreat place to be stuck.” The only thing thatstopped that thought going too far with mewas I am supposed to get back because mydaughter was going to be born. But on theother hand there was this inkling: “If I can’thelp it, I can’t help it. [laughter] Wouldn’t itbe wonderful to be stuck at Point Barrow forthe winter?” And it almost came to that. Butfinally we were ready to go. We batteneddown the hatches and got the ship squaredaway and had to go in reverse, pull up theanchor, and use the anchor a couple of timesto break ice. And, in fact, I guess we left itout. We didn’t take it all the way in. We leftit up so we could drop it now and then if weneeded to. We were able to sort of go asternand push some ice behind us and get out tolittle patches, and then make a turn. In fact,I was at the wheel for part of that. Fascinat-ing, because it was really tough. The secondmate had a real time moving the ship; he wasafraid the screw would get damaged on someof these large ice floes. And we were able toturn around and had to push our way for, Iwould say, half a day—push our way throughsome very thick ice floes that were beginningto form into solid packs.

363BACK TO ALASKA

That’s incredible, just to even think about it.

Yes. And it’d break; we could hear itcrunching—you know crunch, crunch, crunch!And once or twice drop the anchors down.But it didn’t do too much good because itwas just laying on the ice. Then we knew itwas fairly deep when we saw that. And nowand then the screw would shudder, and we’drealize that some ice had gotten back there.But eventually we got into clear sea, but withplenty of ice all the way back down toDiomede, and there were still some ice floesfloating around off of the Aleutians andthings of that kind.

So that to me was a beautiful trip, as Iremember. Even though it was hard work, andthere were a lot of squabbles in the crew.There was lots of overtime, because we werealways doing longshore work—at least partof it. And then the question of, “What dowe get paid for longshore work?” and, “Whatabout overtime for this and for that?” So Iwas very busy with that kind of stuff. At thesame time, there was something about thatatmosphere of that part of the north, and oneof these days I want to take a tramp steamerto Point Barrow. I’d like to be one of the shipsthat goes up there before they put the roadin, which eventually they will do. They’regoing to try to get to Skagway and Juneauwith roads, and then it’ll be something else.But I sure would like to get up there—just to

see that ocean up there. It was marvelous.Oh, and lots of terns and gooney birds andthose puffins, Auks. Just thousands of auks.

Are they the ones with the big eyebrows?

One species. I am not sure they had them,but they were short, little, squatty birds, mak-ing this: “Auk, auk, auk!” [laughter] Oh! Weheard the auks all the time.

Well, of course, you know, there’s thewonderful, traditional, little anecdote aboutauks: The “Marvelous Auk.” “The MarvelousAuk that flies around and around in concen-tric circles, in ever-decreasing concentriccircles till finally it flies up its own extrem-ity, and it says, ‘Auk!’” [laughter] And that’swhat you’re hearing in the “Auk!”—the aukjust as it flies up its own extremity. [laughter]There it goes again—“Auk, auk, auk!” Theyhave a proclivity for flying around in circlesuntil they fly up . . . . [laughter]

Anyway, that trip was over; I get back,very anxious now coming down through theInside Passage to the Sound. By the way, upthere in the Diomede Islands, they were veryworried about subs going past the Aleutiansbut had no problem. There were subs reportedthrough there. However, the Japanese hadpretty well given up on the Aleutians. So ifthey had subs available, that was a good placeto bring them to get ships.

42ANYA

OMING DOWN south, here I waswithin two or three days of whenAnya was due, and we hadn’t even

where the babies were, and looked in. Andthe nurse was holding up a baby, and I wassaying, you know, [whispers] “d’Azevedo?”And she held up this little creature—little,smashed creature—a red, little . . . . Youknow, I’d been envisioning these marvelouslythree-months-old children . . . .

Gerber babies.

[laughter] Gerber babies. And I wasdeeply shocked . . . . I was also old enoughto realize that things would change veryquickly. Nevertheless, I thanked the nurseand smiled. And then I saw Kathy, who wasvery kind to me, very nice. She didn’t likemy beard because it was really quite large andmade me look like Rip Van Winkle.

And it was red?

Yes, a reddish beard. But that was a won-derful homecoming. So you know, “What arewe going to call her?” And I had made a lotof suggestions—everything from Christina toGeena to this, that. And we finally decided

Cgotten to Seattle yet. Well, we didn’t knowif it was a girl or boy. In those days you didn’thave all the fancy technology. But the babywas due in mid October, and I was supposedto be in on the fourteenth. And all I can fig-ure out is . . . because I didn’t get down toAlameda, where Kathy was in the hospital. Ididn’t get down until the night of the eigh-teenth or on the nineteenth, just after Anyawas born, I mean just, I don’t know, within afew hours of that time. And all I can figureout is what happened was the ship was heldup, and I might have taken the train downfrom Seattle to the Bay Area. Whatever it is,I got in just in the nick of time—a little bitlate—with a great big, long, flowing red beardor reddish beard and all my Alaska junk onme and some mukluks for Kathy, and wentinto Alameda Hospital, right near whereKathy had gotten this place on ClintonStreet. And I remember running into thehospital with my Seabee coat on and myJeremiah beard, and rushing in, and went by


on Anya, which was a name that had comefrom my grandparents’ family way back, andit was a Russian name. There was a heroineof a novel that we liked very much namedAnya. And there were two or three otherAnyas in our experience, and so Anya be-came the name.

And that was a wonderful time, I remem-ber, excepting I was at times miserable,because in that month or two before my nexttrip, all the problems that I had packed withme from the Alvarado and the YPO descendedon me. Here I am; we’re getting close to thetime when the war is going to be over; I didn’tknow what I was going to do. And here wewere in a small, little place on the beach inAlameda. It was very pleasant, wonderful. Iwas doing a little writing, and it was roman-

tic, and we had a little perambulator, andKathy and I would take the baby for a walk.And I was painting, drawing pictures of them,and feeling very wonderful, excepting some-times it would just descend on me—“My god.Where is this going, and what am I going todo?” And there were times when I was ex-tremely miserable—even to the point ofthinking I’d like to be on a place like KingIsland or Little Diomede. You know, get backto sea or anything, which I eventually didanyway since the war was still on.

Yes, that brief period ashore, after Kathyhad given birth to Anya in Alameda, was avery mixed period for me of conflict, I think.On the one hand, I was facing the fact that Ihad sort of merely dreamed about, thoughtabout it, in a kind of romantic way at sea,that Kathy was pregnant and we were goingto have a child. And it was all very wonder-ful and stimulating, and I felt great about it,despite what was going on on that particulartrip. But on the other hand, there we were.We had a little child; we were living in awonderful, little, shingled house on the shore-line of Alameda.

In those days there were no lagoons ortremendous buildup of housing. It was a kindof an old, broken-down Alameda neighbor-hood, and the backyard was on the shorelineof San Francisco Bay! [laughter] It was verynice, very beautiful. We had a little, tinybackyard out in the sand and a wooden fence.And we’d go out there and sit on the rocksand look out on the bay. And when it wasstormy or the tide was in, it would come uphigh, almost next to the house. It was a won-derful feeling that we had.

And there we were with a child, and Ihad no idea in this world, other than what Iwas doing—going to sea with very small pay-offs—how we were going to continue. Andwhile I had been away on this trip, I think

“‘What are we going to call her?’ . . . And we finallydecided on Anya.” Kathy, Warren, and Anya inAlameda.

367ANYA

Kathy even had to borrow from her folks.And all those things somehow or other atthat age—when one was that age—they don’tseem insurmountable, but they are troubling.[laughter] What is one going to do? And thisbothered me a great deal, particularly, becausethat trip on the YPO was a very troubled timein many ways.

On the one hand, I was deeply engrossedin a kind of recapitulation of the spiritual-metaphysical views that I had once held. Iwas not, I don’t think ever in my life, reli-gious in a conventional sense. Only when Iwas very young had I any connection withchurches or formal religion under the pres-sure from the Swedish side of my family, mymother’s people and my mother. My father,was very, very ambivalent himself aboutchurches and religion because of his back-ground. So I will say from the time that I was

fourteen or fifteen, I was an atheist, or at leasta decided agnostic. But I still had very strongfeelings about transcendence, about unitywith the cosmos, about the importance ofhuman relations with nature. In a way I wasa . . . [laughter] secular humanist, but verymetaphysical on the one hand. And thehumanism was the aspect that kept shiftingand changing and where the conflicts were.

On the other hand, there was this grow-ing identification with work, with labor, withthe unions or the union that I was in, whichunfortunately was a very limited right-wingunion. Nevertheless, the idea of trade union-ism became a very important thing in my life.And so that was a real conflict between thatand these strong, spiritual, metaphysicalkinds of concepts that I had.

I remember writing long letters to Kathyon that trip on the YPO about this, about

“I was doing a little writing, and it was romantic.”


this conflict. And some of them are very re-vealing, and I suppose I should resurrect acouple of them and read them, but I won’t atthis point. Nevertheless, they were reallyabout this business of how was one to incor-porate what was going on in the world,accommodate to what was going on in theworld, all around the war, the horror of thewar, and one’s feeling of wanting to be of ser-vice and doing something positive in theworld? On the other hand, there was this verystrong pull in the other direction, which hadto do with a highly subjective personalgrowth and orientation, having to do with apull toward isolation, toward removal fromthe world, toward contemplation, medita-tion. On the other hand, this very real,hard-bitten feeling that one had to take part.It was a growing social consciousness I had.

I would have to attribute a great deal ofwhatever stability I maintained during thisperiod to my relationship with Kathy, becauseshe was very matter of fact, a straightforward,pragmatic person. She had been workingduring the war in the shipyards; she was a“Rosie-the-riveter” type during that periodand was very much involved with everyday,average people working hard in the shipyards.And she had this feeling that there was some-thing very important about that kind ofinvolvement, not only for her, but the kindof attitude she felt, the sense of unity she feltamong these people she worked with. Also,because of some other friends of mine, shehad spent quite a bit of time, in fact, at theCalifornia Labor School, being of servicethere and I think taking some classes. Andher friend, Mimi Kagen, the dancer, wasgiving dance performances in connectionwith the labor school. And so she was verymuch into this San Francisco, Bay Area labororientation and progressive orientation—progressive orientation from a political

standpoint. And we had long, long discus-sions of this kind.

I think she was a little concerned thatmaybe this kind of romantic pull towardsmetaphysics that I had a real concern andinterest about was moving in the directionof the occult—which it never was. I had agreat contempt for most of the occult move-ments. I had already been there, done that,when I was a little kid. And I don’t thinkthat I was at all interested in occult move-ments, but I was terribly interested not intheological thinking—it’s hard for me to findthe words for it—but thinking that had todo with internal growth, consciousness,awareness. I was very interested in astronomyand in some aspects of physics, what I couldunderstand of it, and the feeling of the large-ness of the world, the importance of beingfully aware and open to new directions andto change of ideas. And I had a respect forcertain of the mystics of the past, who seemedto transcend their time and thought, whothought universally, I guess universalisticthinking.

It would be hard for me to put it intowords, except, oh, the kind of reading that Iwas doing at the time when I come to thinkof it. There was a guy called D. R. M. Bucke,I believe—a book Cosmic Consciousness thatI had at sea with me. [laughter] And G. K.Chesterson’s Saint Francis, that I found very,very moving. I don’t think I would now, butI did then. And the poems of WilliamBlake—I remember being really taken withthem. Oh, and William James’s The Varietiesof Religious Experience was another. And Ithink I had with me on that trip, or another,Radin’s Primitive Man as a Philosopher. Awhole range of things that sort of threw meinto a framework of thinking about largerspiritual concepts and problems and thehuman accommodation to the world around

369ANYA

them, or recognition of what was real in theworld around them. Long gone was myinterest in Plato and that kind of idealism.[laughter] I wasn’t that sort of idealist. I’dhave to do a lot of thinking about it now todefine what I really was. But I was strugglingwith all these things.

At the same time, I was reading thingslike Wendell Wilkie’s One World, which hada great impact on me. I wrote a long letter toKathy about that on this trip on the YPO,because I thought it was one of the greateststatements that I had ever seen on what wasgoing on in the world at the time. I felt itwas an honest, straightforward, simple state-ment of the realities of what human beingshad to face in the world where was emergingduring the war and after the war. I admiredthe fact that he’d made a long trip all throughthe world that he could during the war inorder to see for himself what was taking place.And I don’t know if I’d have the same viewof Wilkie today that I had then. And HenryWallace came into the picture a little laterfor me. These were the political figures thatI felt congenial about. They were people whothought about the kind of problems that wereof interest to me. And so that was some ofthe readings.

And I was reading, oh, EdwardCarpenter’s Toward Democracy. And, oh,Pablo Neruda’s poetry—Neruda. He fired areal interest in sort of a revolutionary spirit,a feeling of change, of what was necessary tomake change, the kind of consciousness thata human being had to have to absorb and todeal with change in the self as well as in theworld around one. I was also occasionallyreading tracts from the left-wing trade unions,excerpts from Marx and Lenin at the time.All these things were sort of going throughmy mind. It was when I think of it, a won-

derful hash. [laughter] And I was dealing withit with a tremendous sense of urgency, I think,a need to find a way through all this.

I had Herskovits’s The Myth of the NegroPast, which I think I said somewhere else,that I wrote that it became a kind of scrip-ture for me—not at this point; later on. But,nevertheless, I read it with great interest, andit awakened in me at the time a real concernabout the fact that I was in a union that wasa “lily-white” union, as we used to say in thosedays, and that the union actually hadstruggled against ending discrimination, likethe CIO union had done, the NationalMaritime Union. Also, the longshorementhat we would deal with along the way invarious ports, particularly in Seattle and SanFrancisco, but even up along the way throughthe Inside Passage, the ILWU [InternationalLongshoremen’s and Warehousemen’sUnion] men would often raise these questionswith us, you know, just in passing and talk-ing while we were working, and the like.“What the hell you guys doing? What kindof union are you in, anyway? You don’t evenknow what’s going on in the world out there;you don’t know all the struggles that are tak-ing place right now all over the world. Youdon’t know what the role of workers are.”These were sort of left-wing guys in theILWU, and I remember listening with greatinterest, these exchanges.

And the guys that were usually on theships with me, bantering back, you know,like, “Oh, you bunch of commies or reds”—usually joking, but there was this difference,this tension. Oh, and among the longshore-men there also would be blacks, blacklongshoremen working together with thewhites. This impressed me. I was very movedby this and thought, you know, “What’swrong with us, anyway?” So these things were


beginning to jell in me, I think. But at thesame time, there was the great struggle goingon.

And then, of course, that teacher up atKing Island—he became a kind of an em-blem for me, kind of an icon, which, by theway, I think in a way distills the conflict Ihad. Here was this guy, living out there, witha small village of isolated Eskimo people, andcarrying on this little school, and all alone,and seemed to be so happy, seemed to be sosatisfied with himself, and was so admired bythese people. This threw me back to my oldviews about how I wanted to go to one of theTuamotos in the South Seas and set up a newsociety when I was twelve, thirteen years old.[laughter] I was thinking, “Here is this guywho went off and found a little world of hisown and developed a positive and produc-tive kind of work in it.” And that appealedto me; at the same time it was very unrealis-tic, because I could not separate myself fromthe world I was creating with a child comingand Kathy at home waiting to give birth to achild and all that sort of thing.

Yet these are the escapist kinds of think-ing, I suppose, that go on when one’s under alot of pressure to make decisions about one-self. You’re torn in many directions, and allthe things that you are and all the things thatyou come into contact with come togetherand have to be unraveled. You’ll have to finda solution through them. Well, I didn’t findit very soon.

But, also, that was a hell of a trip in someways. It was a marvelous thing just from thepoint of view of moving into a strange, newworld at the end of the year in northern cli-mates, up through the Bering Strait, and uppast Kotzebue to Point Barrow. And thatwhole atmosphere was one of . . . really, Iwould say, it created a sense of the unreal, a

sense of another world, a sense of mysticism,a sense of metaphysics. And I was in themood to thoroughly respond to that. So thatwas going on.

At the same time, the work . . . . Therewas absolute incessant work, day and night. Ithink we did six on, four off when cargo wasbeing unloaded—coal, mainly, coal dust, etcetera. And we worked like hell. It was proba-bly one of the hardest working periods of mylife. I mean, intensive, hard work, where youdid nothing but work, get into a kind of a half-dazed coma of work. You were so tired, youdidn’t even think about it. You’d just go work-ing. Then you were too tired to eat, to go tothe mess hall; you’d go in and flop on yourbunk, and you would have to be awakened—people would have to come in and practicallyclub you to wake you up. And you were dirty,and you didn’t care. Then you’d go into themess room and have a cup of coffee andgobble down whatever lunch meats werearound, and then you’d be back in the hold.And that would go on for days and days anddays.

That was conducive to a kind of mysticalframe of mind, too, as I come to think of it.[laughter] I mean, in a way it was kind ofdrug . . . the “drug of work.” And I remem-ber thinking about the “drug of work” andthinking about my shipmates and how someof these men did this all their lives. And whathappened to their way of thinking and theirlives when all they would have would be backto shore for a few weeks, doing things thatother people did in the world, yet not exactly,but running around wild, trying to make upfor lost time, drunk. Some drunk, some see-ing wives or girlfriends and trying to maintainrelationships, and others kind of lost anddrifting around the streets of cities and thenback to sea again to this endless repetition.

371ANYA

Some trips where the work isn’t so hard, andothers where it’s deadly like it was on theYPO.

The crew was a mixed bunch. We hadtwo Eskimo crew members, which is the onlytime I saw a mixed crew. And they were takenon because I think a couple of guys hadjumped ship along the way in the InsidePassage. And they were very interesting guys.I remember these guys—young fellows—theycould work and work and work. These youngAleuts were like some of the old seamen, sixtyyears old, who could just work as though theywere fifteen. Moving without pause, and thengo to sleep and go eat and come back to work.And that seemed to be their lives. I don’tknow what they were thinking about whilethey were working. Sometimes they wouldsing.

Oh, that’s where I first heard “Joe Hill.”[A song about labor organizer Joe Hill, exe-cuted by the state of Utah in 1915.] [sings] “Idreamed I saw Joe Hill . . . .” One of theseold guys would sing the “Joe Hill” song, whichI learned to love and remember. “I said, ‘Joe,you’re a long time dead.’ ‘I never died,’ sayshe.’” [laughter] I remember this old guy wouldbe mumbling this song, keeping him going,and that was also very affecting to me.

And these Eskimo guys would work rightalongside the old-timers, and although Icould do it too, and others of the youngerguys on the ship could do it, it was with greateffort. These guys seemed to be effortless; theyjust moved with oiled joints. And one ofthem was in our fo’c’s’le, with our watch, andhe never said anything. He didn’t have any-thing to say to us. He must have felt that wewere unreachable anyway. But he worked;he’d do his work.

And the captain on that trip went a littlewacky. He drank all the time. This was oneof the ships where they had the problem

about whether they’re going to feed theEskimo longshoremen aboard, and where Iwas delegate and had to make the decision,finally, in great confusion. Maybe it was rightnot to have them there because of the healthrisk, and yet I knew that that was a dodge; Iknew that the reason for that was not onethat I had. And yet there I was, a delegate—I had to go with the majority of the crew,even though I spoke for doing it, and wentto the captain and said, “Why don’t you havethem up in the officers’ mess?” and got loggedfor it and things of that kind. But those wereconflicts. They sound today, when I speak ofthem, really inconsequential and a little flip-pant, but they weren’t—they were deep,powerful problems [laugher] that you facedin the middle of being under strain and tiredand working. And these things all becameimportant. And one had to make decisionsunder the worst possible conditions.

I remember one of the few things thathappened on that trip that I think was a glo-rious bit of good fun. The captain got verydrunk with the mayor of a little town thatwe passed. We had stopped and dropped somecoal off at a little town with mostly Eskimoswith an Eskimo mayor. And he came aboard,and he had some walrus spears with him. Idon’t remember why he had them; I thinkthat he was going to sell them. And he andthe captain went up to the captain’s cabin,and they got drunk—terribly, terribly drunk.And I remember they came out on deck eachwith a walrus spear, running around, throw-ing this spear at sacks of coal! [laughter] AndI remember myself and a couple other guysthat stood and watched this said, “There’s ourcaptain.” [laughter]

And finally the mayor of the town wasso drunk, this Eskimo guy with his spear, thatwe put him in a cargo net sling, and put himover side into the whale boat, a skin boat!


[laughter] And he was screaming and yellingand saying, “Good-bye, Skipper. Eh, I hadthe most wonderful time I ever had in mylife. Thank you, Skipper!”

And the skipper was stumbling drunk outon deck, saying, “Good-bye, old friend.”[laughter]

I remember that as one of the few reallyentertaining moments on that trip. [laugh-ter] And, oh, that one of the deck hands andthe steward got into a fight over the food.And the steward, as sometimes stewardsdid—they’d get so mad that they’d actuallytake a cleaver—not because they were goingto kill anybody, but if a steward raised acleaver, he was mad.

The tools of the trade. [laughter]

[laughter] Right. And he was threaten-ing to take on after this guy; said, “You know,you’re going to eat what you get because that’swhat you got, and that’s all there is on thisgoddamn belly-robbing ship, and you’re go-ing to eat what you get.”

This guy was saying, “You’re not going toget me to eat that, and you’re hiding stuff;you’re feeding the good stuff to the officers,and we’re getting all this goddamn slum-gum.”

So this guy, the deck hand, ran into hisfo’c’s’le and came back with a dried walruspenis [an “oosik”] that he had bought some-place—quite long, very hard. It was like abilly club. And he came back, and the two ofthem stood opposite each other, one with acleaver and one with the walrus penis. Andas delegate, I finally was able to calm themdown and tell them, you know, this was notime to have that kind of fight. “Please putyour walrus penis back in your fo’c’s’le,” I toldthis guy. [laughter] “Steward, do not raise yourcleaver at any member of the crew. Do it to

the captain, not to us.” And that was the endof that.

So I’m just telling these funny, little anec-dotes, because they were the only breaks inthis, aside from the environment, which wasabsolutely stunning.

This time of year were you having long nights orlong days?

These were long . . . long, dim twilights.So aside from work, part of the craziness andthe sense of miasma and detachment that youhad, came from the fact that day and nightseemed hardly defined. You’d get up, and it’dbe a little bit lighter or a little bit darker.[laughter] The sun just came—well, evenstopped doing that—came up just enough,you could see the rim of it, and then disap-peared. And, of course, the ice floes werecoming down. I’ve already talked about that.

So I’ve been back over this to say thiswas the quality of my life and thinking whenI came back, saw my new child, Anya, thislittle baby, and saw Kathy, and we had ourlittle, shingled place on the water, which wasall very romantic and all very lovely. And Iremember this good feeling, a sense of not onlyaccomplishment and pride that Kathy and Ihad, but, you know, a real sense of unity aboutwhat we had done. It sort of made up for thefact that we had gotten married under suchconditions, and we were still trying patch upour relationships with our parents, on bothsides. [laughter] And, you know, I said, “Here,Kathy, you are a bride one day and a motherthe next!” [laughter] “And our poor parentshave not been informed about what we’redoing.” And so that was going on.

At the same time, I remember walkingthe streets in Alameda, sometimes at night,thinking, “What in the hell am I going todo? What is my life going to be? I can’t go on

373ANYA

doing what I’m doing without any money,without any pay, ship after ship, and shoreleave after shore leave.” I even had the ideathat the selective service was still on. I thinkit was just a little later in early 1945 that theselective service was ended, but then I thinkit was still on. So that I had to do this; I hadto stay in, or I had to enlist in the army, or I

had to declare conscientious objectorship.And that came back to me again—this oldproblem that I had at the beginning of thewar—was I going to just be a conscientiousobjector? So that sort of mystical, mixed-upkind of feeling was working in me, too. I wasescapist; I was trying to find a way out of thiscul-de-sac.

43A LITERARY LIFE

OU SAID you were writing. What kindof things were you writing?

kind of anti-social view that was really basedupon the elitism of art. And I was feeling verymixed about this.

I had written this critique of a letter thatHenry Miller had written to New Republicand in which I took him to task. Even thoughI had admired him, admired his work, I tookhim to task for a kind of melodramatic, self-serving, pleading orientation to his role asan artist in the United States, having comefrom Europe and having fled France, fled poordead France, as we used to say. And whenParis was liberated, some of my shipmateswould say, “Oh, boy! All those slimy littleartists over there must be dancing in thestreets!” [laughter] They had absolutely nouse for anything. I didn’t feel that way.

And I was thinking, here during thewar . . . not that patriotism was somethingthat I held up as a great good, but I felt it wasfor him, unseemly; it was out of character.There was something wrong with him pre-senting himself in this way, as a supplicant,and denouncing the country not helping himpersonally. It was this personal kind of

YWell, I had written some things that were

now getting published. Oh. That’s when theHenry Miller thing came out in New Republic.And I was having a real deep inner conflictabout my own writing and about what I wassaying and what I was doing. My writing hadbeen pretty subjective and pretty avant-gardein its orientation. And although I liked whatI was doing—I thought it was good, and someothers apparently thought it was good—I hada feeling it wasn’t what I really wanted to do;it wasn’t the way I really wanted to write.

I had this growing contempt for what Iconsidered the art world, the avant-art world.My friend, George, of Circle magazine . . . Ihad admiration for what he was doing andwhat it was doing (probably because he’dpublished a couple of my stories) and thingsof that kind. At the same the whole worldthat it represented, the kind of detached,effete world of the agonized artist living in aseparate strata from the rest of society . . . a


thing—“You are doing this to me”—thatannoyed me. So I wrote this short article,which was accepted and printed in NewRepublic, and immediately things fell apartamong the people that I had known.

Certain people thought it was great thatthat had been said; somebody had to say it,and then others and my friend, George Leite,who was very close to Henry Miller, felt thatI had made a tremendous mistake.

He wrote me a long letter at sea, I remem-ber, that was probably the most feeling andprofound thing he had ever written. [laugh-ter] And it was very good, in fact. But sayingto me, “How can you do this to this greatman who has suffered so much?” I thoughthe was talking about Jesus Christ, you know.

I was reading it, and kind of feeling a littleguilty about being a Philistine; I didn’t wantto be somebody fighting against the verythings that I was for. But there was somethingabout his attitude, too, that bugged me. Imean, you know, here is this great man, butuntouchable, his pristine, marvelous great-ness was such that anybody who wouldcriticize him just missed the point and allthat. And this bothered me; this bugged me.

This was a very profound problem I feltabout literature and art. During the war Iasked myself, “Am I just being affected bythe facts of the war and a kind of indirectpatriotism, or, you know, am I reacting onsome more realistic personal basis?”

And so that gave me a long pause. I hadto do a lot of thinking about that, but whileI was doing that, I was becoming more andmore critical of the kind of writing that wasbeing done by a lot of people in the avant-garde world. I was reading a lot of otherthings—Steinbeck and Farrell and, of course,Joyce, a lot of poetry. T. S. Eliot, of course—I was very interested in his work. And some

of the local poets, Kenneth Rexroth andothers, and Josephine Miles.

This problem was for me a kind of anArmageddon, I suppose. I was thinking, if I’mgoing to be a writer, what kind of writing doI want to do? Was it what I’d been doing andwhat I’d been praised for at the moment? Andis that the kind of thing that I really feel? Idid. I mean, those were important things tome that I wrote, but is that where I’m going?How much more of that can I write? I hadfarmed that particular genre.

The kind of praise that you were getting, was itin response to what you’d wanted to communi-cate, or was it for things that surprised you?

No, that was the interesting thing. Thepositive things had to do with style, had todo with the kind of content that I had, thethings that I was writing about that were sortof unusual. For example, suicide at sea.

“Deep Six for Danny” was a highly sub-jective story about a suicide I’d heard about,about a young kid who jumped overboard.Not on my ship, but I had shipmates whotold me all about it in great detail. And I wasvery impressed by the story, about their takeon the kind of kid he was, and their analysisof him in terms of what kind of family he’dcome from and what his problem was, sexu-ally and otherwise. And it had a deep impacton me—that lore, that sea lore, about sui-cide at sea, and then all the tales that go alongwith it, the anecdotes that people have aboutother suicides they saw. And how, you know,when you’re out at watch at night, and you’reup there by the hawseholes where the an-chor chains go out from the bow of the ship,when you’re out there by these great big holes,in the dark night, and the ship is movingthrough the water and going up and down,

377A LITERARY LIFE

you can hear sounds, you know, coming fromdown below—gurgles and cries and calls.Quite possibly, you do—certainly up in thenorth seas, you know, with the auks and inthe South Seas with the gooney birds or theterns. Sometimes these night terns makestrange cries. And, also, maybe porpoises orsomething make strange sounds, so that youhear these funny sounds. And those are criesfrom the rotten bodies of dead sailors tryingto get on the ship. And if you’re not careful,they’ll crawl up through the hawsehole withtheir fins on. [laughter] They’ve grown fins,and they’re all rotten! Their hair is like sea-weed, you know! And that impressed me so,those tales, that I sort of put that all togetherin a kind very poetic mélange, I guess.

Henry Jackson in the San FranciscoChronicle wrote a column about that story andsaw me as a merchant seaman writer, as a sea-going writer, which I was, and how I hadcaptured a very unusually sharp and movingview of sea life. And I don’t remember allthat he said, but it was very positive, and Ithink all true! [laughter] I know that that wasa good story, as well as others that I had writ-ten at the time.

And what was it published in?

That was published in Circle magazine.And that’s the issue that got banned inAustralia. I think probably because I hadmentioned Australia, [laughter] that he hadgone with a whore in Sydney or Melbourneand how this had affected his life, comingfrom an extremely rigid and fundamentalisthousehold. And I guess they didn’t like that,but, also, instead of saying “fucked” in thosedays, I said “focked”. I thought I would cam-ouflage it a bit, but they weren’t fooled at all.[laughter]

What happens in a fo’c’s’le. [laughter]

In a fo’c’s’le, yes, a fo’c’s’le. [laughter] Andso anyway, that had happened. And I wasbecoming, though, disillusioned with thatparticular world, I think, because I was do-ing a lot of reading in social themes. Oh, Ihad come across Gorky, and I had great admi-ration for the directness and simplicity of thestories, and the fact that he was dealing withreal people and in a most, I would say,unelaborated way—direct writing—one ofthe things that I admired Steinbeck for. Sothere was that side of it. And at the sametime I was personally, though, surrounded bypretty much the avant-garde group of poetsand some writers—mostly poets then in thatarea, people whom I admired and all that.But at the same time I didn’t want to writethat way or about those things.

But my issue over Henry Miller botheredme a great deal, because in a sense I felt I hadcut off a connection that I had, because I hadgone down to Big Sur, and I’d seen whereHenry Miller lived up on the hillsides upthere—a very romantic setting, wild horsesrunning around on the mesa above Big Sur—and where he had had a little shack. Hewasn’t there at the time that I was there, buthis friend was; his woman friend was there.And later I saw her and her newborn baby, Ithink, whose name was Valentine. And so Ihad this feeling of intimacy, though it wasn’treally deserved, about my connection withthat world and him. But although I reallydidn’t feel that, a couple of my friends mademe feel that I’d made an irretrievable break—George Leite in particular. He got over it,though, because he himself had some troubleslater on that caused him to rethink.

And then, oh, there were people likeAnaïs Nin, whom I never met personally but


heard a lot of. I mean, her spirit was aroundthat group a great deal. And LawrenceDurrell, who had written about North Africa.And it was a scene that I began to lose iden-tity with because, I think, of work, the war,my connection with people at sea—thatwhole waterfront scene had given me anotherperspective on things. And I was beginningto feel that if I was going to write, it wouldhave to be in a different genre. Though I likedwhat I had done, and I felt that I had ex-pressed something that was important to me,I was changing—personally changing.

I found this old letter to Kathy, talkingabout something like this. I say, “You know, Ibelieve that it is the key to the great dumpheaps of impotent art piling up around us. Itis a sort of by-product with spiritual disloca-tion. In the first place, there are too manypeople writing, painting, planning to writeand paint, or do any number of other relatedthings. Such activity, or intended activity, hasbecome a haven for twentieth-century mis-fits and malcontents. It is a rationalizationfor the chronic psychological chaos of thetimes. A hundred years ago most of themwould have had their energies molded anddirected for them. [laughter] But today everycollege student who happens to get an over-dose of college English, economics, oranthropology, along with his adolescent dis-illusionment, eventually finds his way to thesordid, little ghettos of dead souls. It is anunhealthy underworld and as dangerous as aquagmire. It is almost impossible to avoidthe ghettos around universities and theGreenwich Villages of cities. But only thosewho have managed to get away in time eversucceed in directing their strength and ability.The magazine View strikes me as being to theupper-class ghetto people what the NewYorker is to the lower class—a sort of hand-

book for the smug, brittle, twittering, littlehothouse world of intellectual canaries. Oneadmits to being amused by the slant and luredby the intricate, facile jigsaws of their minds.But there is something fossil and unclean,too, as though seven clever twelve-year-oldsfrom an English public school were to besealed for fifty years in a cave and given onlyThomas Aquinas and funny books to read.[laughter] Perhaps at the end of forty yearssomeone might slip them the EncyclopediaBritannica. What sport for the gods. Whatweird refinements of flesh and spirit in thatlast golden decade. Seven old men, unutter-ably civilized and informed, sitting in a circle,diddling their undescended cerebral testicles.[laughter] One could be quite confident thatupon their resurrection a presentation of ayear’s subscription to View would be riotouslywelcome.” [laughter]

[laughter] So that was written to Kathy while youwere at sea?

Yes! It was written on my typewriter in-termittently in the few times that I could stayawake or wasn’t absolutely seeking escape,sleeping or . . . . Well, there were certain daysbetween ports—that’s right—where we hada little space, a little time, and I wrote these,say, probably between Skagway and Kotzebueor something, two or three days. Anyway,that’s one of the things that was goingthrough my head at the time, among some ofthese other things.

What did your shipmates think you were doing?

I never had a problem of being lookedupon as peculiar because I wrote. There wereothers who had kept diaries. There were guyswho weren’t necessarily seamen, who had

379A LITERARY LIFE

come to sea during the war, who had inter-ests. One or two were teachers, I remember,and one was a lawyer on a ship that I was on.And these guys, you know, talked a little dif-ferent from the old-timers or the kids thatcame off the waterfront. And on the shippeople begin to sort of homogenize. [laugh-ter] There’s a lot of sort of acceptance andtolerance.

Also, in this case—not always, but in thiscase—I was ship’s delegate. And I could spenda lot of time at my typewriter, and was con-sidered as doing ship’s business. I was a “sealawyer” under those conditions; ship’s dele-gates were really called “sea lawyers.”Sometimes that was an epithet—you know,“goddamned sea lawyer.” But no, I had noproblem with that. It was sort of accepted thatI had gone to school and was interested inthese things. And I didn’t talk about it toomuch. I hardly ever talked about these inter-ests. But it would creep out.

Did any of those men who had originally relatedthe story that inspired “Deep Six for Danny,” doyou think any of them ever read your story? Didyou send it to any of them?

One did. Trot Ikenson, whom Kathy andI kept up with for a few years after this point.He had read it, and he said, “Wow, Whitey!That’s a hell of a story!” you know. [laughter]And I think a lot of it he might have missed,because it had a kind of a rhythmic, poeticstyle to it. And it was somewhat analyticaland philosophical. But he wasn’t dumb; hewas a bright guy.

But you were really writing, you think, that storyfor an audience that never would have person-ally experienced the world you were describing.

No, my audience was this avant-gardeworld, I mean, the world of artists and writ-ers of that kind that I knew and was reading.At the same time I thought it was bigger thanthat audience. You know, you always do. Youthink it’s for the world, for the universe![laughter]

I just wanted to clarify for myself, that earlieryou had mentioned this ambivalence and con-flict about your leanings and interest in humanismversus metaphysics, having a social conscience.

Secular humanism, yes.

I just wanted to make sure that I understood thatthere’s something potentially mutually exclusiveabout being a humanist and indulging in meta-physics, or . . . ?

Well, usually. Usually, you think ofhumanists—secular humanists—because thatimplies they have separated from formalreligion. Usually that is associated with ascientific, rationalistic approach to theworld—usually. It doesn’t have to be. Thereare a lot of humanists who are also very mys-tical. And that metaphysics in the ordinarysense of the word is placed in opposition tohumanism, to secular humanism. Metaphys-ics can be thought of as humanistic,depending on its content, but it’s usuallythought of as detached from worldly con-cerns. Philosophically detached.

Kind of self-involved. I mean, self and universeor . . . .

Either self-involved, or involved in otherplanes of experience, idealism, et cetera. Atleast that was the way we thought of it.


So sort of a disconnect from the everyday prob-lems.

However, my struggle at that time, wasthat they were linked in my mind. I was ahumanist; I was a developing a social con-sciousness; I was beginning to be politicallyaware about forces, political forces in theworld and the war; I was cynical about thecauses of the war; I was cynical about the

orientation of many of the politicians in myown country. I had, you know, what at thattime would be considered, a dissidentapproach to politics. [laughter] Ship’s com-panies, officers, and the government were allthe establishment, lumped together as thekind of authority that I was opposed to. Andit wasn’t very clear. I certainly didn’t have itvery clearly worked out, as I’m sure has comeout, by what I’ve just said. [laughter]

44A FAMILY MAN

URING THAT month or two ashore,Kathy and I were learning to beparents and feeling . . . “My gosh,

spiritually, a Christian—just felt that therewas this great gap between them, which Iguess there was. And what kind of environ-ment was our little daughter going to growup in? All that sort of thing. But my mother,I must say for her when I look back—not atthe time, because I understood what shemeant when she said things indirectly—shewas very, very controlled about this, and shewas being as nice as she could. But she washurt, deeply hurt, and troubled, you know.But I knew that was going to happen, andKathy and I made the best of it, and I thinkKathy handled herself beautifully.

And with her folks . . . her old father,this poor, old working man, Jim Addison,whom I really liked, had worked hard all hislife, you know—foundries and then at thatpoint in his life, he was working as an engi-neer in a hospital. A no-nonsense, old Scot.He would look at me, you know, like, “Whois this gazoony coming in?” I felt I was beinglooked at by an old seaman, really. [laughter]And I respected him; I liked him. And even-tually he got to like me.

Dhere we are.”

Did you see your parents during this time to showthe baby off?

Yes. Yes, we took a trip up to Modesto.And my mother was absolutely delighted, andmy father was, I think, delighted. And theywere getting over their peeves about us, aboutwhat we’d done. And I think Kathy had . . .well, not at that point—a little later—begunto make peace with my mother. Never fully,because in that family people were never fullyaccepted unless they were practically bornagain and crawling on their hands and knees,you know, to the nearest church. [laughter]And Kathy was not that, but that would notbe a very good picture of her way of behav-ing. She just was non-religious and came froma non-religious family; highly moral, highlyconscious of problems in the world and allthat, but not religious. And my mother, whowas not a fundamentalist—she was I’d say,


Kathy’s mother was very, very wary ofwhat her daughter had gotten herself into.“This guy, you know, going to sea? What thehell is he going to do in life? And he’s got allthese dreams about all these impossible endsand goals.” And they, of course, had the sameworries I had about me! [laughter] Only I hada slightly different take on them.

Anyway, that was going on. And then mygrandmother—my father’s mother, Amaliad’Azevedo—she had had to give up her oldhouse on Lake Merritt that she had lived inbecause she was impoverished. She had spenteverything, sold everything, and it was not agood time. Her husband had died—my grand-father—and my father practically supportedher at that point. He was just beginning tomake enough in his practice where he coulddo this. He had had a very hard time duringthe Depression years, earlier. People justdidn’t make anything, and he was makingmostly handouts in food from his patients.But, anyway, he began to have a practice, andhe supported her to some degree.

Anyway, she had to move out of that greatplace, that grand house, as she saw it—and itwas in its day—now torn down for an apart-ment house on Lake Merritt. But she had tomove to a little apartment in Alameda of allplaces. So there she was in Alameda, and Iwould visit her. And there is where I did alot of talking about the genealogy and thepast of her family and her very dramatic,almost operatic view of her own life and theworld she’d come from—the Azores and hergreat family and her relationship with closerelatives like Cardinal Nunes of Macau inChina. What was his position? Somethingor other of the Indies, a pontiff of some kind.And we would talk about that, and she’d haveall the old pictures on the wall; she still hadher old phonograph with all her operaticvinyl records.

And there she reminded me of a story thatI had forgotten about. When I was a kid inhigh school, I had written a story for one ofmy classes about my great-grandfather beingshipwrecked in the South Seas, on this wildstory she had told me. I have no idea if it’strue or not, but I remember it had a greatimpact on me: how he was shipwrecked, andthe chief of the tribe on one of these littleislands had taken a fancy to him and wantedhim to be his son-in-law and marry his daugh-ter. This is such a classic tale. I think she madeit up, but who knows? She said, “It happenedto Joaquim. This is the way he was. He was apirate! He was no good. And this is whathappened to him.” And somehow he got outof this; he had to go with this woman, but hewas rescued in some way.

It was a fantastic and wonderful tale! Iwrote it all up, and I have up at the top of it:“This is a true story of Joaquim, my great-grandfather, told to me by my grandmother,Amalia d’Azevedo.” And it’s wild and woollyand I think mostly fiction. But she was greatat that. She knew what I wanted to hear. SoI remember her telling me about this again,about, oh, I was going the way of Joaquim. Iwas going the way of my grandfather.

This must have pleased you a great deal![laughter]

Well, I was partly pleased, but also wor-ried about what happened to that old guy,you know! [laughter] Well, he did all right.He came to California and had farms andopened a winery and all that sort of thing.

But, anyway, that was going on about thesame time my aunt . . . I had two, youngaunts who were only about a year or two olderthan my brother and myself. We used to playtogether. One aunt had been committed. Shehad become very strange, and she was in a

383A FAMILY MAN

convent. She had been an extremely beauti-ful Portuguese girl, and very regal anddignified.

Now was this your father’s sister?

His younger sister and my aunt. He hadtwo brothers and two sisters.

And so she had been—I’m not quite clearon it—partly committed at some point, thenhad gone to a nunnery where she’d be takencare of. And she came to visit us. I mean, allthis was going on in this interim period whenI was trying to figure out my life. And shewas dressed in a severe, black dress, almost asthough she were going to a funeral—ratherstylish, with a black veil on a funny, little,black hat. And she came to visit us, and shecame in the house and sat. She didn’t havemuch to say. And I tried to carry on a con-versation with her, and she would say “yes”and “no” and all that, and then she wentaway. And then we learned that she was areal problem at the convent—I don’t thinkshe was a nun; she was being cared for bythem. She would get into cars; when she’dsee some man in a car, she’d open the door,and just sit there like she did at our house—just wait to be taken away someplace. So itwas a real problem for the convent. [laugh-ter]

But aside from that aspect of the story, Ihad this tremendous sense of the decline ofthe dynasty, of the world—the end of anera—through them. And seeing my aunt,who was practically a peer, and my grand-mother in her decline but still being the grandlady, and kind of proud of her in a way forbeing able to put on the show that she did.She always dressed finely, sitting in this sortof drab apartment that she had. And shealways treated you in a grand manner andalways had a little glass of wine and things of

that kind or coffee, and would talk about thepast.

So a sense of the end of an era was there,too—a feeling that things were declining.And my grandparents on my mother’s sidewere getting old and ill. My admiration forthem had been great, and here they weregoing, too. And my mother was becomingill, but not at that point seriously; later on itwas cancer, and she died I guess ten, fifteenyears later. But all this was sort of portentousat that time.

And, also, things were happening on thewaterfront. There was a lot of labor negotia-tion, particularly the longshoremen. HarryBridges [a labor activist and president of theILWU for forty years] was being attacked, andI was very positive about him as a great fig-ure, and irate at what was happening to him.But I also admired the ILWU for what it haddone as a trade union. And the CaliforniaLabor School, which I’d visit occasionallyand would take part in some of the thingsthat were going on.

So all this was happening. I mean this wasmuddy water, a period of shining, muddywater. That’s all I can say.

Shining! [laughter]

Well, it was shining in a way, because itwas also extremely promising.

Well, it really sounds like no matter where youturned, it was just shifting sand.

Well, it’s the time, you know. When wasthe war going to end? We were winning thewar; I think, by that time, I guess we weregetting into Europe. I think France had beenliberated, and the Soviets had, I think, prettywell broken the Stalingrad barrier and werecoming down. The Japanese area of control


had slowly diminished in the Pacific. And Ithink we had by that time gotten into thePhilippines. Most of those battles had beensuccessful. They were out of the Aleutians; Iknew that because I had been there.

And was the fearfulness of them actually beingoff the coast of California kind of diminished?

Oh, well, yes, because by that time theJapanese were no longer a threat directly inthe country. Though there was that strangeperiod of the balloons. I recall that theJapanese were sending up balloons with littlebombs on them.

I remember that being in the press, but Idon’t remember exactly when that happened.[From November 1944-April 1955, theJapanese launched some 9000 balloons armedwith incendiary bombs taking advantage ofthe jet stream. Several made landfall andcaused forest fires in the Pacific Northwestand Canada.] But that kind of fear and hys-teria, was as I remember, no longer there.There was the feeling that the war was beingwon slowly and arduously.

Did you know anything about the GI Bill at thistime?

No. And I don’t know if it was beingtalked about. It might have been talked aboutin Washington, but I think it was 1945 and1946 that that was happening. I don’t know.

The merchant seamen thought they weregoing to be part of it at that point, becauseRoosevelt you know, had the idea that every-body was taking part in the war. And, mygod, I even got a little certificate fromFranklin Roosevelt, thanking me for my ser-vice to the country in the war effort and allthat. That was the period when the merchant

marine—six thousand men—were consid-ered part of the armed services. Otherwise, Iwould have been in the army, because goingto sea was alternate service. But I don’t re-member us thinking too much about thatuntil later. That became the real issue in 1945and 1946 when the war was over, and wefound that we were not going to be included.I remember that very clearly. Earlier I’m notsure that I or others followed the GI Bill orthe merchant Seaman’s Bill of Rights thingthat was being pressed by some union, I thinkprobably the ILWU . . . NMU, I think.

Well, one of the interesting things about thatpolitical battle over the GI Bill was that it almostdidn’t pass because of strong opposition from thesouthern contingent, because they didn’t wantthe blacks that were coming home to be educated.

Oh, yes.

And they could speak about it like that, thatopenly.

But that issue entered my consciousnessa little later. I mean, the whole issue of whythe merchant seamen were not included hadcertainly to do with desegregation on NMUships, and the fact that the merchant seamenwere considered to be “reds,” those in theNational Maritime Union that I was part of.But that was later. Now, if this discussion wasgoing on earlier in the press I wasn’t aware ofit.

Well, apparently the president of Harvard andthe president of the University of Chicago hadtried to keep the college portion in the GI Bill outof the bill from the get go, because they said itwas going to ruin education to have all this riff-raff coming to school.

385A FAMILY MAN

Oh, that’s fascinating. You know, I mayhave been aware of it at the time, but I can’trecollect now. I think you’re aware that sit-ting here and putting together the past is anexperience that I have not had before, andit’s a very interesting one. There are all kindsof things that I’m sure I knew about, but Idon’t recall knowing about them, you know.There were other things that were foremostin my mind—like my Aunt Alice—I mean,what relevance does that have to anything?I don’t know, except that it had a great im-pression on me, how people that you knewas children and . . . is this what they’ve cometo? I don’t know, I had a sense of a kind ofdoom, and in the war itself. I had two viewsof the war: one, the fight against fascism andthe new world to come.

Some of the socialist reading that I wasdoing was about a new world and a new orderof things and how all this was progress. Thenthere was another side of me and in the read-ing I was doing, the feeling that this was thedecay, the degeneration of Western civiliza-tion, the Tolstoyesque kind of view of theworld, [laughter] you know, that corruptionwas rampant, and people were being led byJudas goats—you know, like goats to slaugh-ter—that human beings were going down thedrain.

Which was part of your objection to occultism,too, wasn’t it?

In what sense?

Of people being led by . . . .

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I couldn’t stand the ideaof gurus, although I was interested in somespecial people, like earlier, Ashokananda hadimpressed me because he was a very smartman. And I don’t know, there is something

about his kind of spiritual view that I foundcongenial and all that. But in general, theidea of gurus and swamis and great leaders ofthe masses was something I was very, veryleery of. And later on, I had that problemabout the development of charismatic polit-ical leaders in the so-called socialist world,in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe,and later in China.

My attitude was the same toward charis-matic figures in religion and fundamentalistsects, in occult sects. I was not only suspi-cious, but there was always an element ofrepugnance in my feelings about that kind ofperson, being adored and unquestionably fol-lowed. I always had that.

And I suppose, underneath all of thisemotional and intellectual struggle, I wasalways a kind of positivist and rationalist.And that probably came from my early lifewith my family who were very, very straight-forward, rationalist people—practical,pragmatic people in a way. Despite their reli-gious orientation, they were basicallypractical, especially my grandparents on mymother’s side—thoroughly pragmatic people;farmers and peasants, who worked hard alltheir lives. Yet, they saw the world, on theone hand, mystically. They believed in allsorts of strange supernatural events andthings. At the same time, except for the timethey knew how to get along in the world asit was, and they often were very, very shrewdand aware about what people really were.They saw through a lot of the tomfoolery andelaboration that people would present tothem, except if it was in the words of God—if a person claimed that they were the voiceof God, they were easily fall guys. But evenafter my grandfather went to the top of thehill, he went on; afterwards, he came back,and things went on.


And that was part of my reaction, repug-nance—that they so willingly would go alongwith that. However, they were terribly alertand clear about everybody else. They couldpeg people very quickly as phonies and thisand that, but not when it came to their reli-gious experience. So those things were alwaysaffective to me.

And my father, who was a physician, onepart of him was always very rationalistic, posi-tivistic, based on all of his discourses, basedon reason. And I disagreed with him fre-quently, and I thought he was a stuffed shirtoften, the way he would talk and his assur-ances about rationalism and all that.Nevertheless, those things stuck with me,that kind of orientation to the world.

And then later on, the kinds of readingthat I did, certainly the anti-religious work,the atheistic work, was to me highly ratio-nalistic. And, you know, I think I would havebeen a great contributor to the SkepticalInquirer, the magazine that exists now, whenI was a kid, because I was always debunkingthings. I felt there was an awful lot of bullshitgoing on in the religious world, in the press,and in relations between people. I never hadsupernatural views—maybe a few times whenI was very young, a belief of odd and strangeand peculiar phenomena having meaningsthat were highly mystical, spiritual. But mostof the time I wasn’t. I think I would say nowI’m proud to be a positivist, you know, eventhough that’s a bad word these days. [laughter]

A book title. [laughter]

You know, that “Okie from Muskogee.”[laughter] But by positivist, I don’t mean any-thing very elaborate or fancy—just that I dothink that evidence is what is testable data.Testable data that can be shown by a greatdeal of arduous investigation was the way to

go, rather than simple belief. Though I had alot of beliefs, and always have had, that couldbe considered spiritual and mystical, they inno way impinge upon my feeling that thebasic course is a rational and positivist one.

The mystical, that’s really sort of thedecoration on the cake to me. I enjoy sci-ence fiction; I enjoy mystical fantasy. I thinkit’s part of the theater of life. I enjoy whenI’m dealing with this as part of fieldwork. Ican empathize with the views of the peopleI’m talking to, even though I don’t hold them.I can even feel emotionally about them, be-cause I can see what it means to the otherperson.

Like with my grandparents. I sometimesfelt they were absolutely stark-raving mad.At the same time, they were my grandpar-ents, and I loved them. And I listened tothem talk about things that were, you know,way out. I would feel about how wonderful itis for them, you know; [laughter] what joy itgives them. And to try to debunk them I feltwould have been a terrible disservice. Theirlife depended upon these fantasies. And someof the fantasies were remarkably beautiful, Imean just tremendously moving. I remem-ber even as a young kid, thinking, “I don’twant to spoil that for them.” Like the time Itold my grandmother, “Grandma, you weren’tsitting on Jesus’s lap. You were right theresleeping. You were dreaming.” And I remem-bered that mainly because I felt badly thatshe had reacted the way she had, and Ithought that, you know, what I had said hadhurt her, you know. And I thought, “Whatright did I have to do that?”

Later on in my life, I used that as a . . . infact, I’ve used that in classes at times—abouthow you can have empathy without belief.You can have tremendous feeling ofsympathy, of accommodation, empathy,understanding of somebody else’s views with-

387A FAMILY MAN

out believing at all. Just like, you know, myfavorite phrase: I’m not a believer in gods,but I certainly am a great respecter of them.

So, anyway, all this was stewing between theYPO and the Castle Pinkney, which wehaven’t even reached yet.

45THE SS CASTLE PINKNEY

HE SS CASTLE PINKNEY was atanker out of San Francisco. And Ihad to take her. It was December of

That was a trip we made to Darwin innorthern Australia, and we took a load ofgasoline. It was a terrible trip in that way,because that was real scary. Even a spark couldhave blown us up, but on top of that, a subwould have made a marvelous fireball out ofus. We had no convoy or anything—justfloating down there across the equator, zerolongitude, and over the international dateline again. It was one of those trips that wasdéjà vu. It was a long trip, because we wentwithout stopping all the way to Australia.And that was a wild trip, because Darwin wasa terribly wild port at that time. Very provin-cial, that was my impression of it as kind oflike the “Wild West.” Everybody got drunk,and everybody ran around the streets.

It was a wild port to stop at. And again Ipicked up some parakeets, like the early tripI made. Well, I got two more. I had namesfor them from some eighteenth century lit-erature. Anyway, I had these two parakeets,and most of the crew got pets. It was a wildtrip. They had parrots; there were a coupleof dogs—mangy curs from the streets ofDarwin. Someone had some kind of a small

T1944, after this relatively long shore leave inwhich all these wonderful things were hap-pening to us, and at the same time, all thiswild stuff was going on in my head.

My friend Bob Nelson and I had talkedabout having a fishing boat, and later on wetried to do this, but I was thinking, “Gee, if Icould only get a fishing boat and go fishingnow, but how could I do that and carry outmy draft obligations?” And everything wasmixed up. Marvelous potpourri: spendingtime in San Francisco Labor School, talkingto people. I also had this whole other wave,a feeling of commitment to labor and to pro-gressive movements and things of that kind.

So then I had to take another ship, andit turned out to be the SS Castle Pinkney, arelatively new tanker. And we headed off nowacross the Pacific again. And we didn’t knowexactly where, but we figured, and we wereright, that it was going to be Australia again.And that was quite a trip. It was Deacon Hillshipping company, as I remember now.


marmoset-like animal. I mean, strange littleanimals running around the ship. And thenthere was a kitten that somebody had pickedin a whorehouse. [laughter] It was a sick,little, scrawny kitten that finally got someweight on and grew during the trip.

Eating parakeets. [laughter]

Yes. [laughter] As usual, one parakeet flewout the porthole. That was the male—flewout the porthole and was obviously consumedby the sea. I used to have them sitting on theventilator lids—large, round, metal lids—andthey would swing back and forth.

And I had the porthole open one day, andwhatever his name was—Paolo, I think hewas. [laughter] It comes back to me. Paoloand Francesca [laughter]—two tragic figuresin literature. Paolo flew out and hit the waves,and Francesca lasted a few days longer andprobably died because of sorrow over Paolo,but actually from the fumes. Because comingback, we had to ventilate the tanks. Tankersare awful in those conditions. I mean, if thewind is wrong, you’re practically knocked outby the continual fumes. I don’t know howany of us survived, because, you know, if “thecanaries” died, well, I would expect the wholecrew to have been sick and die. People didget sick. But certainly, Francesca got sick, andshe just keeled over and died. So that wasthe end of that.

But that was a sort of uneventful trip. Itwas an interesting crew, I remember. Therewas two guys, college boys, very bright, youngguys. One had been to UCLA, and the otherwas from some other university. And we usedto have long conversations. It was a kind ofpleasure to do that. But they were kind oflazy guys, and I had to stay away from them,because, as delegate, I had to keep clear ofthe guys who weren’t doing their part.

Although I used to enjoy them. We’d sitaround talking whenever we could. But theywere just poor seamen and real lubbers andgazoonies. But it was a thoroughly interest-ing crew and good trip.

We had, though, a crazy captain. I don’tknow why—maybe it’s my bias—I keep talk-ing about crazy captains. We had a couple ofgood ones. The first one I had, I told youabout, was Roogenes [of the Bret Harte], awonderful, old man. And there were a fewothers who were nice, old seamen who didtheir jobs well and who kept away from thecrew and let their mates handle things andwho were usually extremely good at finalnegotiations with the crew if it came to that.And there were some mates who also weregood guys. But I also had a couple of realcorkers, and Captain Stuart was one of themon this trip.

He was a wiry, little, neurotic guy. Andhe would bark orders, not only to his mates,but sometimes go over his mates heads, barkat the crew. And you just don’t do that. Cap-tains aren’t supposed to do that. Skippersdon’t deal directly with the men. They do itthrough their mates or the bosuns. And hejust ignored all these things—always runningaround giving orders and telling people to dothis and that and the other thing. So wedeveloped a kind of a deep sense of animos-ity towards Skipper Stuart. [laughter]

And the chief mate was a guy that Ideveloped a strong feeling of animosity to,because he was two-faced. He would tell usone thing and then tell the captain another.And he was anti-union. I remember havinglong conversations. I’d go up with him to takethe overtime records and the beefs to him,and we’d sit around for two or three hours.He was very congenial in a conversation, andwe would sit and chat.


I would think Captain Stuart was one ofthe most peculiar and remarkably offbeatskippers that I can remember—aside fromthat wonderful guy on the YPO who gotdrunk with the mayor of a small village, theEskimo mayor. And they were chasing eachother around, as I told you, with walrus spears,very drunk. And the mayor had to be takenoff in a cargo sling and put into his little skinboat and sent back to shore. That was a won-derful thing. I mean, that captain was a lotof fun. He was entertainment. And was drunkmost of the time, so the mates had to takeover. But, anyway, he was an enjoyable fig-ure, and he was a great raconteur wheneverwe’d hear him, he was full of stories. Andthen when he was drunk, he was quiet in hisbunk. [laughter]

But Captain Stuart was another kettle offish. I don’t know about his background, re-ally, excepting there were rumors that he hadbeen in the navy when he was younger, andhe had had some kind of position in a busi-ness during the years ashore and had finallyvolunteered to go into the merchant marineduring the war, in which they were takingalmost anybody who could stand up and whohad certificates. But, anyway, he was a realproblem.

I remember coming back from Australia,through that long stretch across the Pacific,when the tanks that had carried gasoline onour outgoing voyage were now empty and hadto be opened whenever the weather permit-ted to air them out. And the stench, thefumes from the tanks were sometimes over-powering. If there wasn’t enough breeze forthe ventilators to clear the tanks and carrythe fumes away, they just accumulated on theship and in our fo’c’s’les and in the mess roomsand all through the passageways.

And this of course, is what had killed mylittle parakeets on two voyages, and I should

know better. After all, we do have the storiesabout the use of canaries in mines as a warn-ing for fumes. But here we were on this ship,sometimes locked up in hot weather duringthe war, with portholes down sometimes,particularly during the night, breathing theseheavy fumes.

I’m very lucky; I don’t think that I hadany effects from that. But I wonder how manyof those crews, after a number of voyages ofthat kind, what kind of trouble they may havehad later in their lives. No one seemed to beparticularly concerned about it. We didn’tlike it; we complained about it. But obviouslythe companies and obviously the War Ship-ping Administration and obviously theofficers didn’t think it was anything morethan a normal set of circumstances.

But the thing that really got to us, as Iremember, was about halfway across, after wecrossed the equator going north and wereheading, we found out, toward Panama—theship was going to go around Panama to NewYork, where we would be discharged—thatthe captain ordered the mates to send us intothe tanks to clean them. He wanted cleantanks, he said, when he got back to homeport. And those tanks were a mess. In thefirst place, the fumes were so strong that wewould put wet rags around our faces so thatwe could breathe a little bit. And every timewe went up on deck, we would dip them intobuckets and wring them out and put themback on again. And those were our gas mask.

And we would go down with copper scup-pers and hammers; all the tools we had, hadto be copper . . . .

What are scuppers?

They’re like little shovels. I even haveone to this day. I took as a souvenir off thatship. The hammers and chisels had to be


copper to diminish the possibility of sparks.One spark, of course, could blow the wholeship to bits.

And so, you know, a whole watch wouldgo down there, sometimes extra men onwatch on overtime. We’d go down to cleanout the tanks. And we had to use the chiselsand the hammers to break up the rust on theside of the tanks, and that rust would fall tothe bottom in a kind of sludge that accumu-lated at the bottom with water and gasoline,and lord knows what else. And all this rustwas sometimes, I think, six inches deep atthe bottom of the tanks. And we’d be usingthese little shovels and filling copper bucketsfull of this debris. And we could only reallywork for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time.We had to go up and breathe, because you’dget dizzy. [laughter] We were all drunk! Wejust were all gassed up!

This went on for two or three days at atime, as I remember. And I’d be sent up bythe crew, and sometimes go on my own, tothe mate, first through the bosun, to negoti-ate. And the bosun would say, “I can’t doanything about it. The skipper has orderedit.” We didn’t say we shouldn’t clean out thetanks. I remember the beef that we hadwas . . . that it should be spaced more, weshould be down there only fifteen minutesor twenty minutes, and then come up foranother fifteen or twenty minutes to get backin shape, and also that we should wait forreally good weather, so the tanks could beopen before we went into them and be thor-oughly ventilated if possible.

The skipper would have none of this. Thetanks had to be cleaned, and he’d . . . “Youguys get down there,” and sent word to themate that anybody who refused to go downor to do their duty would be logged.

Logging merely meant you were put downin the captain’s log book and when you got

into port, this would be taken into court—acoastguard court in this case—and you mightbe charged and fined or have your paperstaken away. You were logged for disobeying alawful order. And that was wartime, and cap-tains had almost total power.

Was this a coastguard boat? Was that why you’dbe before the coastguard . . . ?

No, no. But the coastguard were the war-time regulators of the merchant marine.There was a merchant marine law that I thinkhad been passed in 1940 or 1941 that hadsomewhat clarified the relationship of crewsto officers and the ships’ owners, the compa-nies. Before that, the unions had done a greatjob during the 1930s in relaxing some of thevery stringent kinds of laws that restrictedseamen’s rights aboard ships. Early in thetwentieth century the conditions aboardships were terrible. Seamen had no rights, andthe possibility of suing companies for yourdisabilities or for disobeying orders becausethey were absolutely ridiculous in some cases,was impossible for a seaman to do. But dur-ing the war there was some relaxation of thesereforms, and the captain at sea had totalauthority.

And I would say that the skipper, Stuart,took this to the extreme. He was a neuroticdespot. And he would never go back on oneof his orders, and this was . . . “That’s theway it was, and don’t you guys disobey. Thisis wartime, and I am the master of this ship.”I remember hearing that time and time againfrom him. “I am the master of this ship. Getback and tell those guys to get to work!”

So this went on for a couple weeks or so,I think, all the way across the Pacific. And Iwould say most of the deck gang was reallysick, and also the engine crew and thesteward’s department—all these guys were


affected by these fumes. Now, there wasn’tanything to do about a lot of this. The shiphad to be battened down at night and theportholes closed, and nobody had any con-trol over the weather. If there was no breeze,the fumes would accumulate. Nevertheless,there was every reason why the schedule ofwork should have been changed or relaxed.And so that’s the kind of beefs that I wouldtake to the mate.

Oh, there were many others, too. Thecaptain was one of these strange guys whowould walk around on deck and into thecrew’s quarters and check things out, asthough he was in the army or the navy.There’s nothing that gets a merchantseaman’s gall more than having somebodyplaying navy with them. [laughter] And that’swhy I think he had been early in his life inthe navy, because his idea was his job was tokeep order everywhere. And I had never seena captain walk through crew’s quarters. Thiswas a new one on me. Opening fo’c’s’le doors,making all kinds of remarks about the condi-tion of the fo’c’s’les and, “Why haven’t youmade up your bunk?” And we didn’t have tomake up our bunks. We were merchant sea-men. We could do as we pleased with ourfo’c’s’les!

And this was a big joke. “The captainwants our bunks made up. And why don’twe have maids aboard the ship?” and thingsof that kind. Nevertheless, most merchantseamen keep their fo’c’s’les very clean and invery good shape. But if you’re working hardand you’re rushing from one job to anotherthen go on a watch, you don’t always havetime to make up your bunk, for gosh sakes!But he would come in, anything laying ondeck, he would demand it be picked up. Andof course, we hated him. We got to the pointwhere just the sight of him would make uslivid. And this affected me, and I think I be-

came really compulsively antagonized by thatlittle man. And here I was the delegate, andI was supposed to be very careful and judi-cious and then take complaints to the officersand negotiate. But it was impossible with thisguy.

The chief mate I could talk to, but I didn’ttrust him. Nevertheless, we had long talks,as I’ve already said. And he’d always comeback to how the unions had interfered withthe development of the shipping industry,and that things would be much better if ithad not been for the unions interfering.“Look at the kind of gazoonies coming aboardships now! You got everybody . . . .”

And I would say, “Well, it’s wartime.[laughter] Even the army and the navy takeanybody they could get these days, you know.What’s the complaint?”

“Oh,” he says, “yes, but none of these guysare seamen; they don’t know what they’redoing; they got none of the tradition of thesea in their hearts.”

And I would look at him and think,“Well, buddy, you certainly do have . . . .”Also, he drank heavily, which was OK, hedid his job.

Nevertheless, he would agree with me onmany of the issues that I’d bring before himfor the crew. He’d take them to the captain,and I learned that he’d take the exactly oppo-site position, you know. “These guys are justasking for too much. They’re looking fortrouble, and that delegate, he must be a damncommie. He’s a college boy; he’s doneevery . . . ,” you know, “he’s got all kinds ofbig ideas about how things should be. Andhe’s a troublemaker.”

And so I became the troublemaker in thecaptain’s mind; I was the guy causing thetrouble, when, really, I was representing thecrew. And I may not have done it well, be-cause I tended to shoot my mouth off a lot.


When I thought I was right, I would put up apretty good front.

Did you ever win any concessions at all thatwould have encouraged you?

Not on that ship. But, oh, many timeson a good ship. My relations as delegate withthe chief mate and the skipper on this par-ticular ship was rather unusual. It was just asthough you had, beyond the chief mate, atotally, immitigable situation.

I think that most of the mates—the chief,or first mate, and the second and thirdmates—really feared him. I don’t think theyrespected him, but I think they feared hisactions, what he might do at any given point.And he did have the power also to log them.

And so the first mate was really an ex-pert two-faced guy. He would talk veryreasonably with me and take a beef seriouslythat I would present to him—for example,this one about the deck gang being able toget some relief from the fumes when theywere working below decks. And then hewould come to me and say that the captainwould say no. But actually then I would learnthat he had told the captain that we were adissident group led by a Portugee college boy,a loud-mouth guy named Daz, [laughter] andthat I was a troublemaker. And yet to me, hewas always very reasonable and even veryfriendly. And it took me quite a while on thattrip to learn the dynamics of that situationon the bridge.

You asked about the tanks. There werefive or six tanks on this vessel, in the placeof holds. Rather than holds for cargo you hadtanks for fuel. And they were fairly large. Ivaguely remember they were maybe fifteen,twenty feet deep. You climbed down laddersto the bottom, and they were maybe fifteenor twenty feet across.

One of the procedures was that whenthey’re empty, and that had happened earlyin the trip, they got “steamed.” Steam wassent into the tanks to loosen some of the re-maining gas and sludge on the sides of thetanks. And all this would go down to thebottom, mixed with gas and sea water andwhatever, and so it was a very difficult situ-ation to work in.

We were miserable! We’d come out of thetanks after three or four hours, only gettingup for a breath of air every now and then.Not only feeling fatigue, but sick to our stom-achs. Guys would vomit. Along with thesludge at the bottom would be vomit and thesmell of vomit, steam, rust, and gas. And itwas quite terrible. It was one of the worst situ-ations I remember at sea, including, youknow, the endless hours of humping coal onthe Alaska run. In fact, I yearned for theAlaska run on this particular trip.

And, by the way, the temperatures werewell above a hundred down near those tanks,because we were in hot tropical weather withvery little breeze for long periods of time. AndI remember, we would practically yearn for,call for a storm that would relieve us of thejob for a while and might clear the air.

So, anyway, this was one of the majorbeefs. There were other things. The food wasterrible. In fact, the food smelled of gas![laughter] Everything, everything was perme-ated by this strong, nauseous blast of gas fumesthat sometimes would be insufferable. I re-member we’d open up our hatches at nightsometimes when we weren’t supposed to,because we couldn’t bear it. We would openup our portholes in our fo’c’s’les to let thebreeze come in. And that was against the law,and we could have been logged for that.There were times when you could do it, butother times when you couldn’t. And therewe were out in the middle of the Pacific, in


wartime, alone, with this mad skipper and avery disgruntled crew.

Another thing that was beginning toaffect my thinking a lot were the engine gang,who were members of the CIO union. Theywere organizing ashore, along with theNational Maritime Union, which was theother seamen’s union. They were very mili-tant unions. And they had literature aboardthe ships. And I remember I read a lot of theNational Maritime Union and Marine Fire-men, Boilers, and Water Tenders Unionliterature aboard ship, which was very mili-tant, trade union literature.

Some of these guys—the delegates foreach of these other gangs—would come tome and say, “What are you guys putting upwith? You know, your damn union, you guysnever fight for anything. You never join withus on anything. And there’s going to be a bigstrike after the war, and you guys are going tobe left out,” and all that sort of thing. Therewas a great deal of trade union talk in themess rooms and in the fo’c’s’les with theseother guys.

Now, why was there going to be a big strike afterthe war?

Because everybody knew, already therewere portents of this in Congress, as soon asthe selective service was over, the ship own-ers were going to be free to negotiate the kindof wages and the kind of working conditionsthey wanted; and they were very upset witheven the lousy conditions we had at sea dur-ing that time. I mean, my god, when you hadto put a man ashore because he was sick andgive him four dollars a day, this was just toomuch. And the wages were too high. We weregetting something like thirty-five cents anhour average over time. And, also, the shipowners were not able at that time to press

the kind of interest they had freely, becauseduring the war you had War ShippingAdministration intermediaries. So everybodyexpected the ship owners to press for changesthey wanted, and for the unions to respond.At the end of the war the trade unions, par-ticularly CIO seagoing unions, were going tostrike.

CIO stands for what?

Congress of Industrial Organization. Mostof the other unions now belonged to the CIO,but the Seamen’s Union of the Pacific wewere AF of L. And we were considered a veryconservative and reactionary union by someof the more militant members of the otherunions. So we would hear a lot of this.

And, of course, there were three or fourother members of the crew who were also veryaffected by this, and we felt that our unionwasn’t really defending us to the degree whichthey should have. So, I was ship’s delegate—that is, delegate for the whole ship. I wasbeing urged by these other delegates. Youknow, “For Christ’s sake, are you going to letthis captain do this to you guys? I mean, thesefumes are making everybody sick. Do some-thing about it!”

So I felt that I had an obligation to pressthese things very strongly with the chiefmate: “Look, we’re just not going to do it.We’re going to make our own organizationdown there. We’re going to send guys up.”On each watch, there would be usually oneguy at the wheel and two guys in the tank,then guys on overtime—additional guys toget the thing done in a hurry from otherwatches.

We were always arguing about over-time—how much overtime they should getfor what they were doing. When I said,“We’re going to just organize this so that every


fifteen minutes one of the guys can go up andstay up and get some air, good air, for at leastten or fifteen minutes and then go back down,and somebody else come up.”

The mate would say, “Well, the captain’sgoing to say that you’re not going to get over-time when you’re up on deck. I mean, there’sno overtime for that.” You know, these littlepip-squeak kinds of arguments that would goon.

And we’d say, “Look. The guy’s on watch.This relief time should be built in. These guysare going to get real sick, and some of themalready are. Some of them are in their bunks.”In fact, two guys couldn’t turn out. They werecoughing and spewing and vomiting, and soothers had to be taken out on overtime,brought out on overtime.

This was considered terrible up on thebridge. I mean, “My god, look at the moneywe’re putting out to get this thing cleanedup.”

And the captain was in a state of frenzy,and he would shout from the bridge, youknow. “Hey, you lazy bastards, you get off yourasses and get those tanks clean, or you’re allgoing to get logged when we get into port!”[laughter] He was crazy! We got so we justexpected total madness from him wheneverhe spoke. I mean, it was incomprehensible.He would sometimes rattle on and scream,yell, sometimes just to nobody, from one ofthe wings of the bridge.

So this went on for two or three weeks,and I was feeling I was getting into a real bind,because nothing could happen. I couldn’treally force anything to happen. And thecrew, even though most of them were withme—I would say most of them, you know,were urging me to do this—there were alwayssome guys you called phonies, who were al-ways saying, “Aw, forget it, you know. Whatare you guys making such a fuss about?

Haven’t you ever been on a ship like thisbefore? Just do your job and shut up! Just goup and get your air; don’t argue about it; justdo it! Don’t tell anybody; just do it!” And ofcourse, my view was that I’d follow the prin-cipled road, and if it wasn’t right, then youdon’t do it. And most of the crew was withme on this at that time.

And so I was getting into a real bind. Icould feel the tension was getting to the pointwhere something was going to happen, andit wasn’t going to be good.

And we had no power. Legally, at sea, thecaptain, even if he’s a madman—you canprove later he’s a madman—you never getcompensation for the trouble that’s hap-pened. [laughter] You can have him removed,and there can be court cases, but in wartimethat was very unlikely, very unlikely, asproved to be the case.

So we went on with this work, and weworked out a little system, and he would getfurious and say, “What’s that man doing upon deck? Get that man down! He’s on watch!”you know. And so we would go back and doit; then sneak up again when . . . . Welearned when he was in his bunk, when hewas in his fo’c’s’le, and then we would re-sume our little schedule where guys wouldgo up for air.

But, anyway, by the time we got toPanama, that ship was a powder keg. Every-body was irritable and angry, and there wasvery little communication. I remember in themess halls, instead of a lot of talk at mess,everybody was sitting there eating, they’dgobble down their food and get out. Nobodywas talking to anybody. And I began to feelthe pressure in a different way, too, becausethe crew began to feel there was going to betrouble when we got to port, and who wasgoing to take the brunt of it? I could feel thesupport beginning to erode.


Although a few guys stayed the course. Iremember Kim, the Korean guy—he was anoiler, I believe, in the engine room—he wasvery militant, a big, lanky, tall Korean kid,young guy. And I think he was the delegatefor the engine gang. He didn’t speak verygood English, but he spoke a lot. And he wassaying, “Hey, this goddamn bunch of officersand this skipper and this damn company andthe whole goddamn War Shipping Admin-istration, they’re just a bunch of . . . .” Hewas very angry, and I think a little bit out ofhand, as was the whole situation. And hewould yell at the officers sometimes. He wouldsay, “Get the hell out of the way! You’re get-ting in my way! How can the crew work withyou guys standing around?”

He even said it to the skipper once, andthe skipper said, “I’m going to log you!”

And, “You can log me all you want! Getout of my way!” [laughter] So he was obvi-ously a guy that was under scrutiny. And therewas a guy named Clark, who was in the deckgang with me, and my strongest supporter.He stuck with me through all this, and twoor three others. Two young college kids—Ingersol and Ironsides—I remember, youknow, very smart, intelligent, young guys. Ithink this was their first or second trip to sea,and they were appalled at what was going on.And I felt rather funny having them on myside, because they weren’t exactly the kindof seamen I admired. [laughter] Nevertheless,they with two or three other members of thecrew formed a little enclave. We were verysolid on this, that we would stick together.And the other members of the crew werebeginning to sort of fade away as we camecloser to the port. This is an interesting phe-nomenon, and I can remember it on othertrips as well.

But on most ships, when I was delegateand as I remember, other delegates, had much

more success in dealing with bosuns and offi-cers and skippers. I mean, you could alwaysnegotiate something. Usually somethingcould be worked out. This one, there was justan impasse. There was no way.

The upshot came one day, just as we wereapproaching Panama, coming up the coast,and I remember there had been a report ofsubmarines in the area. Now, this was towardthe end of the war, and it was doubtful, butsome oddball, lost Japanese submarine couldbe in the area. [laughter] Nevertheless, therewere reports that something had been seenalong the coast.

And so the skipper, of course, this washis moment. “Full alert. All watches awakenon deck.” And he wanted four men on thelookout all day long and all night. Now, thismeant a lot of overtime, you see. This isbreaking out other watches.

And so the first thing I did was say to thecrew, “What the hell is going on here, youknow?” Because usually you had one man onwatch. I was on that first watch, and I wentup to the mate’s cabin, and said, “Look, thisis utterly ridiculous! I mean, not only doesthis mean overtime—the guys out on watchare going to get overtime—but four men onthat one king post stretched out there, stand-ing, hanging onto shrouds? And going to beup there for an hour and a half every otherwatch? It’s ridiculous!” And I said, “You know,I don’t know if I’m going to do it!” I said tohim just in passing.

He went to the captain and said, “Dazsays he’s not going to go out there on watch.”

Well, this is serious business. When Iheard that that had been told the captain, Iwent on watch immediately. I went up thereand got the other guys. We all four went upthere.

Everybody was against it. In fact, theywere all almost ready to say none of them are


going to do it, and that would have beeninteresting! [laughter] I don’t know whatwould have happened.

So we went up, standing our watch.When I got up there, I heard this commo-tion coming from the bridge. And here thisold guy with the mate behind him, had strungon two pistols, one on each side on his belt.With his hand on his holster, he was comingdown from the bridge, yelling, “Where’s thatgoddamn delegate? Where’s that goddamndelegate?” He didn’t know where I was. Andhe was walking down below toward the crewsquarters. And I thought he was crazy! He wassuch a little guy that the holsters almost borehim down. It was very funny if you weren’tthe target! [laughter] And it occurred to me,he could shoot somebody and get away with

it, I mean, for refusing a lawful order at sea.He could have. And I think he was the kindof guy who might have done it.

So finally some of the crew said, “He’s onlookout. He’s on lookout. You ordered every-body on lookout.”

“What are you talking about? Thegoddamned guy refused a lawful order!” Andhe goes on. I can remember I was standingup there watching at the passageway to thecrews quarters, when this little guy comes outwith this big mate looming behind him. Andhe looks up and he sees me and, sort of crest-fallen, goes back to the bridge. [laughter] Youknow, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan.

But, anyway, that set the scene. I was a tar-get and an enemy. That old bastard was goingto get even with me.

46A CURAÇAO JAIL

E GOT TO PANAMA, and hewent ashore, and he went I thinkto the coastguard headquarters.

another thing. We didn’t get shore leave.That was an indication something was up.There were orders from shore that we werenot to get shore leave.

Wouldn’t that be very unusual after such a longtime at sea?

Well, we were only there a day or so. Itwasn’t necessarily unusual, because certainports under certain conditions during the warin a sense quarantined ships. So it wasn’tunusual, generally, but in this case it was, andwe knew something was up.

So then the ship took off, and we wentthrough the canal and through theCaribbean, where there was still talk ofsubs—German subs in this case. We went inconvoy out of the canal into the Caribbean,and then our ship was left off at Curaçao,Dutch West Indies. Wilhelmstrasse—thatbeautiful little, sleepy town, beautiful Dutchtown, on Curaçao. And when we got there,we went alongside dock and secured all themooring lines. And as soon as that was done,a group of, I think navy and coastguard guys

WApparently, later I learned he had made allsorts of reports. Nothing happened rightaway, except that when he came aboard, Iwas doing something on deck with the watch,and I remember him going by and looking atme, you know, like, “You’re going to get yours,bud. You’re going to get yours.” And the matewas shaking his head, and it was awful! It wasan awful feeling, a sense of doom. I had asense of portent! [laughter] And here I wasdelegate, and I had to go to the mate andcontinue to carry out beefs that were goingon.

The crew at that point began to feel thatsomething’s going to happen on this ship.And so whatever really good communicationor good feeling that was in the crew was nowpretty well gone, except for these few guys,four or five, that were encouraging me andsaid, you know, they’d stick with me, and allthat.

We had a day or two in Panama, but weweren’t allowed to go ashore. That was


came up to the ship, onto the ladder, and Iwas called on the deck and put in chains![laughter]

The captain was up on the bridge saying,“That’s the man! That’s the man!” And I wasin shackles, put in chains. It was a verystrange experience.

Around your ankles and your . . . ?

Yes. Oh, yes. Had chains on my anklesand sort of handcuffs behind my back.

And the guys were very nice, but theydid it. There were about six of them, I guess,in uniform. Then Kim was brought out—Kim, the Korean kid. He was brought out,and he was put in chains. And then Clark,this friend of mine from deck gang, came outand said, “What the hell are you doing tothat guy?”

And the captain said, “Keep your mouthshut, or it’s going to happen to you.”

Well, it did. The next day he was put inchains. [laughter]

Anyway, it was a strange thing, because Iremember members of the crew were watch-ing, and three or four—well, these twocollege kids and two or three others—cameout on deck, and they came over, and theysaid, “Don’t worry, Whitey. Everything’ll beall right.” But the rest of the crew just stayedout of the way. And I had this wonderful illu-mination about how when you get into asituation like that, and you’re not fully awareof what you’re doing and what the implica-tions are, that people cannot necessarily berelied on to be with you, because it is a seri-ous matter.

To them, it’s their lives, it’s their jobs.They’re not always sure that you are the kindof guy who should have been their delegate,but, you know, you were willing and you didit. And they didn’t expect you necessarily to

carry out all of their demands. People thatdemand those things don’t necessarily expectyou to be so stupid as to follow through.[laughter]

And so in a way you sort of got what wascoming to you, you know, “There you are.”At the same time, as Clark told me later whenI saw him, they were terribly depressed aboutit; there was a real feeling of guilt and shameamong some of them, particularly in the en-gine department, where some of those guysgot so damn militant. And here their del-egate, Kim, you know, is taken, and I don’tremember any of them coming out to see him,you see. And so we were taken over side,taken ashore, and I remember the mates upon the bridge and the captain yelling: “Goodriddance!” [laughter] “Good riddance!”[laughter] It was something.

And I don’t remember being terriblyscared; I wasn’t afraid. I was just shocked. Ithought, “What the hell is going on here?”

There must have been a sense of total unreality.

Well, it was, you know, “What kind ofworld am I in?” I was thinking, if there’s go-ing to be trouble, there’d be some kind of trial,some kind of thing ashore, in Panama orsomeplace—what would be the usual systemof a court hearing? It would be a militarycourt, but, nevertheless, some kind of hear-ing. But no, I just was taken off.

We were marched over to some canvascovered carryalls, put in, and taken into townto the Wilhelmstrasse jail. The jail was madeup of little sort of cabins, cabooses, around aplaza. And they had bars on them and allthat. And I was put into one, and Kim wasput into another—in little, separate housesin a rather charming, beautiful setting![laughter] I mean, as I remember, I was think-ing, “Wow!” you know, “This isn’t bad.”

401A CURAÇAO JAIL

There were palm trees and gardens. I couldn’tsee the other prisoners at that point.

But still an eye for beauty. I love it! [laughter]

Yes. [laughter] Well, it was a nice, little,rural setting. And we were put in there andunder guard.

Well, now, they took the chains off of you whenthey got you in a room?

I’m trying to remember. I think so. Yes,yes, they did. Yes, the chains were put backon when we went out of the compound. Sowe’re put in there, and we were there for twoor three days. Nothing happened.

I had a lot of time to I think; I wrote a lotof letters to Kathy—long, long letters thatshe’s kept of me ruminating while I was keptin that little Curaçao jail. And we’d go tomess; we were put into shackles and takeninto the big mess hall, where there weremostly Caribbean prisoners, mostly African-American prisoners from various places, andHispanics—obviously all minorities. And asI remember, I was the only Caucasian in thewhole thing, and here Kim was Korean. Wewere quite a bunch.

And, oh, we all were given white cottonor linen uniforms—and straw hats, wide-brimmed straw hats.

Had anyone told you at this point what’s goingto happen?

No, not yet. Not yet. But that first day atmess, I was sitting next to a very large, good-looking Caribbean guy named CliveAnderson. Very well spoken. He had anEnglish accent, was very carefully spoken,with a very elaborate kind of speech. Littleby little we got talking, and I learned that he

was from Antigua, one of the small Caribbeanislands, and I said, “What are you in here for?”

“Well,” he says, “I reported German sub-marines!” And he said, “You know, theseDutch, they got some arrangements with theGermans now, and they don’t want any re-ports of these things. I made a number ofreports because we could see them, and whereI came from, we would see them and reportthem.” Now there was a rumor around theCaribbean at that time that German subma-rines were refueling at certain neutral places,like either the Dutch West Indies or else-where. And that was just a rumor. Well, herewas this guy telling that he had seen thesethings, see. And he said, “That’s why theyput me in—to shut me up.”

He had a family back, I think, in Antigua,but he had rousted about the Caribbean doingodd jobs. Oh, he had gone to school, one ofthe islands—I don’t remember where. Andhe was a poised, dignified, and very intelli-gent man. He was in his thirties, a matureman, very intelligent, and highly radicalized,and he helped to radicalize me. [laughter]

When he heard my story, he said “That’snothing new. It happens all the time. We getcharacters like you through here all the time.You know, the war eats you up and spits youout.” [laughter] “You know, the big corpora-tions in the United States are running thiswhole war, running everything.” And he hadthis whole story about how the United Stateswas becoming the wealthiest nation in theworld because of the war. “You guys are in aDepression—look at you now. You’re on topof the world.” He said, “We’re aware of whatyou’re doing, and look what you’re doing tous down here. We’re just your replacementslaves down here. We produce, and you useit.” He said, “What you’re seeing, is some ofwhat’s happening, you’re getting a little tasteof it. Enjoy yourself.” [laughter] “The food’s


not too bad. Probably better than what youhad on your ship. It’s pretty good.” And itwas. And he said, “I’m taking this time tothink things over. I’m writing a book.”

He was writing a book denouncing thewhole war and the Dutch. He was very angryat the Dutch, because he thought they weresecretly dealing with the Germans. He wasanti-fascist and possibly a communist—Idon’t know—but most likely. When I lookback, he was a garbled communist like I be-came. I mean, he had the ideas, and he haddone a lot of reading. Anyway, I found himextremely congenial and a bright light.

And Kim, this wonderful Korean kid—he was a great carver. He had a jackknifewhich they allowed him to keep, and hefound pieces of wood around in the court-yard, and he would carve these marvelous,little objects that reminded me of some ofthe elaborate Chinese carvings I’d seen, butvery small. With a pen knife he was able tomake these very refined, open work kind ofcarvings. He carved me a paper-knife. I stillhave it—beautiful with a handle in thiselaborate carving, and he stuck little quartzrocks on with gum for eyes.

He was giving them away to the otherprisoners. So he was something of a heroicfigure. And he was as radical as any of themwhen he got going, you know, denouncingthe whole of the Western world. Oh, andwhen I think of it now, he said, “Our time iscoming, and your time is finished.” [laugh-ter] “Look what you’re doing to yourselves.You’re not only destroying yourselves, you’redestroying the whole world.” That was aboutthe time during the end of the Guandongperiod, and the Japanese were slowly beingforced out of Asia. [This Japanese force hadcontrolled Manchuria since 1932, and sur-rendered to the USSR in 1945.] And I wouldsay most of the Pacific was in our hands,

except for the far western area. And so Kimwasn’t pro-Japanese; he was anti-Japanese butwas saying, “The Asians are going to showyou guys. We’re going to show you guys.” Andhe was agreeing with Clive, you know, aboutthe end of the Western world, the declineand fall of the Western world.[laughter]

So that was a very rich few days. Andthen we were put to work sweeping thestreets. We were given these big brooms, andour leg shackles were left on, but they werewide enough for us to walk. And we’d go outin the streets in lines, sweeping up the al-ready very clean streets of Wilhelmstrasse![laughter] The sidewalks looked as thoughyou could take food off of them and eat it, itwas so clean.

I had a visit from a naval intelligence guy.I forget his name now. A very nice, youngguy. I think he’d been to Yale, and he wasbeing very congenial with me and saying,“What the hell happened? Tell me aboutthis.” And I talked very freely with him andtold him about the trip, and, you know, I likedhim, and I needed somebody to talk to. Hewas urging me to explain my side of the case,and, “They’re charging you with mutiny, youknow. You’re going to be charged with mu-tiny, and that’s a very serious thing inwartime. I’d like to hear your whole story.”And then as we talked, he began asking ques-tions about the union.

“Did the union tell you to do these things?Did the union urge you to make those com-plaints at sea? What is your union like?” And,you know, when I come to think of it, if any-thing, the SUP would be the union themilitary would praise, because it was anti-union, with other unions, anti-cooperationto a considerable degree, it was very reaction-ary from the race relations level. But,nevertheless, there was this thing he keptbringing up that somehow or other the union

403A CURAÇAO JAIL

had been behind it all. I said, “No! The crewdid it. We . . . I did it.”

And, “Well, you know, have you read anycommunist literature, do you get union litera-ture?”

I said, “Yes, we have some even aboardthis ship and always aboard ships. And, well,I don’t know which is communist literature,but there’s a lot of literature around.” And Ibegan to feel that this also was part of thesetup that was going on. He was a very niceguy. We had long talks about things. He wasvery friendly, but maybe that’s the way theseguys do things.

So the date was set for the hearing, and Iremember going into this kind of a courtroomsomewhere in Wilhelmstrasse. And the skip-per wasn’t there, but the chief mate was thereand one or two of the other officers. Andthere was an array of judges that were coastguard and I think naval people in uniform. Idon’t remember clearly who was there, but itwas, I think, a coast guard or naval court inCuraçao during the war with American andDutch administrators. And the presidingjudge finally called me and said, “You havebeen charged with this, this, this, and this,”and named everything, like “refusing to obeyan order, urging the crew to dissent,” all ofthese falling under the category of mutinyduring times of war. “What have you got tosay?”

And I said, “It is just not true. Thosethings did not happen in the way that they’rereported here, and they were not as seriousas they seem here.”

And the judge said, “Are you saying yourcaptain is a liar?” I’ll never forget it—“Areyou saying that your own captain is a liar?”

Well, you know, if I’d said, “Yes, he’s aliar,” I’m calling my captain a liar during timeof war. And I said, “I’m not saying that at all.I’m just saying it didn’t happen like that.”

And that was the end of my interrogation.And I was taken out, and others were com-ing before the court.

I later learned that the chief mate hadsaid that I was probably the cause of it allbecause I was a very militant, possibly com-munist member of the union, and a uniondelegate. And as for Kim, he was just a crazycommie from Korea! [laughter] And we weretaken back to our jail and heard nothing moreabout that, excepting the ship had gone, hadleft.

I want to say now, because I may forgetit, is that months later, I heard the rumor thatthe ship had gone to the Mediterranean andhad been sunk. I don’t know if that’s true.I’ve looked through records, trying to seewhere the Castle Pinkney might have been,but I remember being of two minds: “Theregoes Captain Stuart.”

But on the other hand, “There also goesa number of other people I knew.” But I don’tknow if that really happened. It was a rumor.“Oh, yes, the Castle Pinkney, that got sunk inthe Mediterranean right after they leftCuraçao and had gone across the Atlanticand into the Mediterranean, and it sunkprobably off France.”

Anyway, so we were there about twoweeks, two and a half weeks. Nothing wassaid. We just went on doing our work, hav-ing our meals. Except one day we were allgiven new uniforms, new white clothes andclean big, straw hats, big white ones like thesombreros.

Sounds like kind of a Van Gogh painting![laughter]

It was! Or Rivera. [laughter] And so wewere all brought out to muster in the court-yard, and we’d also been taught to marchtogether. We were lousy marchers—you


know, stragglers in our chains—clank, clank,clank.

There must have been about fifty, sixtyof us altogether. And we were marched intotown with our brooms and lined up on theboulevard, the main boulevard. And we werelined up in two rows about twenty to thirtyfeet apart along the boulevard on both sides.So there we were, all in our white uniforms,with our brooms up! [laughter] And we weretold that Queen Wilhelmina had come intoport, and she was going to drive up to themansion up this street, and we were there tohelp greet her. And there were crowds outon the streets. And nobody said anything tous. We were almost like the police! [laughter]

And an entourage came up—beautiful,old-time touring cars coming up. And thefront one came with army people in it, Dutchofficers and big-shots. And in the next one,this large touring car, open, was this marvel-ous woman with a great white hat and aflowing, white dress, very dignified, sitting inback in the touring car. And she was nod-ding in her great hat at either side of the carat the crowd. And they were cheering her asshe came, and there was a band somewhere.And she came up the street, and in this longline, I probably was the only white guy inthe whole goddamned town! [laughter] I wasnext to Clive; Kim was down the line a bit.And as she came up, I remember she saw me,and she made a very special nod at me! AndI’ll never forget having that special attentionof Queen Wilhelmina in 1945 in Curaçao!And I should have yelled, “Get me out ofhere!” [laughter] She probably thought I wasa Dutchman, and she wanted to recognizeher countryman.

And then a few days later we were goingto go, and I remember all these guys, manyof them I didn’t know, all these wonderfulCaribbean, African-American, Hispanic, and

other characters, led by Clive, sang us a song,and in Spanish, I think, a song of farewell. Itwas very nice. Everybody was, you know, yell-ing and saying good-bye and giving us littlegifts, pieces of candy that they filched fromone place or another or leftovers from din-ners, and just little things, you know, put inour hands as we went. It was all very mov-ing; I was very moved by that.

We were taken away and put on a navydestroyer, in the brig, to be taken to NewYork: Kim and I, and by this time, Clark.They kept Clark separate from us. He was inanother place, I gathered later, because hewasn’t charged with the same things we were,or he wasn’t as seriously. I didn’t see Clarkuntil later.

Nothing else was done—no papers.[laughter] Nothing was signed one way or theother; nobody said anything to me. And offwe went on this little destroyer. That was avery pleasant trip for a few days. In the firstplace, it was very safe, because it was in aconvoy going to New York. And the brig wasclean. There was a little jail down in the hold,and the navy guys on the crew were extremelynice to us.

They’d not only bring us food, but extrafood, and coffee at different times, and sit andtalk to us. They weren’t at all interested inwhy we were there. If we told them, theywould just say, “Oh, well, that’s the way itis.” [laughter] And, oh! One guy’d even comeand wash our clothes, take them up to what-ever little laundry they had.

Did you ever see the man from intelligence?

No, I don’t remember seeing him again.Maybe I would have, but there was nothingsignificant that happened between us, youknow, that I can recall after Curaçao. We justwent. A very nice trip and excellent food.

405A CURAÇAO JAIL

We saw how the navy lived. All thesenice, little things that they did for us. Theylooked upon us as pets, you know. “Thesemerchant marine characters! Well, look atthem!”

And we’d kid them about the navy, “Lookat you guys. Look what you’ve got,” you know.

And they’d say, “Ah, but look at you guys.You can go ashore and see your wives.”

“You do, too. Not only that, they getmoney every month. Ours don’t. We have tosend them our lousy checks,” and so on. We’dhave this repartee.

And we got to New York, our shackleswere taken off, and we were taken ashore,and told, “There you are. Good-bye.” Andwe were told to go the next day to thecoastguard offices in New York. That’s all.And those were our orders, to go and see suchand such a commander or something likethat.

And so we didn’t know what to do. Wedidn’t have much money.

Were you with Kim?

Yes, with Kim. And we must have beengiven a little money. Something that I knewabout was the Seamen’s Church Institute. Itwas near the waterfront. It’s been moved nowor torn down, but the old Seamen’s ChurchInstitute was a marvelous place. And seamen,I think, could stay there for seventy-five centsor fifty cents a night and eat for a quarter. Idon’t know what it was, exactly, but you couldget a little, clean room, and they had a littlechow house down in the bottom, for coffeeand doughnuts and sandwiches.

And so we went there. It was within walk-ing distance. We walked to the Seamen’sChurch Institute, the Maritime Institute, andwalked around the streets of New York. It waswild! We felt like aliens from another planet!

We didn’t know who we were anymore. Youknow, “What are doing here?” [laughter]“We’re free, and yet we’re not.”

And so we went up the next day to thisoffice where a very, very bored guy in uni-form—some officer, you know—heard ourstory and said, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got somethinghere; I’ve got something in a file on that.”He said, “You know? That guy Stuart hasgiven us trouble before. He’s a scum-bum,crazy bastard. Nobody pays . . . I mean, he istrouble. I don’t know how he ever got papersto go out as skipper.”

And I said, “What are you guys going todo? It’s up to you!” [laughter] “We were justbrought in the brig from Curaçao.”

“Oh,” he said, “that was to get you safelyout of there!” [laughter] He said, “You’relucky! Look, my advice to you, is to get backto port, to wherever you came from, if youcan, and ship out. Just forget it! Forget it.”

I said, “Well, is this going to go on ourrecords?” Kim and I were both concernedabout whether he knew about our records.

And he said, “Records? We don’t haveany records!” [laughter] He said, “We get athousand of you guys a week! Just get out ofhere! Get out of my hair!” [laughter]

I’m trying to remember how I got back tothe West Coast by bus. Oh, yes. Our payoffwas in Curaçao. We were discharged from theship, and I guess we got some of our pay atthat time—at least part of it—well, at leastenough to get back to the West Coast. Kimhad to go somewhere else, so I said good-byeto Kim. Maybe he wrote once, or I wrote onceto him; we lost touch. I don’t know where hewent, but I always thought of Kim as a won-derful guy. I’m an Asiaphile to some degree,and he’s one of my symbols of Asians whomI respect. [laughter]

Kim and I had run into Clark at theSeamen’s Church Institute. He had been kept


separate from us because he was on a differ-ent charge, and I learned that the same navalintelligence officer who had seen me tried toget him to testify that I was the cause of allthe trouble and that the union had put meup to it. [laughter]

Now, this was Clark’s story: he said thatthey had tried to set him up, and that he hadrefused to testify. And that’s why he was sentto another jail in town and kept separate fromus, that he would change his mind and tes-tify against me—or against us.

On one hand, Kim and I would talk andsay we wondered if Clark was straight, youknow, whether that really happened that way.On the other hand, he had been taken offthe ship; he had been in the jail in Curaçao,and I tended to believe him. But that alsogave me . . . .

I began to become more cynical than I’dever been in my life about bureaucracy andabout military, about everything that washappening within our society during the war.And I was affected by people like CliveAnderson. I must say, he was an eloquent sonof a gun, and his story about the situation inthe Caribbean and what was happening toCaribbean culture, the role of the Dutch andthe Americans during the war, and the laborconditions on the various islands, all this stuffaffected me. As well as Kim—this marvel-ous, militant, radical Korean, who somehowor other got into the American merchantmarine. And he was a citizen. But I don’tknow anything about his background, and Ifeel terrible about that. I wish I had asked

more about where he came from, where hisfamily had lived, and what his experienceswere, because he was a wild man. When Icome to think of it, he reminded me at thetime something of Melville’s Queequeg,[laughter] you know. I mean, he was myQueequeg. And he would shout at me attimes about, “You damn American! All youdo is think of yourselves. You guys, you eatwell, you’re fat, you’re white, and you thinkeverything is your way. And we’re going toshow you!” And I always regret that I neverran across him again. He was marvelous.

I had enough money to take a Greyhoundbus from New York across the country andhead for home. In those days that was a four-day trip or something. I had gotten a pack ofletters from my family and from Kathy andothers, worrying about me, you know, whathad happened to me.

I had written from Panama and got somemail in Curaçao and in New York. The mailservice was sort of divided up in a peculiarway. You would get your mail either whenthe ship docked, and the War ShippingAdministration or company representativewould come aboard, the pursers, and they’dbring your mail. Or you’d get them throughthe navy. And I forget how it was in NewYork. But, anyway, I had a pack of mail, andread those coming back on the bus, realizingwhat a furor had been created by my lettersfrom Curaçao. I’m sure, they were very fullof drama and theater, because I was half en-joying this. I was very worried, but I wasenjoying what was happening on the spot.

47HARRY LUNDEBERG

AND THE SUP

O WHEN I GOT back to San Francisco,there was an interim period from aboutFebruary of 1945 to April in which I

sense of not cooperating with other seamen’sunions, particularly the CIO union, the com-peting National Maritime Union, that I wasbeginning to get interested in because I likedits policies. I liked what it was doing, and Ihad heard so much about it at sea and readthe material.

Its hall was just up the street from theSUP hall, a few blocks away. I never wentthere because there’s a feeling among unionpeople, you don’t spread yourself around. Youhave a certain territory. So I just never wentthere, though I had met a number of NMUmen ashore, and I knew some of them now.

Anyway, I went in first, to see Harry. Andhe was a gruff kind of a guy. “So, what’s up?What’s up?”

And so I told him what had happened,and I suppose I had in my mind that theunion was going to take some kind of action.You know, that there should be some redress.I was taken off a ship by a madman; I wasaccused of things that weren’t so; I was nevercharged with anything; nothing ever hap-pened later. I was told by the coastguard toget back and go to sea. You know, what rights

Swas ashore. Had a chance to be with Kathyand little Anya, who was now almost a yearold—an extremely rambunctious, beautiful,intelligent little girl, and into everythingalready and crawling around like a tiger. Andit was very pleasant there in our little shingledhouse on Clinton Avenue in Alameda nextto the bay.

But at the same time, I had to go back tothe SUP hall. The first thing that I did wasgo to the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific hallon Clay Street to report in. And here I was,you know, and I’d been knocked off a ship inCuraçao and had all these things happen, soI asked to see the president of the union,Harry Lundeberg; I had an appointment tosee him. He was a great big, good-lookingScandinavian guy and rangy, always wore awhite cap and dungarees, who was somethingof an icon in a sense to the old seamen onthe coast because of his role in early strikesand early seamen’s struggles. But he had be-come very much a reactionary leader in the


do I have? I mean, I lost money on that trip. Ididn’t get my special pay for sea duty duringthe war—none of those things. I just got thelow wages. I didn’t even get all my overtime.[laughter] And here I was a delegate anddidn’t have a chance to complain to anybodyabout it!

I told the story of the ship and the awfulconditions that existed aboard it. And Harrylistened, and as I remember, he said, “Forgetit. Get back to sea.” That’s all I rememberhim saying. “Just forget it. Get back to sea.”

I always wondered about that. In fact, ithad a lot to do with my decisions later. But Ialways wondered to what degree that union,the leadership of that union was involvedwith the coastguard, the naval intelligenceand others. It would be likely, because it wasa reactionary union. It was possible. And, ofcourse, we always later thought of it as beingin league with the ship owners. I mean, therewere stories of agreements betweenLundeberg and ship owners to keep the sea-men in line.

On the West Coast, there were storiesamong the seamen in other unions that usu-ally tied Lundeberg to all sorts of conspiracieswith ship owners and with authorities. Andhis total anti-communist stance, very popu-lar with some elements of the country, wascertainly not among the left-wing or the CIOunion people.

I don’t know how much of it is true;nevertheless, I do know that the policy of theunion was extremely conservative and out ofdate, particularly about race relations and thehandling of beefs. Actually the patrolmenseldom took beefs directly to companies orto authorities, and I don’t recall that therewas really that much activity that involvedsupport of seamen’s complaints.

Although there was the view among theold-timers in the union that the union was

doing a good job, there was this kind ofbuddy-buddy relationship. It was a smallunion with just a few ports up and down thecoast, so that there was this feeling ofmaintaining a kind of solidarity—union con-nection—with the various halls up and downthe coast. But also there were a lot of com-plaints about the fact that the union was notdeveloping a policy that was facing the factsof the 1940s and the coming end of the war,et cetera.

That few minutes with Harry Lundeberggave me the feeling that I kept with me;either that he saw me as a troublemaker andhad gotten word about it, and I was undersurveillance within the union—that was onesort of semi-paranoid view I had, which therewas some basis for as it later turned out—orthat he just didn’t give a damn, and it wasjust, you know, “Right now our job is to keepthese ships going, and you’re lucky to be go-ing out, and just get back to work.” Therewas no idea that somehow or other somethinghad been done that the union should be con-cerned about. So that rankled me a bit at thetime.

So I was now home and having this won-derful reunion again with Kathy and seeingAnya, this rambunctious, little hellion thatwas crawling around the house. Very bright,very alert little girl. She was terrific, and Imust say still is. And also seeing my parentsand Kathy’s parents and putting them at easeabout the horrible thing that supposedly hap-pened to me. I remember my mother saying,“You got to get out of there! You got to dosomething! You got to make up your mindthat you’re going to make something out ofyourself. You can’t go on going to sea this way!The war is coming to an end, and the Selec-tive Service Act will probably be terminatedat the end of the year, and what are you goingto be doing now with your life?”

409HARRY LUNDEBERG AND THE SUP

I was very worried about that. [laughter]“What am I doing with my life?”

And I wasn’t in a very good frame of mindin terms of going to sea at that time, either. Iwas feeling, “If this can happen, you know,what’s going on?” I was very dim about themeaning of that whole event and the senseof betrayal that I felt, and the feeling of help-lessness about big organizations, and howmuch of this, that nobody could do anythingabout, was going on during the war.

I had this idealistic sense that it shouldn’tbe that way, you know! [laughter] I had feltthat I had been not only a good seaman, butI’d been a good delegate; and yet, when Icame to think of it, I probably did exacer-bate things a lot, because I was a big mouth,and I shot my mouth off a lot.

One of the more certainly sobering parts of yourstory is this sense of a kind of abandonment andpeople scuttling for shelter, maybe, when theysensed that things were really coming to a head.Maybe you didn’t feel like you were repre-senting . . . .

Well, it taught me something—that is towatch out for my own ego. Ego involvementcan be a very deadly thing that is, if you feelyou’ve got to win . . . that you have been setup there to be a leader and to representpeople. To take that too seriously, particu-larly on a little damn microcosm of a ship inthe middle of the Pacific Ocean . . . .

A situation like that takes a level of ma-turity that I didn’t have. I mean, there arethings that I wouldn’t have done, or wouldn’t

do again, and didn’t later. And, also, that youcan’t expect people to support you under allconditions—even if they have set you up todo it. They’ve got their own problems, andthey’ve got their own personalities. You can’tjust go by what people say; you have to go bywhat they do, and you have to also leaveenough leeway for the fact that it all couldfall apart pretty easily. Well, I didn’t knowall those things, and I must say, later as a dele-gate on ships, I was much more astute aboutthis, I was much more organizationally con-scious, much more aware of how to go aboutit, not necessarily to protect oneself, myself,but to do a much more competent job—thatis, to be more effective, and not become atarget of attack when it’s unnecessary, whenthe beefs are minor and small and can besolved without . . . . Actually a lot of thosebeefs on the ship could have been handledby going ahead and doing what we should doand trying to get away with it. Like some ofthe crew members said, you know, “Ah, let’sjust lay off all this carping, and let’s do ourjob and sneak up on deck, you know!”[laughter]

And I didn’t agree with that and wouldn’tnow, but the point is, there has to be moreflexibility in the way one goes about handlingbeefs. I was very principled, very hard, andalso ego oriented in terms of telling myselfthat I was doing a good job and that I coulddo it. Well, the Castle Pinkney took a lot ofthat out of me. I was a delegate for two orthree more years later on ships, and I wasmuch more aware, much more competentand mature about those things.

48UNIONISM AND MARXISM

O, NOW, what did I do ashore? Thatwas a very significant interim—I wouldsay it was a kind of a turning point. It

graph machine, which was pretty high-techin those days, upstairs in the back, where alot of the left-wingers would hold their meet-ings. In fact, leaders of the seamen’s branchof the Communist Party, from two or threeof the waterfront unions, would meet up thereand discuss things. I wasn’t aware of all ofthat at the time. However, I was aware I wasin the middle of a cauldron. This was theheartland.

And you know, I was very interested init, and I got friendly with two or three of theguys from the NMU, people that later be-came sort of heroic figures for me, like WalterStack and Bill Bailey—and Pat Tobin, whobecame a good friend of mine. And, oh, therewere a number of others that I got to knowvery well at that time, just by being in thebookstore and having coffee at the little cof-fee stop next door or at the bar nearby wherewe would drink beer.

I remember I was ripe for this, because Iwas beginning to feel very, very disillusionedand cynical about a number of things that Ihad once felt very firm about. I had a greatadmiration for what was happening in theILWU and for Harry Bridges. I knew about

Swas during that month or two ashore that Inot only sort of reconnected with my familyand Kathy and Anya, I had a chance to think,like that four days on the bus coming out fromNew York. [laughter] I did a lot of thinking.And I had to hang around the waterfront,you know, looking for ships.

I began to hang around the old MaritimeBookshop on the Embarcadero, a wonderfulplace. It seems like bookstores had a specialplace in my life, like in Mexico City when Iwas a kid. But, anyway, the MaritimeBookshop was a hangout for most of the left-wing leaders on the waterfront. It had a signabove it, “Knowledge Is Power.” It was onthe foot of Clay Street. It was a small place,but it was loaded with pamphlets and litera-ture. Marxist literature, all sorts of things fromall over the world foreign, left-wing litera-ture, novels and books, and a lot of leaflets,including the kind of leaflets that were be-ing handed out on the front by otherunions—some of them had come out of theMaritime Bookshop. There was a mimeo-


the attack that had been made on him andabout the growing anti-labor legislation inWashington.

Actually the big period of anti-labor leg-islation was coming later just after Roosevelt’sdeath in April of that year, leaving Truman,who was susceptible to the pressure for anti-labor legislation at the approach of the endof the war. But the portent of that was alreadygoing on on the waterfront. We were talkingabout how this was going to happen and whatwas necessary. So there was a lot of talk ofcoming strikes, a lot of talk of labor unrestthroughout the country.

I also heard a lot of anti-SUP talk; therewas talk against the union that I was in. AndI was ready to accept that, because I was atthat point very aware and I think deeplytroubled by the fact that there were no blacksin the SUP, that it was a lily-white union; Ifelt susceptible to criticism on this score.

I had been reading not only people likeHerskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, as Imentioned earlier, but Herbert Aptheker’swork on the history of the slave revolts.[American Negro Slave Revolts, ColumbiaUniversity Press 1942.] Aptheker was a bril-liant historian/scholar, who has never gottenthe credit that he deserves. He was at theforefront of historical research and writinginto the period of pre-Civil War and CivilWar slavery and the slave trade. His work onthe slave revolts planned by Denmark Vesey[a free black hanged in Charleston, SouthCarolina in 1822 for planning an insurrec-tion involving thousands of free and enslavedblacks] I think was the basis of HermanMelville’s short story that I later wrote a paperon.

And by the way, there were a number ofblack seamen and longshoremen who wouldcome into the Maritime Bookshop, and they

“The Maritime Bookshop was a hangout for most of the left-wing leaders on the waterfront.”


would use the place and sit around and talk.So I absorbed a great deal of that at the time.It wasn’t all new to me, but it somehow be-came real. I was beginning to think in theseterms.

I suppose I was taking stock on a numberthings. I even thought at that time, you know,that maybe I should join the National Mari-time Union. But at the same time, I felt veryloyal to the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, myunion since the early part of the war and myfirst voyages. I’d attended meetings regularlywhen I was ashore; paid my dues. I knewsomething about the history of the SUP andidentified with some of the old seamen I knewwho had been part of those struggles.

Do you think, also, maybe you had the idea thatyou could actually be a vehicle of change withinthe SUP?

No. I don’t think so. I don’t think I hadthat kind of messianic view. [laughter] No, Iwanted to be a good union man. I wanted tobe a good delegate.

On the other hand, I remember I wastalking like this aboard ships. I would saythings like, “For gosh sakes, why don’t wehave any, Negroes on board ship? Why not?You know, there are a lot of seamen thatwould be available,” and feeling a very stronganti-black feeling on that topic. That both-ered me a lot.

Well, was the SUP smaller than other seamen’sunions?

Well, it was primarily West Coast, andin numbers it may have been smaller thanthe NMU became, but the feeling was justthat they didn’t want to sail with blacks, and,you know, “We got to keep those jigaboos offthe ships, for Christ’s sakes. You know, they’re

taking over everything ashore. We got to keepthem out. And look at those checkerboardunions like NMU. My gosh, you see thosecrews; you’d think they’re coming out ofAfrica.”

Well, I was extremely uncomfortable withthis kind of attitude, more and more so, as Iwas realizing that somehow or other this wasa very backward kind of labor situation, verymilitant on some levels, the SUP seamen, butvery reactionary on this level. It was the re-maining container of racist labor views onthe West Coast. Here the ILWU was takingthe leadership in ending discrimination onthe waterfront, and the National MaritimeUnion, the Masters, Mates and Pilots—mostof these unions had begun to desegregate andwere very, very open about it, including mak-ing a great deal of literature available on thewaterfront. In fact, I took some leaflets aboardships that I was on and left them around,causing trouble sometimes.

But I didn’t do it because I had felt I wasany leader of change. I just felt that, forChrist’s sakes, we should be thinking aboutthese things. There might have been the ele-ment that I wanted to change things, but thatwasn’t my main reason.

Well, if everybody that felt as you did left theSUP, then there would be no chance for change?

Yes. And I remember there were alwaysguys on some ships that fully agreed. Wecould talk about this, and it would be dis-cussed. But then there was always anotherelement that was very deeply angry about anysuggestion that there should be change in theracial structure of the crews; and loaded withthe most vicious kind of stories about whathad happened on other ships. “Ah, yeah, so-and-so with this goddamned NMU ship, theguy’s at sea, and while he was at sea, his wife


was going out with some nigger, you know,and has been seen around.” Oh! The storieswere on such a level, you could hardly toler-ate them. And I began to get very, very upsetwith this.

These experiences and the reading I wasdoing, like Aptheker’s work, that marveloushistory of the American Negro that had neverreally come into the mainstream UnitedStates history, laid the foundation for mymain interest when I went back to school.One of the first things I did was take Englishcourses dealing with American history andAmerican literature; my main interest wasin this hidden history. This was a few yearslater, when I went back to Cal.

Now, I think you said that the other differenceabout the SUP, too, was that there wasn’t asmuch ferment about striking after the war as theother unions?

Well, yes, that came up later, but the mainpoint is that they weren’t going to cooperatewith what they considered the commieunions. And, by the way, it was really dirtypolitics, because later on it was quite clearthe SUP had agreements with the ship own-ers, resulting in higher pay than the NationalMaritime Union right after the war, as kindof a gift. And one of the elements of thestrike, which finally came about in 1946, wasto make up for those differential wages thatthe SUP had managed to get. During theUnion oil strike, later, that I was very muchinvolved in—we’ll go into that—it was obvi-ous the SUP was getting quite a different deal.

And so all that was going on; the oldMaritime Bookshop, what a marvelous place,I’ll never forget it. I did a lot of reading; Idistributed pamphlets—not purposefully, butI’d take them with me aboard ship and else-where and read them, and I often was

criticized or sometimes denounced by certainphony members of the gang here and there,you know, like, “This goddamn communistcoming aboard the ship with all this litera-ture.” And later this came up against me in avery aggressive way.

This interim was an important period forme. I was also thinking about the meaningof the war. I was very anti-fascist, glad thatwe were winning the war, and was glad tosee the Japanese driven back and the changesof fortune in Europe and the fact thatGermany was about to be defeated. All thiswas great. But at the same time it opened upthen, all of the criticisms of what had hap-pened and what it all meant; whether or notwe had really learned anything from that war,and did we really understand the corruptionthat had taken place in our society becauseof it, and the lack of clarity about goals? AndI suppose I became radicalized in the senseof, “So what now? What kind of society arewe going to have after all this bloodshed andmayhem? What have we learned? What kindof society is going to come out of it?” And Ibecame sort of a critic, a social critic in myown mind—a rather uninformed one, but,nevertheless, that was going on.

And, of course, Marxism was an influ-ence, to the degree which I read it—I wasnever a scholar of Marxism, but, you know, Iread it and was deeply impressed by it. Therewas a lot of Marxist critique going on, a lotof left-wing literature within the unions, thattranslated Marxist concepts into trade unionagendas.

I was mainly locally a radical, in terms oflocal trade union issues and the way we onthe waterfront looked at the world. So all myearly thinking along those lines was in termsof a local trade union situation; the signifi-cance of world events as it affected us, kindof thing.


How did some of that literature deal with, or didthey deal with, Stalin’s . . . the Russian itera-tion of . . . ?

The communist Left.

Yes.

When I say “left,” I mean a broad spec-trum of people, but the communist Left, ofcourse, were very pro-Soviet at the time.And, you know, from their point of view, theSoviet Union had led the way—in fact, al-most single-handedly won the war!—which,by the way, was partly true in Europe. Andthe Soviet Union represented an exemplarysocialist system and moving toward commu-nism. And there was great praise—some ofit well taken—for advances that were madesocially in the Soviet Union, and I supposedenying a lot of the terrible things that wouldcome out later that were already rumored inthe press, then. The communist Left was pro-Soviet at the time, and its Marxism wasdirected toward an ideological defense of theSoviet Union. At that time that was notunusual. A lot of people felt that way.

The Soviet Union has made a very greatmark in the world, and it made a mark onliberal and progressive thinkers in the UnitedStates. So the so-called “fellow travelers” ofthat period, the dupes of the communists,were many. I would say most of my friendswere in a sense fellow travelers. They weren’tnecessarily Marxist; they weren’t necessarilyeven pro-Soviet.

I like that term “fellow travelers.”

Well, that was the term that was used forthe dupes of the communist, and, you know,all the progressive organizations thought tobe influenced by the communists were

referred to as “fellow travelers.” And I thinkto some extent that was true. I can’t see anyreason why it shouldn’t have happened. Theclearest statements of policy, the clearest cri-tiques of events, particularly events involvingsocial issues, were coming out of the Com-munist Party at the time. And so I was veryattracted to that.

I think I may have even gone to a Com-munist Party meeting in San Francisco at thattime . . . no, that would be later. I didn’t haveany direct, formal relationship with the farLeft, but I read a lot of them, talked to a lotof them. I didn’t even know who some ofthem were. And I met a lot of other kinds ofprogressive left thinkers around the water-front at that time. And I found it very timely.

I just wondered if there were any intellects orliterary figures that were overtly left or pro- . . . ?

Oh, yes. There was a lot of pro-commu-nist, pro-Soviet thinking—a lot of it veiled,a lot of it indirect, but there was no reasonwhy it shouldn’t have been overt. The SovietUnion had been part of the war, and theyhad suffered tremendous losses, and yet theyprevailed, and partly because of their system,the socialist system, that made for tremen-dous patriotism and the urge to defend theircountry. All these things were consideredheroic and remarkable and like our own, bya lot of people here. People like WestbrookPeglar and a number of other columnists wererabidly anti-Soviet and anti-communist, aswere a lot of people in the country, people inthe political structure, and in governmentwork. But it wasn’t for a while—it couldn’tbe—as rampant and as vitriolic as it becamejust a year or so later, after the end of thewar. During the war they were still our allies,and it was so obvious that we needed them,particularly when they moved into


Manchuria and Manchukoa and foughtagainst the Japanese [1941]. You know, theywere obviously our allies, and yet there was alot of suspicion and concern about commu-nism spilling over the world like the catsupad, you know! [laughter] But, it was possiblefor a lot of people to be pro-Soviet and evenMarxist and communist oriented in theirgeneral way of thinking, without beingattacked so much at that time.

So that was the general climate. On thewaterfront it was quite clear. I mean, the pro-gressive, left-wing unions were the dominantones, because there were more people in-volved. They were united; they had left-wingleadership, and Harry Bridges was this greatsymbol.

I remember Harry Bridges was a heroicfigure who felt very strongly about labor.There were people who called him a commieand things like that, but they still admiredwhat this guy had stood for in the develop-ment of the longshore union all those years,under attack; and they couldn’t deport him,you know. [Bridges was from Australia.] Hestood as a kind of an icon in a way, even forthose opposed to his views.

In my view, he was never a communistever, I mean, even though every attempt wasmade to tar him with that. I wouldn’t haveminded if he was at the time, but the thingis, he just wasn’t. He was a very individualisticleader; he’d cooperate with the communists,they were one of his constituencies. He wasgoing to use every possible resource.

All that was fermenting at the time, andI wasn’t very clear about it. Nevertheless, Iwas deeply influenced by it, and I felt that ina way this was the track that I was going tobe on. I was more and more interested in tradeunion activities and doing something in tradeunions.

One comment you made off tape that really inter-ests me is that there was this sense that Rooseveltwas enough of a sympathizer with labor to stema very effective reactionary element in Congressand the Senate.

Oh, well, yes—not quite in those terms.It was just that he was considered a progres-sive president. However there were a lot ofthings that the laboring people were opposedto in the Roosevelt administration that werenot necessarily conducive to the kinds of re-forms they were interested in, and a lot offoreign policy they might have opposed, butin general it was considered to be a progres-sive administration, and Roosevelt wasconsidered a progressive president. I can’t atthe moment think of all the critique that wasraised about him, but it was there. There alsowas a lot of defense of him against the right-wing opposition. But, yes, he was consideredto be a great president. In fact—as much as Ihedge about it here—when he died in April,there was a tremendous sense of—what wouldyou call it?—coming to a brink. “What now?”

Well, of course, when he made Trumanhis vice president instead of Henry Wallace,that was something that the Left always feltwas a great mistake. Henry Wallace was ad-mired, highly, like Wendell Wilkie may havebeen earlier, as a kind of a left liberal pro-gressive figure in the government. So thatlater on, Henry Wallace became a centralfigure when the Third Party movementdeveloped.

But those years towards the end of thewar, there was a time of great yeasting, andthere was a sense of being “on the brink.”Everyone that I knew had a feeling, “Whatnow? What are we going to do now?” Andthe death of Roosevelt had a traumatic effect.Everybody was thinking about what it meant.


There was as much, if not more, public sor-row and feeling and emotion expressed aboutthat death, as there was later about Kennedy,I believe. A great pall seemed to go over thecountry with a feeling of coming to the endof an era and starting a new one, and ofcourse, this affected the trade unions. Itaffected the seamen that I knew. It forced usto think about what we were going to befacing.

And, of course, in that period I remem-ber that Harry Bridges became even moreimportant in the minds of a lot of us. He wassomebody who had survived the era, who hadfought through and was still there, had man-aged to maintain his leadership in that uniondespite all of the attacks that had been madeagainst him and were continuing to be madeand would go on being made for the nextyears.

It brings to mind the song that I used tohear sung—groups of longshoremen in par-ticular—but a lot of us would sing it whenwe would get together, if we were drinking,you know. How does it go? [sings] “Oh, thebosses, they’re worried; the bosses, they arescared. They can’t deport six million menthey know. But we’re going to fight them,fight them all the way; going to build a unionand save the CIO.” Something like that![laughter] The words are not quite that way,but that was the gist of it. And I’d mull thatover in my mind a lot. That was one of myfavorite songs.

Anyway, so there was something else go-ing on, too, for me, at that time. At theMaritime Bookshop—I’m quite sure that’swhere I ran across it—I ran across a copy ofor an excerpted pamphlet of LudwigFeuerbach’s book, The Essence of Christianity,I think it was called. I remember reading itover and over and over and over again. Ithad a similar impact as my very early reading

of Ingersoll, the great atheist, and it broughtback to me all of my basic atheistic feelings—all of that undercurrent of questioning, doubt,and skepticism that I had had, along withthese occasional bouts of mysticism and meta-physics and all that sort of thing. Underneathit all was this basic skepticism about religion,about any religion, and particularly the kindof Christianity that I had been exposed to inmy family. And here was this wonderful, bril-liant, clear statement by Feuerbach that allreligions and gods were projections of humanconsciousness. This was very much like—later when I read Marx—the idea thatconsciousness does not produce being, butbeing produces consciousness. Feuerbachenunciated that in terms of religion in themost, to me, startlingly clear way—that godsand, therefore, also religious systems, wereprojections of the human mind, of humancultures, of the way people view themselveson one level, either at their best or at theirworst.

That meant a great deal to me. It sort ofexpressed what I had always had semicon-sciously thought and believed. In fact, Ideveloped a kind of a motto for myself that Ididn’t believe in gods and could not believein gods, but damn it, I was a respecter of them,[laughter] because they were powerful, be-cause they made things happen. Humanbeings had created them to make things hap-pen and to express what they were, and thatyou could tell a lot about people, about cul-tures in the terms of the kind of gods theyhad—what their gods stood for, what theirgods meant. And there could be good gods,bad gods, intermediate figures of all sorts, andwhen you saw what the gods stood for andall the minor gods that surrounded them—like even the Christian god that comes inmany, many forms, depending on what partsof the Scriptures one reads and what groups


of Christians one encounters—“god” is adifferent kind of a god and stands for differ-ent things, and tells you a lot about the peoplewho believed in their kind of god. So this tome was a revelation. I remember beingthrilled by this little tool I had, to thinkthrough the whole question of religion. Andit firmed up my non-mystical, my anti-mystical, skeptical orientation to aconsiderable degree during that time. Alongwith a lot of other things that were happen-ing to me, this made a great deal of sense.

I just wanted to ask you if at this time you con-sidered it a tool for understanding individualpeople, or were you thinking in terms of differ-ent cultures and societies?

Well, both, both. I mean it was a kind ofa tool in the sense of when you ask people orlisten to people when they talked about reli-gion and talk about God, or talk aboutspiritual essences and values of the world, yousort of get a tag on the kind of people theyare, what they believe, what they feel is im-portant, what their values are. And Iremember from then on, all my life, in con-versations about religion, I’d always ask morequestions than offer opinions; I was deeplycurious about what people had to say aboutwhat their gods stood for, what Jesus meantto a Christian.

And you’d find this wonderful variety ofresponses, the things that were picked out ofa whole range of legend and myth that a per-son would pull out that was more meaningfulto them than something else. Sure. So it toldyou something about individuals, but it alsotold you something about whole cultures andpeople, you know, what they stood for. Andthere were always the dissidents who said,“No, that isn’t what the gods said; that’s notwhat God believed. God believed something

else.” And then there was all the critique ofreligion within the religions themselves thattells you about the different kinds of peoplewho were involved in the religious system ororganization. Sure. To me it was like findinga laboratory process.

Do you think the atheism, a question of lack ofbelief on your part, as just on a different levelbeing able to be objective and sample anythingyou . . . any system, any thought process youwanted to explore?

No, it wasn’t that big. I’d like to think Ihad had a philosophical transcendencebreakthrough. [laughter] No, not that big.Just the idea that here was a series of state-ments, a way of looking at the things that Ihad been looking at, that was powerful, thatmade sense, that, when you applied it, toldyou something about reality.

Now, was Feuerbach a philosopher, a socialcritic?

He . . . what was Feuerbach? He was ascholar; I guess he was a philosopher, but Ihave to go look; I have to find out, but hewas a very important figure. In fact, laterMarx and Engels were affected by him andutilized his ideas, and then wrote a great cri-tique about Feuerbach, because they didn’tagree with him fully. They felt that he hadromanticized religion; he had actually cre-ated the basis for the “new religion,” ratherthan undermining the whole concept ofreligion.

Was Durkheim writing at this time? Didn’t heexplore . . . ?

He may have, but at that time I wasn’taware of Durkheim’s work.


Anyway, one of the things of Feuerbach’sthat I will never forget—it was so important,in fact, that I even jotted it down—becausehe talked about change: how all religionschange, how they evolve in terms of humanbeings, how human beings evolved anddeveloped, that their religions and their godschange with them, and that this is the pro-jection from the human consciousness, thehuman mind. And then he made this won-derful remark. He said, “Thus do thingschange. What yesterday was still religion isno longer such today. And what today is athe-ism tomorrow will be religion.” [laughter]

That was the sort of enigmatic statementthat I love, because it sort of threw every-

thing into this great spinning wheel of howideologies develop. And it’s true: the waymany convinced atheists codify their systemof atheism to such a degree that in a sense itbecomes another kind of religion, or any kindof ideology that becomes rigid is in a senseanother kind of projection, another kind ofreligion. This was very meaningful to me. Ithelped me do a lot of critical thinking at thattime and to try to find my way out of a paperbag that I had been in for so many years.

So that was going on, and at the sametime, see, Germany had lost the war in April,before I took my next ship. This was justabout the time of Roosevelt’s death; every-thing was happening at the same time.

49ON THE DAY STAR

HERE WAS Victory Day, V-Day, inSan Francisco, I remember, as I wason my next ship in the bay. We were

impressed by. They had struck because shipswere already being diverted for commoditytrade on the East Coast by the shipping com-panies. The NMU struck to support using theships to bring the troops back from Europeand from North Africa and wherever elsethey were stationed.

They had a one-day strike in support ofbringing the troops home, which made manyship owners and the War Shipping Admin-istration very angry, because they were tryingalready to diversify the use of the ships, whichwere getting in short-supply. The UnitedStates did not have as many ships as theyneeded at that time, and it was getting to bea problem. And, of course, the war was stillgoing on in the Pacific, so there was this greatproblem of not only the war, but what to doabout the changing trade situation in theAtlantic.

By the way, that went on for two or threeyears, the whole business of the great rush ofthe United States to control the trade and thedistribution of commodities to Europe, andthe Marshall Plan and all that, which ourunion was very much opposed to. And most

Tgetting ready to go; we were out at anchor,fully loaded and ready to leave and here wasthis tremendous celebration. We are on theship; we couldn’t get ashore, but the lightswere on. You could hear the horns and thesounds of shouting and exultation on bothsides of the bay. The whole bay was lit up,there was this enormous celebration going on.And because we were apart from it, I remem-ber the crew sitting out on deck, looking outat all this, being really very cynical—a senseof apartness, you know. Here, Germany hadsurrendered, and that’s great, but here we are,loading a troop ship. In fact, the troops werestill coming, being shipped out to us in thebay to go out into the Pacific, because Japanwas still at war with us. And we had this feel-ing of, “Oh, yeah?” you know, “Victory Dayfor who?”

However, some interesting things werehappening. The NMU, the National Mari-time Union, had struck on the East Coast.And this is something that I was very


of the unions were opposed to the MarshallPlan, seeing it as undermining the Americanmerchant marine in a way, but also creatinga situation in which trade union interests inwages, et cetera, would be diminished; thoseinterests would be diminished in the interestof getting goods to Europe. At the same timewe were very aware of what that movementmeant. It meant the great corporations in theUnited States, the great industries, wantedvery much to get in there first, to get intothe depressed European market and helprebuild, in quotes, “poor, downtroddenEurope.” Oh, we were very cynical!

I remember we were sitting around thedeck as troops were being brought up in thesebig barges, loaded on. I think we took on fif-teen hundred troops. We weren’t sure wherewe were going, but people were saying, “We’regoing to the western Pacific.” And it couldhave been anyplace, you know—Japan, IwoJima, which had been taken earlier; itcould’ve been Okinawa. We didn’t learn tillwe were out at sea that we were, in fact, go-ing to Okinawa.

So this was the Day Star.

This was on the Day Star. Yes. [laughter]I’m sorry, Penny, we haven’t gotten throughthese ships yet, or the war! [laughter]

Well, if you were cynical, I wonder . . . thetroops must have felt really . . . .

I don’t remember how they felt, except itwas a very ragged, scraggly bunch of guys thatcame aboard. This was toward the end of thewar, and things were not as—what was theword we used to use?—gung ho as they hadbeen. And there was a feeling of, “You’re go-ing now to risk your life, when it may not

even be necessary, and lord knows what’shappening over there.”

But I can’t speak too much to that,because I don’t remember that we talked alot about that. We just saw them comingaboard and going again into these awful holdsand feeling very sympathetic with them. I justremember the crew—I was on watch, andthere were three or four guys—watching allthis excitement going on ashore, and weweren’t in it. [laughter] All the wonderfulmayhem and orgiastic activity was going on,and we weren’t there to appreciate it, to bein on it! Nevertheless, it was wonderful thatthat part of the war was over, and yet therewas this sense of doom at the other side ofthe world, where we were going to beheading.

Then there was a question of the Selec-tive Service Act at any time maybe was goingto being lifted, and we as seamen didn’t knowwhat that would mean for us. It didn’t hap-pen until the end of 1945, beginning of 1946,that it was lifted for merchant seamen, butthe selective service still went on. There wasstill a minimal draft, because there were allsorts of problems. I think the Truman admin-istration wanted to lift this Selective ServiceAct, but Congress didn’t want them to, be-cause they wanted to maintain at least aminimal kind of draft procedure to keep thearmy and the navy, because there was a tre-mendous amount of attrition—people wereleaving.

So while all that was happening, weheaded off on the SS Day Star, west—thisloaded troop ship, heading, as we learnedwhen we got out, for Okinawa. There wasn’tthe feeling of excitement on that trip that Iremember on previous ones, where eventhough everybody was grousing and, youknow, worried about subs . . . and no matter

423ON THE DAY STAR

what kind of orders we got, they werewrong—you know everything was alwayswrong. Nevertheless, there was an excitementabout the war still going on, and we weredoing something; we were accomplishingsomething. And on this trip there wasn’t.There was a feeling of going into a dark, hope-less kind of situation, because the word wasthat Iwo Jima had been taken, oh, that Japanwas being bombed, that major cities werebeing bombed at that time.

So the idea was, just almost any time theJapanese were going to surrender, but in themeantime people were dying, you know; thatwas on everybody’s mind. “At any momentthe war may be ended, but the poor sons ofbitches who are being sent in there now mightbe killed. Most of them will be killed,” as theywere. And you know, “What good couldthose few days mean?” So there was that feel-ing on the ship. Among the troops, Iremember, it wasn’t dolorous; everybodywasn’t sitting around mournful, but there wasthis kind of feeling like, “What the hell arewe doing here? When is this goddamnedthing going to get over?” and all that.

A lot of irritation among the crew, I re-member, about small things. There wasn’t thesame kind of camaraderie that you had onmost ships. Even if you didn’t like the peoplethat you were shipping with, you felt you wereall in it together.

And there were reports of submarines,though nobody could believe there could beany Japanese submarines as far east as wherewe were and where we were then going, be-cause Japan had really been pushed back, andwe had control of most of the seas all the wayfrom the Aleutians down to Iwo Jima andthe Philippines, et cetera, and were now con-centrating on Japan itself. So even thoughwe had reports of submarines around . . .which was quite possible because there was a

desperation in the Japanese situation at thattime. They might have been sending out sub-marines to make some show of resistance orattack. But we weren’t very impressed by thatpossibility.

One anecdote occurs to me that is anexample of the mood on board. It took placeone night on watch. The second mate, whowas a navigator, was out taking a sighting fornavigation, getting a fix. And he came in andsays, “Goddamn it, I can’t get the . . . “ I for-get what star he was trying to get a fix on. “Ican’t get the son of a bitch.”

And I was saying, “Well, mate, just waita few minutes, and go back again. Maybe youreyes are getting watery thinking about yourgirlfriend.”

He said, “I’m not thinking about mygoddamned girlfriend.” He said, “You knowthe last time I saw her? She’s an astrologer.”[laughter] And he says, “You know, she wasmaking my chart, and she was saying, ‘Youknow, Uranus is rising on your chart.’” Andhe says, “What do you mean my anus? It’syour anus we’re worried about.” [laughter]

And I remember saying to him, you know,“For god’s sakes, you know, you sound likeeverything’s going wrong.”

He said, “I can’t get a sight on thisgoddamned star. I want that fix, or we’re go-ing to be going around in circles,” and he says,“And then I’m thinking, she asked me about‘your anus.’ Well, the hell with my anus, whatabout her anus!” [laughter]

I just remember that because it was atouching and beautiful moment on thebridge. [laughter] The second mate tramp-ing back and forth trying to get a fix for thesextant.

Anyway, I don’t have a very clear recol-lection of that trip across, just that it wascrowded, and it wasn’t like in the tropics; itwas cold. So the troops coming up on deck


were always all bundled up in their smelly,dirty clothes, because they couldn’t washthem; some would try and throw their stuffover side, and it would take days for it to dry.Oh, there’s nothing like seawater that hasn’tbeen completed dried out—it stinks. Andafter a day or two of wearing damp, seawater-washed clothing, you stink! And soeverybody stank, and I remember that. Andthere was a lot of grousing.

Were you delegate again?

No, I don’t think I was delegate on thistrip, but the next one. I don’t recall. If I wasdelegate, I don’t remember doing anythingabout it. [laughter] I don’t know that we hadany beefs that you could do anything about.You had the feeling you were out in no-man’s-land, no-man’s-sea. And I don’t know if therewould have been anything we could havecomplained about. I don’t remember that wehad any beefs with the officers—maybe wedid, but I don’t recall. But I do recall the feel-ing of going into the unknown and a senseof depression. There was a lot of depressionon that ship.

On our way to Okinawa, we had someengine trouble and had to pull off of Midwayand get some parts, some help before wemoved on. Midway is past the main Hawai-ian chain, and way out beyond. There hadbeen a Pan-American airfield there after1935, then a U.S. Naval base through 1941or so that the Japanese had taken, and thenwe finally got them off of Midway in the early1940s. So by the time we got there it was amajor base. And we were told by the guyscoming aboard from Midway, you know, “Oh,Jesus, you guys are going west—too bad you’renot going east. [laughter] You don’t want togo out there! Things are rugged out there.

They’re really bad.” This kind of stuff wasgoing on. And so then we headed on.

And from there I think we had a smallconvoy, a couple of destroyers were with us—not to protect us, but they were going, too,and a navy supply ship was with us, too.

So you weren’t taking troops to Midway; youwere going . . . ?

No, no, we didn’t even have a chance togo ashore, and who would want to? Youlooked out at this little strip out there. It wasa very remote and isolated-looking place. No,we just stayed there a day, not even at anchor.I think we just sort of steamed around wait-ing for something that we had to have fromshore, then off we went.

And a few days later we approachedOkinawa Bay on the eastern side of theisland—this large bay that was crammed withships of all kinds: merchant ships, navy ves-sels of all kinds, a large battleship or two, andit was just crammed, everywhere you looked.That bay was a very large one, and, you know,for miles you’d just see ships. And as we camein, in the afternoon, I can remember we couldhear it; we could hear the battle going on inOkinawa. This must have been in early ormid June, I think. And you could just hearthe thunder, and as it got darker, at twilight,the lights of this battle back and forth—youcould see these great tracers going across thesky. I had never been that close to battle, andit was terribly oppressive, a feeling of . . . itwasn’t fear. Some of the troops and crew andall were, after we anchored, just standing,looking at the shoreline of this glowing set oftracers and bombs going off from both sides.You could see where the battle lines were,from the sort of northern part where ourpeople were and southern part where the

425ON THE DAY STAR

Japanese were. And this went on and on andon all night. In fact, the sound was so huge,at times there would be shells that would gooff on land that would shake the ship—Imean, actually shake the water, the sea thatwe were in, in the bay. You could feel itthrough the whole ship, you know—karump,karump, karump.

So that went on all night and for a coupleof days. And then all during this, during theday, little by little trying to get the troops off.And they didn’t have enough of these am-phibian landing boats, or barges, so the troopscould only get off little by little. And as eachof this bunch went, I remember all of us feel-ing, you know, an awful feeling that the guyswere going there. They’re going into that, youknow. Oh, it was just so . . . that was awful.It was awful watching them go.

And it took, I think, two or three daysfor 1200 to 1500 men to get off the ship. Andthey were a sad bunch—stinking, trying tolook brave and like they didn’t give a damn.But, you know, they were miserable, and theycould see what was happening where theywere going.

And while it was happening, particularlyduring the day, every hour or so we’d hearthis great commotion of all the ships’ gunsgoing off, the tracer shells going up in a littleV up in the sky, and there would be kamika-zes moving around up there, and then you’dhear “zzzz” like bees, and they would comedown, and once or twice they’d crash into aship. And we heard that one ship at somedistance was sunk by a kamikaze. This wasthe last, desperate moments during thePacific war, of the Okinawa battle.

Was there any radio chatter that . . . you know,you said you used to go to the Sparks Radio Shackto try and follow . . . .

Oh, I’ve missed that. Coming over we’dget radio broadcasts. As I can recall, we gotvery little news, and it was very bad.

So this battle for Okinawa had been go-ing on from just about the time that we hadgotten on the ship back in San Francisco earlyin April, through May and June. We hadcome into Okinawa Bay in mid June, so thishad been going on for two months or more.One of the worst battles of the Pacific actu-ally took place in Okinawa—one of thebloodiest, one of the most indescribably hor-rible battles, and we were seeing it therebefore us, like a hellish panorama. For dayswe were watching it; day and night these gunswere going.

We could also see the slow diminishingof the firing from the south where our troopswere moving through the Japanese lines. Wecould actually see this change. And althoughwe didn’t get any detailed reports of what wasgoing on there on the island, we would getreports like, “Things are looking up. We aremoving in.”

We didn’t learn till later that out of200,000 or more Japanese, oh, god, let’s see,130,000 or 140,000 had been killed on theisland. And we had 50,000 or more wounded,many of those dead. And it was a terriblething. We learned about these figures later.But we could see it was awful. And all theword that would come from the island wouldbe depressing.

Was this by radio?

Well, now and then from people comingup to take the troops. These guys on the pon-toon boats, you know, would make littlecomments, like, “It’s pretty bad; it’s prettyawful.” Oh, and then these kamikazeplanes—every few hours we’d hear these


planes and hear all the shooting from theships, and we’d know that these were kami-kazes. At distance we could see them fallinginto the bay, being shot down. Some wouldgo into the bay. Every now and then onewould hit a ship. And although we didn’t seeit, one large cruiser or something had been, Ithink, sunk in the bay, and at any time itcould be us.

And then there was that one day inwhich we heard the guns stop. I think it wason the twenty-first of June, when the Japa-nese had finally been completely demolishedand with a few survivors, probably had sur-rendered at that time. And it just came to astop, deadly still. There is a feeling that onecan’t describe when something like this hap-pens—this noise for days, and then suddenlynothing, absolutely nothing. And everythingwas still. The day was still; there was no soundfrom the other ships. But everybody was stilllistening although the battle seemed to havestopped.

And while we were listening, we heardthis deadly, stealthy sound; this little buzz go-ing on in the sky. And our ship began to fire,and some other ships nearby, and it almostthrew us off our feet. I forget what millime-ter they were, but seldom did you everexperience those guns going off. But whenthey did, the plates of the ship would justbuckle, and you would be thrown practicallydown, worse than any earthquake you’ve everexperienced. [laughter] And they started go-ing off, and we looked up, and the tracerswere going out toward one little spot in thesky. And there was this kamikaze wheelingaround and diving right toward the group ofships that we were in. And it just kept com-ing like a little hornet, you know, rrrrrr, down,and all the tracers following it. And it hit Iwould say about fifty yards from our ship,between us and another ship. It had been

deflected, and it hit the water, broke up, andeveryone was cheering, you know. And well,between our ship and the next, we saw a headbobbing. It was the pilot, who was still alive,you know. And a little pontoon boat wentout, with guys with their guns ready and allthat, you know, and picked this poor, be-draggled kid up, and brought him to our shipfirst, as he was nearest us.

And I wrote something down in my note-book at the time. Yes, I say, “Suddenly oneday there was silence. Word flashed amongthe convoyed ships that the Japanese troopshad surrendered, ending the carnage on oneof the last bastions of the war. The cheers ofhundreds of crews strung out on the wind likecries of sea birds. But in the midst of thisstrangely dispersed and mirthless celebration,sirens began to wail again, and anti-aircraftguns on dozens of nearby vessels blasted awayat a swarm of tiny dots in the sky.” (Oh, itwas more than one.) “One of these specksdove down directly toward us until we couldmake out the markings and patheticallyantique structure of a kamikaze plane. Itcrashed unexploded into the sea, scarcelytwenty yards to our starboard.” Oh, this ismore exact than what I was telling you. “Thepilot was thrown clear and, miraculouslyalive, was dragged from the water by an oddlygentle and unrevengeful navy launch crew.”I remember that. They were very nice to him.[laughter] I think they were stunned. Nobodyknew what to do, you know. “The sole livingremnant of a failed suicide squadron,” becausethe other ones had been shot down,“ . . . crouched spiritless among his captors,barely fifteen years old, we learned, unawareof the surrender . . . ”—because he was proba-bly sent off before anybody probably told himabout the surrender—“ . . . and stunned byunintended survival.” He expected to die. “Igot a brief glimpse of his fine and passive face

427ON THE DAY STAR

as the launch sped off to a nearby destroyer.And in that unforgettable instant, I con-fronted the fleeting images of all thosedemarcated persons,” and I have here noted,like Kyoshi, my friend at college, andMotofuji in Hawaii, “who I had known, whoalong with me were caught up in a web ofcircumstance beyond our comprehension orcontrol. What would any of us be like, hav-ing grown up in the countries of our parentsor grandparents that they had come from?What would the war, or anything else, meanto us then? What made a kamikaze pilot, aNazi brownshirt, a good soldier? For thatmatter, what made any of us what we were?And as we leaned against the ship rail, I re-member one of us, one of the crew, saying,‘He must have been doped,’ [laughter] andanother guy saying, ‘We all are.’ And thattense exchange stuck with me during thecoming months.” Anyway, that was some-thing that I wrote at the time that givessomething of the quality of the experienceto me.

We were told that one of the officers fromour ship had to go ashore for some reason, toleave some reports or get some directives asto what we were to do, to sign off the troopsthat had been taken off and all that. Andtwo or three members of the crew went alongwith them. I didn’t really want to go, but if Ihad had a chance, I would have gone. Butwhen they came back, I’ll never forget, thisone dumb, young kid had a skull that he hadgotten from some of the soldiers. It was aJapanese skull, and it had been carved—itprobably was from months before, youknow—and here it was, a clean, sea-washedskull, and the top was cut off for a kind oflantern for candles! And I remember one ofthe crew, very angry, saying, “What the fuckare you doing with that damn thing? I don’twant it on our ship. It’s bad luck. What do

you mean bringing something like thataboard the ship?” You know, he was reallydeeply offended by this kid.

He didn’t know any better. You know, hewas going to take it home to his mother orsomething so she would see what a great sou-venir. And then one of the crew said, “Whydon’t you get a jar of Jap penises. You know,they’re supposed to be selling them all overthe Pacific. Why don’t you bring her some-thing important?” That kind of banteringwent on. But that kid, he kept that damnthing and put a candle in it and had it in hisfo’c’s’le. And even his fo’c’s’le mates couldn’tstand him, you know, and they wanted to getrid of him, and they were complaining. Butit was his, and he had a right to it, this darnedJapanese skull. [laughter]

So I think we went back empty on thattrip. I don’t recall we had any kind of cargoto bring back. Oh, there were a few woundedsoldiers who we took back.

Were there other merchant marines in the bay?

There were, and in my early notes I havethe names of two or three merchant shipswhere we knew people aboard, but I can’tremember what they were. We didn’t get achance to communicate with any of them atthat time. It was a messy situation. You didn’tdo what you wanted to. You went in andwaited and got out as soon as you could.

So, anyway, I think we had somewounded troops aboard—not seriouslywounded, just guys that needed to get back. Idon’t know what kind of hospital facilitiesthere were either on Okinawa or on the navyships, but apparently others were going else-where. With 48,000 to 50,000 Americancasualties and the Japanese almost totallywiped out—200,000 of them or so almosttotally wiped out—you know, we wouldn’t


expect that any of those guys would be readyto take a long trip on a merchant ship home,you know, without medical facilities. But Iremember we had maybe a couple dozen orsomething, guys that were on crutches or hadwounds and things of that kind—apparentlyguys that could be taken care of by us.

We headed back to San Francisco, and Idon’t remember any particular event goingback, except we were somewhat empty, so itwas a very rough trip. The ship was extremelylight and bouncing around But I rememberfeeling depression; I think everybody wasdepressed.

So there was no surety that the war was over,right?

No. No, that was shortly coming. You see,this was June, and the Japanese surrender wasin August, and I was on the Neptune’s Car,which I will talk about in a moment. But Icame back, and I only had a couple of weeks.I don’t really recall that couple of weeks

between the Day Star and the Neptune’s Car,or that we even knew what was happening.But I know that I had to ship out right awayfor some reason, or that I had a chance toship out. And by the way, the pay was betteron these damned trips of this kind. You know,you got war-area pay. It wasn’t very much,but it brought our pay up to about what thenavy was getting, [laughter] but, neverthe-less, it was better pay than we had on othertrips.

Oh, there was a lot of ferment on thewaterfront. There was a lot of talk of strikes.And in fact, at the end of that year the Com-mittee for Maritime Unity, the CIO MaritimeCommittee, et cetera, were already beginningto make demands about the end of the war,payments, wages, and I think they were be-ginning to talk about the Seaman’s Bill ofRights and things of that kind. There was alot of this kind of thing going on, but I don’trecall being much involved in it. Certainly Imust have seen Kathy and our parents, but Idon’t recall that.

50THE END OF THE WAR

REMEMBER almost immediately gettingon the Neptune’s Car. I shipped onNeptune’s Car August twelfth, and that

lot of shock among the people I knew. It wasunbelievable. Do you recall that, Kath?

Kd: Oh, I remember when it wasdropped. We were living on Chestnut Streetin Alameda, and I guess that Anya was notyet a year old. I remember, you know, the totalstunned feeling that everybody had. It was soawful, you could hardly dare to think aboutit. And I remember Oppenheimer’s statementabout his seeing God or something like thatwhen the bomb went off. I think he was re-ferring back to Los Alamos when they testedit. There was a revival of some of that infor-mation and some of the worry. Everybodyknew that it was a marker of some kind andthat nothing would be the same. [“I am be-come death the destroyer of worlds” is themuch quoted text from the Bagavad GitaRobert Oppenheimer is said to have utteredwhen the first atom bomb was successfullytested, July 16, 1945.]

Yes, there was a halfhearted kind of cele-bration, you know. We’d done it. We hadfinally put the Japanese where they should

Iwas just after August sixth—right afterHiroshima.

The atom bomb was dropped just a fewdays before we left. And all I can rememberabout that is this terrible shock that some-thing awful had happened and that we weregoing back into that area. And I’m not evenclear about what the reaction was at thattime.

Now in hindsight, we know how immense theeffect was, and there are all these testimonies fromthe people that were on the Enola Gay and whatthey saw, you know, but was there any sense ofthat at the time, back in the states?

Yes. Yes. We knew it was terrible, and itwas enormous, that it was beyond anybody’scomprehension, and that it had almostdestroyed the city. And there was a lot of jubi-lation. I mean, people were saying, “Oh, we’regoing to get those damn Japs now, you know.What are they going to do?” And also just a


be. I mean, they now would have to recog-nize that they couldn’t go on fighting theirkamikaze-like, total resistance to the veryend. On the other hand, I don’t rememberanything but depression—the sense of shock.Wonder of wonders.

Kd: Oh, I just know that it was an enor-mous event that nobody could quite grasp,except that you knew that it marked the be-ginning of something very new and terriblyscary.

Yes. And then just a few days later, onthe ninth, I guess, of August, Nagasaki. Sothese things just came right after one another.

Did the public have any notion that a secondbomb was going to be dropped?

Not that I remember.

Kd: None.

No, I think all of this just happened. Idon’t think anybody knew that . . . theyknew there was a bomb and that threats hadbeen made about us having a bomb, but Idon’t know if anybody had any advancednotice that it was going to be dropped.

Kd: It was a total shock, as I remember.

Did the second one generate any . . . was thereany critique at the time?

If there was, I don’t remember it. I’m surethere was, but it would have been verymuffled. Anybody opposed to this would havehad a hard time making a public expression.

Kd: Well, you were quiet about it becauseeverybody was so happy that the war wascoming to an end, clearly.

Yes, there were things in the papers about,“We’ve saved thousands of American livesby doing this.” It was all that kind of thing.But I don’t think anybody felt jubilant. Therewere some, of course, but I mean, there wasn’tthat mood of celebration. But then there wasa kind of the feeling of celebration a few dayslater when Japan surrendered, I think on thefourteenth. And that was the end of the war.They had surrendered. So then that put thebomb dropping in perspective. ”Oh, we hadto do it, and it was a good thing to do be-cause it brought the war to an end, andthousands more lives would have been loston both sides. So a few hundred thousand inNagasaki and Hiroshima, aside . . . .”[laughter] I would like to go back over thenewspapers of that time and see what wasreally going on in the press. I don’t remember.

As we know now, there was a great dealof confusion in the government about thewhole issue of the bomb and the use of it,and charges and countercharges. But at thattime, I don’t think the general public had anyidea of anything, except something enormoushad happened, beyond anybody’s compre-hension. And yet it had brought an end tothe war from their point of view. I thinkKathy’s right that most of the people we knewwere just stunned. You hardly knew what tosay.

Kd: Well, it was beyond your ability tounderstand. But you knew it was awful, andyou knew that human beings given what theyare and not forgetting would go on using itor trying to.


And it was a frightening portent of thefuture. What is this going to mean? You know,what are we going to do with this? What areothers going to do with it? On and on.

Oh, this was the signal for the Cold War.And the following year it popped up because,“Supposing the Soviet Union got this? Sup-posing certain other countries got it? We haveto keep it a secret.” And would it ever beused against us?

Oh the United Nations was meeting thatyear. The first United Nations conferencesin San Francisco were taking place. So all ofthis was happening at once, with the idea, itcan never happen again. It was like after theFirst World War, my parents saying, “This willnever happen again. This is going to be thelast war, the war to end all wars.” Well, theidea was now, it had to be, because you couldkill off the whole human race and destroythe planet. So a tremendous amount of thatsort of feeling was going on. “What can wedo?” In fact, I have some letters that I thinkyou [Kathy d’Azevedo] wrote, that you andDoris and Ellen Phillipsborn were going tomeetings in San Francisco.

Kd: Yes.

You were hearing all kinds of speakers,talking about the future. “What are we go-ing to do?”

Kd: Oh, these were terribly hopefultimes.

Well, and worried.

Kd: Yes. But very hopeful.

Do you mean hopeful in terms of some . . . ?

Things have got to change for the better.

Kd: And the fact that, you know,Roosevelt had been such a positive leader andhad set forth such positive principles for try-ing to resolve problems in the world.

But then Truman was not somebody wefelt that positive about.

I was going to ask later, but I’ll ask now. Idid want to know if the role of Eleanor Rooseveltwas in any way a prominent part of thelabor . . . ?

Oh, yes. To us, to people we knew.

Kd: To everybody.

Yes, maybe to everybody, but I thoughtthere was an awful lot of criticism about her,too.

Kd: She was very revered.

Yes, the people we knew looked upon heras a very heroic woman, as a woman of greatprinciple, somebody who we trusted. Didn’twe meet her? Was that later that we met herdaughter, Anna Roosevelt? I remember go-ing to progressive parties, one where she was.Do you remember meeting her then?

Kd: She came to visit, where I wasworking.

Oh. That’s right.

Kd: She came to Children’s Hospital, inOakland. The Oakland Child DevelopmentCenter was a highly experimental, very wellthought of treatment program for young chil-


dren. And she was one of the many visitorswho came through there to see . . . .

I was wondering about Eleanor’s role, becauseyou said that in general, Roosevelt was regardedby the labor progressive movement as a progres-sive president. And I just wondered if she wasconsidered even . . . ?

She was thought of as more outspokenlyprogressive because he was caught in the webof . . . .

Kd: Oh, I think she also was known topush him to the Left. Oh, he used her infor-mation and her point of view and herexperience with communities in the coun-try very well, I think.

She was highly admired by people wecared about. I mean, she was a clear, positiveforce. And I guess there was the idea thatshe had the ear of the president, and shewould affect his . . . .

Kd: I just remember when we stayed inNew York during the NMU convention.

Nineteen forty-seven or nineteen forty-eight, yes.

Kd: Yes. In the Weiss’s apartment onCentral Park West. It was so beautiful. AndLouis Weiss, who knew the Roosevelts, hada big picture of Eleanor, inscribed personallyto him, on his dresser. And he loved her. Andhe said, “Franklin would never be the manhe is . . .

Without Eleanor. [laughter]

Kd: . . . if he didn’t have Eleanor.”

No, but there was also a lot of hatred ofher . . . .

Kd: Oh, yes.

Just like there is of Hillary Clinton, butshe had her admirers. She certainly wasn’t avery pretty person or good-looking person oranything like that, as I remember, but shehad a tremendous amount of power and dig-nity. I couldn’t stand the way she spoke—herintonation and all that. I don’t know whereit came from. Nevertheless, she had impor-tant things to say, and she was usually on whatwe considered the right side of issues.

Kd: Oh, very much so.

We had great admiration for her.So, I came back very briefly, and just as I

got on the Neptune’s Car, Hiroshima,Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrender while Iwas at sea—just two or three days after wegot to sea. We heard first, this shock of theatomic bombs, and then suddenly the Japa-nese surrender.

I remember on the Neptune’s Car—although I’m sure it was jubilation expressedeverywhere in the country about this—every-body was just sort of depressed. Probably thereare many reasons for that.

The raison d’être of our kind of work andthe kinds of things we were doing—the war—was gone. You know, we were no longer theseheroic figures going to sea. That was one partof it.

The other part was where we were going;we were going west, and we had heard weprobably were going to Japan. It was inter-esting and all that, but it was just a terriblydepressing thing. Also, there was all kinds oftalk on the ship that came through the radio


operators’ set about fallout, you know, aboutthe dangers of atomic fallout.

So that was acknowledged.

Well, it was acknowledged that it wasthere, but nobody knew how extensive. No-body knew how really bad it was.

But you did know what it was?

Yes, we knew that there was a driftingdanger and all that, but none of us realizedhow serious it really was. But this is just partof the view that something horrible had hap-pened out there, and the war was over, adismal, depressed “end of an era,” a fin deciecle feeling about, “What now? Whatnow?”

Oh! And I got word that the bomb wasgoing to be dropped on Bikini in 1946. Ithadn’t happened yet, but I remembered back,when we had gone through the South Pacific,the Ellice Islands, and had taken that onepoor, old man from Bikini, who wanted tovisit his relatives, and who had heard thatthey were going to be moved. This was muchbefore anybody ever said that the Bikinianshad been contacted. But obviously they hadsome idea that it was going to happen. Sohere two or three years later the bomb wasdropped on Bikini.

All those things were . . . it was an un-pleasant time. Also, I think among the crew,the merchant crew, there was the feeling thatwe were no longer going to have the statusthat we had. “We’re just a bunch of lousy sea-men,” you know. [laughter]

Kd: A lot of uncertainty about the future.

There was a lot of uncertainty about thefuture for good reason, because it was goingto happen.

What were you taking to . . . ?

As I remember, the cargo was commodi-ties. When we got to Yokohama, I found outwhat most of it was. It was mostly cigarettesand liquor, you know. [laughter] There werea lot of other things, too—you know, a lot ofthings for the American troops that weregoing to be stationed there. Lord knows whatelse we had, but it was loaded with cigarettesand liquor!

I can’t remember what sort of images Imay have had in my mind or others had, aswe were approaching Japan or Yokohama—what we were thinking in terms of what wewould find, the fact we were actually goingto be seeing the Japanese, now a conqueredpeople. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadjust happened. All those things had to be onour minds, but at the moment I can’t recallwhat kind of expectations we had. All I knowis when we finally got to dock in Yokohamain a very crowded harbor, with mostlyAmerican ships, and had our first glimpse ofthe town, the city, Yokohama, in rubble—itwas devastated—I think we took it forgranted.

We had gotten across the Pacific to Japan,which had stood in the center of all of theproblems that we had had in the Pacific sincethe early 1940s. There was all of the charac-terization of the Japanese as barbaric andvicious and horrible, and their social systemas totally despotic. And the idea of the em-peror and the rising sun and of Japan havingalmost taken all of east Asia and the Pacificislands, then having been slowly driven back


by us, and all the battles that were reportedand the feeling of at last the country had beenconquered.

And here we were just a couple of weeksafter the armistice. MacArthur signed thepeace treaty on the battleship Missouri inTokyo harbor September second of 1945, andwe were there just a couple of weeks or soafter that. As I remember, the feeling was,“Well, here we are, and the war is finished,and here is what they have.” Oh, I can re-member guys saying, “Well, they got whatthey deserved,” looking at this rubble of thiscity.

Cargo was being taken off our ship, andas I said earlier, I can remember slings goingover the side with cases and cases of liquorfrom the holds, of Scotch and bourbon andbrandy and cigarettes. [laughter] I had theimpression that half of our cargo was ciga-rettes. And Coca-Cola and all of thetrappings of American life were going overthe side, and I suppose mostly for our troops.There was other cargo as well—equipmentof various kinds. I don’t remember the de-tails, but we had a fairly substantial cargo.

And watching as cargo was being un-loaded over the side, I became deeplyinterested in who was getting it and how itwas being handled on the dock. It was mostlyarmy trucks coming and picking up the cargoand taking it away. But there were also someJapanese laborers, and they were a veryscroungy-looking bunch. I’m not sure whatrole they had, but there were these very ema-ciated-looking Japanese on the dock as well.

And one thing that fascinated me waswatching the pilfering. [laughter] I mean,merchant seamen are well known for pilfer-ing. Not well known, but I mean we did it,and it was talked about and rumored. I canremember when I was on the YPO up inKotzebue and Skagway, where one of the sea-

men was accused of taking steaks ashore in aBible. [laughter] I mean, there were ingeniousways of pilfering and getting things off ofships.

There were a lot of times when, as far asI’m concerned, it was legitimate pilfering. Youknow, when the troops would be taken backto American ports during the war, they wouldleave all their gear on board ship, and mostof that stuff was either tossed over the side atsea or picked up for lord knows what—maybejust as rubbish before we would leave on thenext trip. And, of course, we would takecoats; I got some myself, a wonderful Seabeejacket and some woolen dungarees and socksand shoes and things of that kind. And wewould all do that, because we’d argue, it wasall going to be tossed anyway. So I lookedupon that as benign pilfering and, you know,when some guy took home some steak for hisgirlfriend or his mother or whatever was lay-ing around the ship. [laughter]

There were some cases of merchant sea-men and others being caught and fined,sometimes sent to jail for pilfering, but thatwas for large amounts, taking something veryvaluable. But the petty pilfering that we did,I considered to be the part of the loot of war,[laughter] and I know the army and the navyoutdid us, because they had good equipment;they had good things to pilfer, and we hadthe dregs.

But anyway, there at the Yokohamadocks, I can remember clearly—it was some-thing that really stuck in my mind—seeingcertain trucks come in, picking up a load ofliquor and cigarettes, and rather than goingthe way of the other trucks, being motionedin another direction. [laughter] And thatwould happen about every four or five trucks;there would be some that went another way.And, of course, the rumor was, with proba-


bly a degree of reality, that this was a veryflourishing army black market activity.

When I finally got ashore I could see why.I mean, a pack of cigarettes could buy whatwould be in this country fifty, twenty dollarsworth of goods. I mean, you had the impov-erished Japanese living in hovels in theburned-out and blasted-out buildings. Andthey had little markets already, flourishingsmall markets—a family or two or threepeople sitting in the rubble with some ob-jects laid out in front of them. You know, fora carton of cigarettes you could have almostanything in sight.

Not only that, people gave you things ifyou looked at it. You just felt you were reallyamong a people who had been brought to thebottom of the heap, and that they in everyway were trying to placate the Americans, asthough the Americans were going to just killthem or destroy them. I remember feelingterribly weird and even guilty going throughtown and having people kowtow to me, asthough myself and my shipmates, somehowor other were going to hurt them. And thesepeople were really ragged. There were somewho weren’t, of course; there always are.

I have something I want to read that Iwrote shortly after I was there. I recalled thefeeling I had in Okinawa about this Japanese“kamikaze kid” falling into the sea, and in-stead of dying as he expected to do—andwould have been to him a noble death—hegets picked up by the enemy and carriedaboard. Fourteen, fifteen years old, a scared,totally emaciated kid. And I rememberedwhen one of my shipmates said, “He musthave been doped or something,” because heacted so somnambulistic, and another guysaying, “Well, we all are.” And I . . . [laugh-ter] I had the feeling in Yokohama, that thisis the ultimate high on the dope of war—theconquerors coming into this absolutely dev-astated area, where people had a few monthsbefore been going about their business, in-volved in supporting their war with businessesflourishing and the city still somewhat intact.It had been pretty well bombed very early.Yokohama along with Tokyo had beenbombed repeatedly by Americans. But any-way, there was that feeling of, “So this is it.This is what we’ve done. This is what wehave. What are we going to do with this?”

51YOKOHAMA

HE WHOLE Okinawa experiencewas with me all through August onthe Neptune’s Car as we were going

tic survivors now defer to us with downcasteyes.

“The ultimate retaliation had beenvented. There was nothing left to do, but pickup the pieces and go about business as usual.And this well underway, for in every crannyof that ruined city a brisk and all but silenttrade flourished between alien kinds. Oursoldiers and sailors wandered sheepishlythrough makeshift marts where emaciatedvendors displayed motley assortments of thisand that: lustrous porcelain and silks, rareprints and scrolls, wonderful objects of shelland lacquer, heartrending collections ofchildren’s toys and garments—all the exoticsalvage of disaster spread out in the dust.”

When did you write this?

I wrote parts, I think, coming back on aship as part of a letter. I continue, “Americancigarettes could be bartered for anything—even for American money [laughter]—at afantastic rate of exchange. And there weremore eerie spoils of victory than that.

Tto Japan. And when the news aboutHiroshima and Nagasaki came, we knew thatthere were smoldering ruins just to the southof us, I mean, where tens of thousands of peoplehad been killed. So all this was with me whenwe docked at Yokohama in September, wherewe were [reads] “to unload a cargo largely ofcigarettes, beer, and bourbon, et cetera, intothe beds of waiting military trucks. In thestreets of that bombed out city, the raggedpeople bowed as we passed as though grate-ful we did not harm them, and even the mostslipshod or otherwise unlikely of us weretreated as benign conquerors.

“But I also remember feeling a deep senseof relief and pride that so few Americans ofthat early occupying force behaved like blus-tering victors, though some did and werebrought in line by their fellows. Perhaps wewere all under the pall of the incomprehen-sible enormity that had led to the surrenderof a feared and despised enemy whose pathe-


“When a shipmate and I took an excur-sion down to Kamakura, the conductor onthe train refused our money, and the passen-gers pushed one another aside to give us seats.And we must have been an outlandish sightin our white caps and dungarees and ourefforts to be polite through gestures andgrimaces.”

And these probably were more ominousto them than had we barely scowled or de-manded something. [laughter] I went toKamakura because I’d heard of the greatBuddha, and I wanted to see it; so I wentdown on this little train with a shipmate,Danny.

[reads] “Finally we walked the streets ofthat still beautiful city. The people kept at adistance, and even the children seemed notto notice us. About dusk we came upon thatgreat bronze Buddha, seated on a rise of stepsat the end of a long park. My usually taciturnshipmate whistled through his teeth in appre-ciation, and I can scarcely fathom the effectthat scene had upon me.

“Then as we stood there, a small, wizenedman came trotting in our direction. Bobbingbefore him on a stick was a marvelous lan-tern made of a large blow fish, glowing fromthe candle within. It was a pale, dancingmoon, growing larger and more luminous ashe approached. Nothing could have beenmore strange and lovely in that place at thatmoment.

“And when the old man was within a fewfeet of us, he came to a startled halt, as thoughseeing ghosts. I tried to put him at ease bysmiling and nodding in admiration at thelantern. He thrust it into my hand and tot-tered frantically down the path, looking backas if he was being followed. [laughter] I feltsuddenly sick and angry. This was no timefor sightseeing. My shipmate tried to laughme out of the deep funk as we headed back

to the station, and I struggled to hide thatincongruous blow fish lantern under myjacket all the way to Yokohama and our ship.On the trip home I fussed over it endlessly,soaked it in linseed oil, tinted it, and stuffingand caulking it to hold its shape. It has beenwith me wherever I have lived, sometimesset aglow by a tiny incandescent bulb, re-minding me of that frightened old man, theserene vista of that park in Kamakura, andthe end of the war.” And now fifty years laterit hangs in this room, as we talk.

In Kamakura on that same little excur-sion that Danny and I made, an old man cameup to us and started talking in English. Hewas very excited and very, very timid, but hewas determined to talk to us, particularly touse his English. He wanted to know wherewe were from and what ship we were on andall that, and then he invited us to his house.Would we come and see his house—a veryold Japanese man. And so we went with him.

And he took us into this really squalidghetto where you went through all kinds oflittle, muddy, dirt paths, and through thesesort of makeshift houses, but some of themrather beautiful, because they were made withsliding screens, and this was at dusk, with thelight coming out through them. And it wasobviously a very impoverished place or onethat had become run down since the war.

He took us to his house and opened upthe screens. We took off our shoes and wentinside and sat down, and here were thesebeautiful mats all over the floor. We learnedhe’d been a professor of Asian literature atthe university in Yokohama. After he sat usdown, his wife came in and his daughter, andthey served us tea.

I remember this little house; couldn’thave been more than two small rooms, but itwas extremely beautiful. I was impressed byhow neat and clean everything was. They had

439YOKOHAMA

these little carved tables and a couple of lan-terns that were quite beautiful. His wife litthem, and while she was making tea, she wentto get various things to put on the table—teacups and little lacquered plates—all keptin little drawers. There were little commodesaround where everything was kept. Thingswere folded, beautifully put away in theselittle drawers, so that nothing was in theroom; everything was in these little drawers.

And they were very nice to us, very polite.And we had a long talk about the war andhow glad he was that it was over, and hehoped that we Americans would understandwhat they had done and what they had todo, and that even though it was terrible, itwas now great that it was over.

I think he sort of saw us as emissaries.Here are these two scroungy-looking seamenon shore leave, and he was treating us asthough we were important emissaries. Andthat made me feel sad; it was a very peculiarkind of thing, having him treat us like hon-ored guests.

And so we had tea and some little past-ries. He wanted us to stay all night. Heshowed us that they had bedrolls over in thecorner—these beautiful, little silk comfort-ers and bedrolls. And his wife was noddingand pointing and saying, “Yes,” you know,“you must stay.” But we couldn’t; we had togo back to the ship.

But, anyway, I had my little lantern withme at that point, and he asked about that,and I told him this old man had run away.And he said, “Oh, the man was frightened,but he wanted you to know he was a friend.”

And I thought, “Well, maybe, but the oldman looked like he was saving his life whenhe got away.” [laughter]

And I said, “I felt funny taking this thing,because it was a nice lantern.”

And he says, “Oh, you keep it. You takeit home, and you remember Yokohama.Remember this place.”

We left and went back to the ship. Butthat’s one experience that I remember veryclearly, as though I’m looking at it now in adocumentary. It is clear and sharp, everythingthat I experienced and I saw. We went backby train, again people giving us seats, gettingup and having us sit down on this crowdedtrain. And I didn’t feel as though people werebeing polite. They were just doing somethingthat they had to do; you treated conquerorswell.

Were there any other Anglos?

No. I saw no other Americans downthere. There must have been some Americanarmy down there, but . . . .

Well, I wanted to ask if you got any kind of for-mal briefing before you went ashore?

Not at all! [laughter] Not on a merchantship.

Really?

No. “Just go ashore. Get back on watchon time”—that’s all.

Well, I was really taken with your descriptionthat if there was any tendency for people to blus-ter about that, people were soon . . . .

Well, to me, that was interesting andimportant, but there were some incidents Iheard about Americans actually breaking intohouses and taking things. And there weredrunken groups going through the city, shout-ing and yelling at the people, and some fights


and things of that kind. But I never saw it.This was rumor.

What I saw was really a sort of quiet . . . .I felt that the army men that I saw there werevery aware that they had an enormously im-portant mission. Maybe they had been briefedthat they were supposed to act in a certainway. I hope that’s the case, because that’ssomething good about what the leadershipwas telling them and doing.

But I did see a lot of drunkenness. Therewas the Grand Cherry bar in an old, bombed-out bank building that had been a very ornatebuilding. I remember all the white columns,some of them broken down, inside this veryrickety establishment, run by some Japanese,I guess, maybe with American backing. Younever knew, sometimes American entrepre-neurs were right there, and they may haveworked with the Japanese to do this—I don’tknow. That sort of thing did happen, but hereit looked as though it was run by Japanese.

There were a lot of rickety tables aroundin sort of a large, empty, dusty amphitheater-like space that had been the bank lobby, Isuppose, and part of the vaults. And here werethese tables around, and a little stage whereso-called geishas—they weren’t—looking tome like hungry Japanese, middle-aged ladies,most of them, dancing and singing and play-ing those two- or three-stringed instruments.And every now and then that would be off,and then American jazz and popular musicwould go on, and then Japanese popularmusic, wild, blaring, through a bad speaker.Everything was just awful—scratchy recordsand . . . . Nevertheless, this was a nightclub,the Grand Cherry. [laughter]

And it was crowded with American sol-diers and military people and some seamen,all drinking warm Japanese, and sometimesAmerican, beer. I think there was somesake—I’m not sure—oh, and bourbon. And

everybody drunk. I mean, just a drunkenmorass.

And these women to me looking verybedraggled and lost and scared. Japanesewomen of that period, when they giggled, itdidn’t necessarily mean they were happy. Imean, they were scared. [laughter] And theywould wait on the tables, and the guys wouldmake passes at them and harass them and pickthem up and carry them around. And theywould pretend—I felt, pretend—to be hav-ing a good time, and they weren’t. They werejust miserable, but this was a living. And, ofcourse, there was a lot of prostitution goingon.

So that also was part of the scene that Iremember. Although I drank a lot, it was asickening scene. Myself and a group of ship-mates would go there sometimes in theevening, but I couldn’t stay very long. I justfelt miserable. [laughter] The whole thing wasa miserable scene.

When I look back, I never was worriedabout safety. Here we were wandering amongthese hungry and desperate Japanese people,and you never felt that you were in danger.At least I don’t remember feeling that. Therewas no sense that anything was going to hap-pen to you that you didn’t start, you know.

Were there things like orphan children runningaround or . . . ?

Oh, oh, little pot-bellied kids half-nakedrunning around, peering in at the GrandCherry, in particular, and all these little bars.You know, dozens of little kids peering in andwatching what was going on, and holding outtheir hands, asking for change, and things ofthat type. Oh, yes, that goes on everywherein the world, but, yes, there was that. Andthen, you know, groups of drunken guys com-ing out and then going on to the next place,

441YOKOHAMA

making a lot of noise, yelling and screaming.That’s the nearest thing I saw to lousy beha-vior, but I don’t remember anybody everfighting with anybody or taking on anyJapanese person, because they were really sopolite and obsequious that I think you wouldhave been ashamed to have even shouted atthem, you know. [laughter] And maybe that’show they survived.

Was there any talk at all about the results ofHiroshima or Nagasaki? I mean, did you hearanything at all?

Very little. Very little. And certainly notfrom the Japanese. We didn’t have that muchcommunication with them. Maybe somepeople that had stayed there longer got toknow Japanese people well. But even that oldprofessor that we met in Kamakura, he care-fully avoided anything that would seem tobe a complaint about what had happened toJapan. You know, just saying that, “The warwas terrible, and we have to now improveourselves and move ahead.”

And, of course, they did very quickly.[laughter] More quickly than we were pre-pared to realize. But that patterned culturalobsequious behavior was something I foundvery distasteful. And yet, when I look backon it, why not? You know, that was a culturalpattern, and it was very useful in that period.It kept them from confrontations. They wereexpecting, of course, to be treated horribly,because they had been told the Americanswere going to come, rape their women, de-stroy what’s left of their homes, kill them,and . . . . So I was there in that period whenthey were beginning to realize these thingsweren’t necessarily going to happen.

That period in Yokohama was, to me, fas-cinating but miserable. I was very unhappyabout it. I remember once I went ashore with

some shipmates, and we brought a couple ofcartons of cigarettes each. I don’t know; I hadsome idea I’d go along with them, to barter.We went out to a little place on the edge ofYokohama, a horribly decrepit ghetto out onthe edge of town. And there were little, tinyshacks, and people had little candles andkerosene lanterns going in the evening. Andwe went into the back of this little shack,and there was a family sitting there. And theyhad a lot of things covered with cloth on theside of the room. This guy that we were withtook out his cigarettes and laid them down.You know, “What do you got?” kind of thing.We wanted money. That was it. We gottwenty dollars a carton. And we were toldwe had been robbed when we got back tothe ship; we could have gotten much more![laughter]

What was that? A month’s wages? Twentydollars?

For us?

Yes.

Oh, no, not a month’s wages. No, thatwould be about a quarter or a fifth of amonth’s wages. But two cartons, forty dol-lars, would be a half of month’s wages. Whysure. But we were told we could have gottenmuch more. We were robbed. You know,when I think of it, “robbed,” for god’s sake.Or we could have taken the cigarettes andgotten anything in these little fly-by-nightmarkets.

I remember with two packs of ciga-rettes . . . by the way, I’m not proud of this; Ifeel very badly that I did this. Later I felt lousyabout entering into the goddamn system. Butonce or twice, I went into one of these littlemarkets, and I brought Kathy some beautiful


eggshell teacups, beautifully painted, somelacquered dishes and hand-carved, woodenplates. We still have them, absolutely beau-tiful sort of pressed wood-ware and abaloneshell spoons and lacquered boxes and con-tainers. Absolutely beautiful things.

I bought two or three of these things totake home to Kathy. But the last word was alittle shop in a bombed out building, whereon a hanger was this magnificent woman’sembroidered, silk kimono—one of the longkind that the geishas used to wear when theywere dancing and singing. A very heavy silk.And I think I got that for the equivalent offive dollars or something. I forget, a pack ortwo of cigarettes. At that same shop I got aroll of absolutely beautiful silk, for—I can’teven remember—either cigarettes orAmerican money. The exchange was amaz-ing. Later that roll of silk—it must have beenabout, oh, ten yards, fifteen yards—ended upin Liberia on my first field trip as Kathy’s ballgown to go to the inauguration of W. V. S.Tubman. [laughter]

Oh, that’s wonderful!

She had nothing else, so she made a gownout of this roll of silk that for some reason wehad taken to Liberia with us. And so thatsilk had its own trajectory.

But, anyway, I got those few items, and akimono for my daughter, for Anya, who wasthen, what, two years old . . . year and a halfold. This was a beautiful, padded child’s win-ter kimono with the most wonderful patterns.

So I had, you know, half a seabag full ofstuff, and when I got it on the ship, I remem-ber feeling like crap, you know. What had Idone? And I couldn’t feel better because Iwas saying I was taking it home to my family.I just felt I had exploited the situation andtaken part in the very thing that I was

opposed to. How could I criticize these guysin the army making fortunes, some of them,off of pilfered goods, you know, when I hadtaken part in this system, or taken advantageof a people who were down at the bottom, inthe dregs. And so I didn’t do much of that.In fact, I felt that the whole situation wascorrupting to us because there was this idea,“Here is everything you can want for so little.”

But I have to be fair. There were a num-ber of the guys on the ship who felt like I did,you know, who felt depressed by being there,wishing there was something more they coulddo. Coming back on the ship one night withtwo or three of my shipmates, after we hadbeen drinking, one of the guys goes into hisfo’c’s’le, and he says, “Hey, for Christ’s sakes,come here.” And his fo’c’s’le-mates had twoJapanese girls in the fo’c’s’le. They were pros-titutes—the most sickly and the mostmournful-looking two girls that one couldimagine. They were trying to be light andhumorous and laugh and giggle. And it washeartbreaking, you know.

And we looked in there, and I rememberus all saying, “You poor bastards, take thosewomen back. Give them some money, andtake them back, and get them off this ship,for god’s sakes. You make me sick.” And thegirls were angry at us, because we were inter-fering with what they were going to get.

And I remember, Danny he reached inhis pocket, and he took out ten bucks orsomething like that, or fifteen bucks, and hehanded money to each of them, and he said,“You know, get rid of these assholes thatyou’re with and . . . . [laughter] I know thembetter than you do. Get out of here and findsome better business than this.” Things likethat went on all the time.

All of the contradictions in Americanvalues come to the fore. You see people whoare very sensitive and very aware, and yet at

443YOKOHAMA

the same time they will do things that theyregret, they feel awful about later, because it’savailable. It can happen. “Anything goes”kind of attitude. And you can’t blame themin a way. But those little events I remember—the business of guys feeling sheepish tradingwith these people and bargaining with them.And then every now and then some guywould say, “Here, for Christ’s sakes,” takingout a wad of money or five packs of cigarettesand putting it down, taking something thatwouldn’t have cost that much, just be-cause . . . I mean, they were angry—angry atthe people and angry at themselves, youknow. All that sort of thing comes out underthese conditions. It’s sort of the extremity ofcultural tolerance.

And Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was fil-tering through what a terrible thing that was.But we didn’t get the full picture; that wasn’tgetting around, but it was smoldering southof us. So there was a feeling, also, of horrorand guilt, of how lucky these characters wereup here that they didn’t get it. Talk like thatwas going on, but we didn’t talk about itmuch. It was too much . . . too much to talkabout.

One day I remember, I wanted to go toTokyo, and two or three shipmates and I, wegot on this crowded train going fromYokohama to Tokyo. It was just packed. Andit was so packed that people didn’t even knowthat we were among them, and now and thensomebody would look at us, and they’d jump,you know. But it was just packed. We werelike sardines. It took a long time, and it was ahorrendous ride. We got to Tokyo andshopped around—a big place with a lot ofbombed-out buildings and all that.

We saw MacArthur, only a few weeksafter he had signed the peace treaty, and hewas in a big Cadillac-like limousine. Andthere was a news-reel camera taking a pic-

ture of him getting out, and we were behindit. And the camera passed us, too, and I wroteto Kathy. [laughter] I said, “You know, watchthe news reels. You may see me behindMacArthur scowling.” Everybody wentsilent, the American troops that were therejust on the streets and the Japanese. It wascomplete silence. There was no cheering ashe got out and went inside. He was a hero atthis point. You know, he had done this sup-posedly remarkable thing of getting to Japan,Tokyo, and signing the peace treaty. But therewasn’t any jubilation. There wasn’t any feel-ing that something great had been done onthe part of the people there. And I don’tknow what their silence meant. Maybe it wasrespect. I just don’t know.

So then we went around town. I didn’tdo any shopping, but there was so much avail-able of the wonderful tradition of Japan. Greathouses of the rich had been bombed out thenlooted by other Japanese, so all this stuffwas flooding onto the market. My god, any-body who was a collector could have gonemad. The most beautiful—some ancient,antique—pottery and handiwork and silksand everything laid out in the streets, practi-cally.

Do you think there were collectors, who weresystematically . . . I mean at a big level . . . ?

You can be sure that already the entre-preneur and capitalist spirit were in fullbloom, not only on the part of our people,but on the part of the Japanese.

I just wondered how many museum collectionsjust ballooned.

Could have been many. But I do knowthere were army sergeants and commanderswho made fortunes, everybody talked about


that, anyway. I don’t pretend to know for sure.It’s just that that was the rumor. You’d haveto be Jesus Christ not to, and there weren’tmany of them there. [laughter] But, no, Ithink that some more than others.

Well, for the most part, though, what you’redescribing to me is a lot of restraint and recogni-tion that you’re among people who have beendevastated.

Yes. But my experience was limited. I washanging out with a few guys who would goashore now and then. I saw just what I couldsee under those conditions, and it was muchmore complex than that, I’m sure, certainlyin Tokyo, which was the center of our opera-tion.

Well, I mean, from my perception, you know,one generation later, I always think ofMacArthur with ticker tape and confetti, andwith screaming and yelling and celebration. Andwhat you’re describing is just the . . . .

I think of him as the guy that Trumanhad to fire . . . and for probably good reason.He was an arrogant, pompous character,though he was at one point a brilliant strate-gic leader. But it also could be said that hewas guilty of many excesses that were unnec-essary. I don’t know; I don’t know about allthat, but I know that we were not necessarilyimpressed by him. [laughter] I mean, mer-chant seamen and the grunts in the army arenot necessarily guys who get all that whippedup about patriotism and great heroes and allthat. In fact, if anything, “Heroes all got clayfeet,” you know. You know better. On theother hand, I don’t want to be a completegrinch about this. He was a remarkable mili-tary leader.

But I don’t have too much respect formilitary leaders. I can acknowledge whatthey’ve done that’s helpful to us when it hap-pens, or what has to be done, but they aren’tthe kind of people I hold in high regard, nec-essarily. And particularly, with MacArthur.There was something about him that rubspeople the wrong way, at least, people on thelevel that I was on. He was an arrogant bas-tard, and a lot of his troops didn’t like him,but that doesn’t mean anything. He was whathe was.

But it sort of came to a head years laterwhen Truman had to fire him for not follow-ing executive orders and going his own way.That was later on during the Korean War.To me, that was pretty much what one wouldexpect him to do. “Old soldiers never die.They just fade away.” And I can rememberpeople thought, “Thank god.” [laughter] But,that’s just one side of world opinion, I’m sure,but that’s where I was.

And so that whole experience in Japanis too enormous for me to even cover it all. Imean, there were so many things that hap-pened, so many visual images that affectedme—there are hundreds. I think of people’sfaces and trying to talk to people and find-ing, you know, there was no way, and that Icould not understand them, and they couldn’tunderstand me, and not just because of lan-guage, because even when some people couldspeak some English, exchange was so guarded.People were so afraid to talk to us. And tome, that poor, old man’s blow-fish lantern isa symbol of all that. You know, I have it; Ilight it now and then; it’s a beautiful thing.I’ve taken care of it and all that, but what isit? It was thrust into my hands by a scared,old man who thought I was going to kill him.And he looked at me as kind of a white ghostwandering around Yokohama.

445YOKOHAMA

And the kids. Hundreds and hundreds ofkids. The kids before the adults realized that,you know, Americans were a possible source;there was a lot of begging on the part of kids.Crowds of them. But I’ve seen that elsewherein the world, but somehow under these con-ditions . . . . Oh, I remember servicemen andus giving out lots of money, coins, to the kids,because somehow or other that was one waywe could atone for everything that happened.Giving to the adults, you didn’t know what

that meant to them. They would have takenit, but the kids, you know, they’d laugh andscream and yell and then turn somersaultsand have a lot of fun. And they’d run offshowing their loot to their comrades, and sothat’s another part of it. And a lot of the kidswere sick. You could just see big pot belliesand their feet worn and torn. No shoes andtorn clothing. It was a very sad scene. So,anyway, that was Yokohama, I guess.

52LEAVING JAPAN

HE OLD NEPTUNE’S CAR took off,and for the life of me, I’m trying toremember. We had to go to some

were all a little sheepish about what we hadhad, also about what we’d seen. That musthave been true a lot of the servicemen, too. Ican’t believe that just characters like us on amerchant ship were affected.

You know what is so interesting to me, it seems,there’s a lot of comprehension and discussionabout the difference between the soldiers who goand the people that actually see the effects of warduring battle, you know. So much of the popu-lation has no comprehension of what you’re . . .of that effect of war, of seeing conquered people.I mean, there’s no other way to describe it.

Oh, there are people who have seen thiskind of thing over and over again, certainlymany servicemen who were in Europe andother places in the world during the worldwars, or later in the Korean War or inVietnam, who have seen this sort of thingand had their sometimes horrible reactionsto it. But for me and for the guys that I waswith and for most of the soldiers at that time,that was a new experience.

Tother places, and I think we . . . .

Do you remember what you took on in Japan?

That’s another thing I can’t be sure of. Idon’t think we brought any troops back. Idon’t recall that. And I don’t recall whetherwe took on any cargo. I can’t think of anycargo we would have taken on from Japan.

Art. [laughter]

Well, we could have taken loot, yes. AndI would say a lot of the crew did have someloot. Nothing very important, the stuff thatthey had picked up for gifts. Christmas wascoming. We didn’t get home for Christmas,but when I think of it, buying things in dev-astated, bombed-out Japan for Christmas athome is an irony beyond my ken at the mo-ment. [laughter] And I don’t think that waslost on some of the members of the crew, theones that I knew and liked. You know, we


This is going to sound strange, but it just occurredto me—is there any focus in anthropology as adiscipline on looking at the recovery of cultureafter war, I mean, after something as focusedand abrupt as a war?

Yes, there is a small amount of literatureon traumatic culture change and devastationof war. But it’s amazing how little has beenwritten by anthropologists on war itself—onongoing conflict. It’s usually sort of retrospec-tive, what happened, afterwards, and howpeople handle it and recover, but not of waritself and the impact upon populations, as it’sgoing on. I became aware of this, you know,recently in terms of the Liberian civil war,that most of the scholars who are Liberianistsin West Africa, including myself, pulledback—it was just too much for us to face thedestruction of the area we had worked in. Wehad certain preconceived ideas about it andassumptions about its development andfuture, and here, suddenly, all that was wipedout. There was this total destruction of a cul-ture, of a people and their country. And Idon’t want to generalize, but anthropologistsI know don’t seem to be very good at han-dling this sort of thing when it happens.

Many of us now will begin in retrospectto deal with it, what . . . you know, try toanalyze and report what’s happening since.But I found I couldn’t write about it, eventhough I had heard a lot and read a lot. Eventhat experience when I went there right afterthe cease fire, I found that I was really un-able to write about it. I was just loaded withthe horror of what had happened to people Iknew; also taken aback by the extent of it. Icouldn’t believe that a whole nation, a coun-try, a collection of small cultures, could be sototally undermined and in part destroyed.

And that may be something that I don’tthink only anthropologists experience, but

people who are on the spot, who are involvedwith a country—I think it must be very hardto face what’s happening until you’ve had achance to think about it and look back uponit. So I don’t think there is much of a litera-ture.

I understand there are a recent book ortwo dealing with the anthropology of war. Ihaven’t seen them. But I know I was lookingthrough the literature, the bibliographies,before I left for Liberia [in 1997 with Friendsof Liberia], trying to find work on just thiskind of phenomena, and I couldn’t find any.

When I wrote to Kathy, I say somethingthat refers to this. I said, “I could never be acorrespondent, a journalist. I have to thinkthings like this over, digest them. It is justtoo much to assimilate and venture opinionsupon at short-order deadlines and letters,”you know. This whole thing was just too big.

Well, I’m glad you brought that up. Were therecorrespondents that you admired? I mean, thatyou admired as writers?

There were some great correspondentsduring the war that, you know, reported thewar in great detail and with great elegance.

I just wondered if there were journalists who . . .if you’d ever followed journalism as a medium ofwriting that you admired and liked and . . . .

No, not really. It wasn’t the kind of writ-ing I wanted to do, nor, as I say here, that Ifelt I could do, because I get dumbfoundedand bowled over by experiences, and it takesme—big ones like this—some time to figureout, all the various meanings it has to me, orto even be able to deal with it directly, otherthan telling little anecdotes about things thathappened.

449LEAVING JAPAN

Have you ever written in some of your fictionand poetry about some of this?

No.

Not this particular experience?

No. Things like it, but the writing that Idid that had anything to do with the war wasmuch more abstract, much more subjective.I wasn’t interested in conveying informationabout events, but more about people and feel-ings and things of that kind. No, as I said inthis letter to Kathy, I don’t think I could everbe a correspondent or a journalist, because Iwould have a hard time turning out materialthat is really significant, like many admirablepeople were able to do.

And, you know, one has to respect thembecause they have created a record. But Idon’t think I could have ever done that. Itwasn’t my genre. I wasn’t constitutionally puttogether to do that kind of thing. And, infact, even now I find I’m hesitating and find-ing myself stumbling over the recollection ofthis, trying to figure out what really was go-ing on, and what was important to me at thetime? I find that I’m still puzzled by it, stilltorn in different directions.

Well, it sounds like your trip to Kamakura wasthe only time you really went to, quote, “see asight” that you might have known about?

Oh, yes. Well, as I said, this was no timeto be a sightseer. I felt strange and funny anda little dirty, being a sightseer when peoplehad faced this kind of thing, and going totheir sacred image, going to this greatBuddha.

But I remember standing there that evenDanny was impressed. I always had theimpression that he had part African-

American background and part Latin orsomething background. A very nice guy, buta very quick temper, and . . . [laughter] andhad very strong opinions. But I remember westood there for awhile looking at this Buddha.It was only the two of us in this great big,empty, beautiful park—maybe people had leftbecause we were there—and being utterlyovertaken by wonder and respect for the factthat this has not been bombed, and that thiswas something important to the people here,the Japanese. And for that moment I didn’tfeel like a tourist. I felt like I was payingrespect to the people. I think Danny, in hisway, felt this. We talked about it. You know,“Gee, that was quite something, Danny. Justamazing.”

“That was something!” he’d say over andover again.

And it was something. And then, ofcourse, this little guy tossing us the lanternhe had lit, I guess, in anticipation of twilight,or because he was going to some dark place.Or he just liked it or something. [laughter]That was right after we felt this strong feel-ing of respect, but then I began feeling . . .again, we both felt like tourists, you know.And I remember saying to Danny, you know,“This is no place to be a tourist, for Christ’ssakes. Let’s get out of here; let’s get the hellout of here.”

And he would say, “Yes,” you know, “let’sget out of here.”

It also sounds like kind of the ultimate of notbeing able to have any form of anonymity orblending in. I mean, there was no way to kind ofblend into the background and observe.

No, there wasn’t. No. There was so muchelse that one saw and felt, and it’s hard todeal with it all, and I have the feeling of notbeing able to create a full picture of my own


response and that of the people who werewith me, what we seemed to feel and howwe reacted. It’s just bits and snatches ofthings. It was a long time ago. My god!

Yes.

When was that? Fifty years ago?

Fifty-three.

Well, I mean, I’m kind of amazed that Iremember anything, but this has stuck withme. [laughter]

Oh, one little thing, this business of be-ing a tourist, feeling like a tourist. I’ve alwayshated that. I’ve always hated being a tourist.That’s why it’s difficult for me to travel. Kathywould love to travel more. And to me, totravel to foreign countries and not have atask, not have something that allows me tofeel that I’m involved in some meaningfulway in understanding the people or what I’mdoing, I feel very uncomfortable and pecu-liar. I don’t like it.

One little event of that in Japan was Iremember when we were in Tokyo, that daywe spent in Tokyo and saw MacArthur, andsome of the guys that we were with wantedto take rickshaws. There were these little rick-shaws or carts, I don’t know what they werecalled in Japan, but they were little carts withsometimes bicycles pulling them. And theywanted to take that, and I wouldn’t do it. Ijust felt I could not get in that thing.

I suppose it was reading early literaturelike Pearl Buck on China and all that, andgetting not only a sympathy, but a sense ofrespect for another culture and the way theydo things. And there’s something about, youknow, Europeans coming and sitting withtheir parasols and hats and bowler hats, inrickshaws—this was to me an image I didn’t

want to have any part of. I didn’t want to bethat way, doing it for the fun of it, or it wasjust wrong in my mind. And I remember acouple of my shipmates, “Oh, you’re a damnJap lover!” [laughter]

And yet at the same time, because I didn’tdo it, they wouldn’t, you know. There wasthis feeling, this understanding of not takingadvantage. I respected that when I saw itamong Americans that I was with. Some-times they would hide it, because nobodywanted to be a character that’s thought of assentimental. But when somebody would re-act that way and decide not to do something,I always felt very good. I felt this is some-thing I respect.

Well, it sounds like it was a subtle thing, too, toa certain extent, where it wasn’t anything some-body would sit around and talk about. It was toohorrific to talk about what was actually goingon, but that there were these subtle ways of kindof acknowledging a sensitivity to . . . .

Yes. And it would come up. It would hap-pen. But, you know, groups of people, andmen, particularly, on most any ship, you don’texpress these sensitivities. You know? If any-thing, you cover it up by saying, “Oh, thosegoddamn Japs.” I may have even said thatmyself a few times, because your own real feel-ings are too sentimental, almost too, in thosedays, feminine to express.

But when I would see that, when I wouldsee people reacting that way, and I knew whatwas going on in their minds, I always felt thiswas a very good thing, a sign of some kind ofvalues there that you could count on. That’sinteresting. I hadn’t thought of that before.That this was a kind of a litmus test for whatare basic values, how people respond underthese circumstances.

451LEAVING JAPAN

On the other hand there was a lot of talkabout the situation there, what we saw, aboutwomen, about whores, about being to ableto make a real bargain with somebody for apack of cigarettes, all that sort thing. Therewas a lot of talk of that kind, but behind itall—I have to be fair to the people I was within this situation—there was also a deep re-spect, a sense of obligation, having to do with,“We did this.” Even though they had beenwhat they were, and had done the terriblethings they did during the war.

Oh, and making a distinction between“they,” you know, the leaders and the army.Oh, this class thing was there, too. I remem-ber some of the older seamen sayingsomething like, “These poor sons of bitchesdidn’t . . . they’re not responsible for thewhole war,” and others saying, “Why, ofcourse, they are,” you know, “just likeGermany, the whole German population isresponsible for Hitler.” We’d have thosearguments. But, you know, we’d say, “Lookat these damn people. They’re not respon-sible for the war. This was done to them. It’sthe damn system, the system. It’s their sys-tem that did that to them!” The “System”was always that capitalized word that peopleuse to talk about things too big for you tocope with.

Those arguments would go on. But theyreally did take the tone of defending theaverage person, the poor persons who werereally pawns in the system. Not that that wasreally true, but that was the feeling. Thepawns in the system were not really respon-sible for all this. “Just as we’re pawns in thegoddamn system, you know? We just do whatwe’re told. Here, look what are we doing here?All these damn, poor servicemen dead on thebeaches of Okinawa and dead on all thebeaches of the Pacific. You know, what didthey have to do with determining this or

deciding what to do? It isn’t something theyplanned and understood what they were do-ing. Hopefully, they’ll understand in thefuture what was done to them, but now theydon’t know. They’re just little puppets, youknow. We’re puppets, all of us.” That kind oftalk went on all the time.

I doubt that that kind of talk was limitedto merchant seamen. I think it probably wenton all through the undercurrent of life dur-ing the war as a kind of escape valve, tocomplain and grouse in this way about whatthis big system is, the one that’s incompre-hensible, bigger than you.

And a lot of talk, even on this SUP ship,about capitalism, you know. “The goddamncapitalists are making gravy, boy! You thinkthat poor army sergeant over there that’s justhad two or three trucks going in that direc-tion for the black market, making a fewthousand dollars, maybe fifty thousand? Youthink he’s anything? Hey, look at the guysmaking millions and millions and millionsall over the world off this war, off of the bloodof these poor sons of bitches. Good for him!I hope he makes fifty thousand dollars.” Youknow, that kind of thing. There was a lot ofthat kind of talk.

So in a way a lot of that’s admirable. Imean, that kind of talk was a great sense ofrelief and a feeling that there was some sensein the world. That kind of talk would giveyou a feeling that somebody is grousing aboutthe right thing, instead of grousing about thechow or grousing about little things—grous-ing about big things.

OK, so we head back to the states. And Ican’t recall where else we must have gone. Ido believe we stopped at Manila. We didn’tgo ashore; I didn’t go ashore. Maybe we tookon cargo at Manila or something, but therewas another stop, and somehow or other . . . .


Were you on your own again? Just your ship?

I don’t recall. I think so. By that time thewar practically was over, and the Pacific hadbeen pretty well swept clean of submarines.Though there were reports of a few oddballcharacters, people who didn’t even know thewar was over.

There was a lot of that reported, youknow, instances of battalions of Japanese whodidn’t know the war was over, were still fight-ing. And there was that famous characterwho spent the next ten, fifteen years livingalone like Robinson Crusoe and didn’t knowthe war was over and thought we were lyingto them when we told them the war was over.[laughter]

Anyway, there was some concern aboutthese things or just an angry member of theair force in a last kamikaze noble deed. Inthe south of Japan apparently there werepockets of not only resistance, but very angrymembers of the army or the military, whowere still resisting, who were capable of doingsomething like that, kamikaze raids andthings. But I don’t think we were really con-cerned about that at that point. So I think itwas Manila where we stopped and took onsome cargo or something, and lord knowswhat it was, and headed back to SanFrancisco.

53CLASS WARFARE

OW, HERE the war was over; wehad won; and, you know, everybodyshould have been happy. But I

men, each seaman by him, complimentingus on the great service we’d given in thearmed services during the war and the heroicseamen who had . . . .

Was there any talk, or did you know anythingabout the GI bill at this point?

Yes, we knew that that was in the picture.

And at this point you assumed you would be partof it?

Yes, we assumed we would be part of it,but that also there would be some specialrecognition of merchant seamen.

And the Seaman’s Bill of Rights hadwithin it, I believe—it hadn’t been formedyet, but it was being talked about some kindof compensation for merchant seamen forwhat they had not gotten during the war. Andmainly a special recognition of their uniquerole during the war. And that was beingtalked about.

At the same time . . . oh, before I hadleft on Neptune’s Car, already in Washington

Nremember a very dismal trip back. We had aword for it at sea—not port fever, the reverseof the exhilaration you get when you’re aboutto hit a port—there’s another name for it,this dismal feeling of not necessarily want-ing to come back. Although the trip had notbeen a happy one, there was the idea of,“What are we going back to? We’re goingback to our families. The war is over; thingsare going to be different. And that’s the scarypart: it’s going to be different. But how dif-ferent? What would it mean to us?” et cetera.And there was word of anti-labor legislationin Congress and a lot of anti-Truman feelingamong laboring people at that time.

There had been talk in some quarters, butnot my ships, not on the SUP, but amongthe left-wing seamen, of a Seaman’s Bill ofRights at the end of the war, where we wouldget compensated for everything that otherservicemen were. And Roosevelt, our hero,had promised the merchant marine that. Infact, I even have a certificate sent to all sea-


there were denunciations coming from theright wing in Congress about, “giving themerchant marine anything—for god’s sakes,these guys’ll turn the guns of the ships onthe United States! They’re all a bunch ofcommies.” There was already that beginning.

Don’t you think there was a lot of classism tothat kind of reaction, too, because a lot of theresistance that I read about to the GI bill at thetime, had a lot of, “We can’t let that riffraff intothe universities,” and stuff like that.

The riffraff, yes. Oh, yes, there was a lotof that, but I don’t think it had reached thatpoint at the time I’m talking about now. Thatwas a little later, in 1946 with the seamen’sstrikes and all of that, that the GI Bill cameto a head. But already that kind of talk wasfiltering through to us. And, yes, class con-sciousness—using that fancy word—wasthere.

I don’t think most Americans understandto what degree class consciousness exists, andvery deeply in American life. You know,people are aware of the class they’re in.They’re aware of what their status is vis-à-vis others. And in some cases they look uponit as denigration; others, they look upon it asa heroic stance.

And that was one thing that attracted meto the left wing in the labor movement, wasthey heroized the working class. I mean, theywere given a certain prominence, a place, asense of destiny, of potential mastery, of con-trol of their own destinies, rather than merelyaccepting themselves as a, you know, a strata.

As worker ants.

Yes, as worker ants, or as puppets or aspawns of the system, as a lot of these ironic

guys would talk about. “We’re just pawns.”So my growing sense of this thing called classconsciousness was very real at this time.

I was aware that I was an intermediatefigure, a person from the lower middle-class,with a knowledge of the working-class, alower middle-class kind of background, butalso from the professional class. And in thatsense I was a middle-class kid, particularly atthe point when I went to sea; I’d been to col-lege and all these kinds of things. So I wasaware of that, and I would say thousands ofothers went through this kind of recognition,awareness. And not only during the war, buteverybody does at some point in their life,when they confront who they are in relationto groups of others that they’re working with.

When I went to sea, there were manypeople like me going to sea during the war.But the basic group that was there, the sea-men and their unions, were an older,traditional kind of strata. And it was obvi-ous that their values, their interests, theirexpectations in life were different from ours.

You know, they didn’t have, like me, greatexpectations of wondrous travel and writingand living an interesting life and being some-what free to pick and choose about directions.I mean, their directions had been made forthem. Here they were; this was their life. Andthat was impressed upon me the whole timeI went to sea. They were a class, and theblacks were a caste.

When I read people like DuBois andMyrdal, you know, I began to see and maybeto understand this business of class structureand the relation of class to caste. And, youknow, that made sense to me in terms ofwhere blacks were on the waterfront andwhere they were in my union. They were acaste not to be accepted, except in steward’sdepartments or some other union like

455CLASS WARFARE

MFOW or engine department or on NMUships, where they were allowed. But, youknow, here we were, members of the sameclass all the way through, but that caste wasnot allowed. They were separate; they weredifferent; they were beyond.

At this point did you see yourself maybe as anuneasy member, but, nevertheless, very much amember or at least a potential member of thisclass?

Oh, yes. Well, I have to be careful here,because that’s the intellectual struggle thatone goes through. I often felt a little disen-gaged, because I had not spent a good part ofmy life that way. So, therefore, I didn’t alwaysunderstand, nor was I able to accommodateto that world fully, because, within me, I hadother aspirations, other plans. The fact thatI wanted eventually to go back to school; Iwanted eventually to become some sort of aprofessional, a writer, or work in universities.These were aspirations that these guys, mostof them never even thought of. I mean, itwas not their world. So within me was theidea there was a difference that I sometimeshad to hide, because it was so much at oddswith that world.

However, there were many men at seathat I could talk to because they were verysimilar. But we were different, though itmight not even be detected. You know, wecould merge into the rest of the crew.

Did you think on some level that after the warmaybe you’d maintain this identity and role?

Yes. Because most of this period I hadbegun thinking that I was going to be a tradeunionist; I wanted to stay in trade unions. Iwanted to continue in this line, but in a more

active and policy-making way. Yes, I guess theromance of the working class was there. Andthe more I developed some kind of interestand background in the social literature of theLeft, the more I saw this as a desirable way ofliving, state of mind, a cause.

Nevertheless, always I couldn’t help butbe aware that I was essentially not workingclass, except that I was working, and I waspart of it in terms of my income and all that.But inside I had not been that kind of per-son, and I had other kinds of concerns andinterests that were not of that class. Now, thatis a very complicated thing, and I’m not sureI’m stating it very clearly. It’s just a sense of—oh, what would you call it?—being to somedegree distanced from the reality of that class.Which I respect. I respect that, the aware-ness of that difference.

When somebody would say somethingnow and then, “Ah, you’re just a middle-classkid. You know, you come from a good family;you got all these things. You got all this to goback to,” which I didn’t really, but I mean itseemed that way. And, “You got all theseinterests in other things,” that used to botherme a great deal at first. Then later I began torealize, well, that’s fine, you know. History isloaded with the idea of people shifting classinterest and throwing their lot in for a cause.

Well, it seems maybe the distinction that wasbeing made for you, maybe is that you werechoosing this role . . . .

Yes. Rather than having been forced intoit, and that I was aware of it. I had choices. Ihad alternatives, or I thought I did. I had al-ternatives.

Well, that’s almost the same, isn’t it? Just to thinkyou do. [laughter]


Yes, and to think you do; it becomesalmost the same sort of thing.

And yet a class is not an even web. Imean, these people who had gone to sea along time or been part of the laboring classfor long periods of time in their lives, eventhey were varied—all kinds of varied peoplewith different aspirations, with different no-tions of what they stood for, and, you know,we even thought of some of the guys as pho-nies, who would always sort of lord it over usabout how they had these other interests, andthey were going to do this and that and theother.

They were laughed at as a phonies, Imean, phony baloneys. “Go ahead. Fine. Bye-bye. See you later,” you know. [laughter]

Although I began to be aware that classwas not a seamless web, the boundaries notimmutable, and merges with classes belowand classes above, I nevertheless was awareof a different kind of culture, a different ori-entation to the world in general, from oneclass to the next. You’re above or below, andthe so-called Marxist lumpen was down atthe bottom of the heap, which castes areoften thrown into.

And so, yes, that kind of thinking wasgoing on. And even in that union, which wasa conservative union, there was a lot of classthinking, class consciousness, awareness. Andcapitalism was not a good thing. It was a badthing. “Goddamn capitalists” all the time. Itwas an epithet, you know—capitalist. Thatwas true even in a conservative union. Capi-talism was a bad thing, or a questionablething. And capitalism caused this and causedthat and caused that, even by people whodidn’t know what capitalism was. I mean, itwas the tag word.

It was what now has become “the government.”

Yes, the big, lousy government, yes. Andeven anti-communists were vulnerable dur-ing the war at least, to arguments about,“Those goddamn commies over there, in theSoviet Union.” Even people who were con-servative themselves, argued, you know,“What the hell are you talking about? Lookwhat they got; look what they’ve done.Everybody’s got a job.” And how true thatwas, we never really knew, but relatively itseemed so. Now why they all had jobs isanother question we didn’t have an answerto. [laughter] But, nevertheless, there was thisideal, you know, that this was a society thatprovided you some kind of health protectionfrom birth to death, and you had jobs, andyou could aspire to things and do things, andyou had a degree of freedom of that kind thatyou don’t have in a capitalist society. “Youthink you’re free? Look at you, bud! If youget sick, where you going to go? Right, dur-ing the war, you can go to the seamen’shospital; you can go to one of the veterans’hospitals, sure. But when the war is over, bud,you’re finished. You can’t go anywhere. Youpay for it; you take care of yourself. Well, lookover there.”

And fellow Swedes aboard ship wouldsometimes talk about their great system andhow, “Nobody is without medical care. Andnobody starves. You’re going to get somethingto eat, anyway. You’re going to have somekind of a job.” All that. This was going onamong conservative seamen.

So that, when I come to think of it, wasone of the real dangers, you see, of the so-called working class. It was vulnerable tosocialism, vulnerable to left-wing “propa-ganda”, and all that. And rightly so.

I mean, the Soviet Union was not thegreat terrible enemy during the war to a lotof these guys that it was later and might have

457CLASS WARFARE

been earlier. There was a softening of thatview, which I think was a positive thing inAmerican life. I also see it as the basis for thetremendous onslaught that came later to wipethat out, to propagandize that out of theAmerican mind. It was a scary thing for acapitalist system, to see underneath this kindof acceptance, or the vulnerability to ideasof this kind—socialism.

Norman Thomas, the old socialist, wenton for years—you know, a heroic figure,[laughter] one of the great heroic figures inAmerican life—was a socialist, you know. Hewasn’t a communist; he was a socialist. Andhe had a tremendous effect upon at least alot of middle class people I knew, who votedfor Norman Thomas’s tickets and all that sortof thing.

So there was this soft under belly ofAmerican life, that something had to be donefor in the Cold War. The Cold War was notjust directed against the Soviet Union; it wasdirected against the Left and the progressivesin the United States.

This, I began to be aware of; right aboutthis time, this was beginning to dawn on me.And my contacts and friends that I had onthe waterfront who were left wing, and thereading that I was doing, began to jell in me.I’d always had ideas of this kind, but now theywere beginning to focus. I was beginning tosee some implementation, instrumentation,of this through trade unionism, through thekind of unions that I admired, like the ILWU,and like Harry Bridges and that remarkabledevelopment of that union on the waterfront.

Things like that, you know, told me thatthere was a kind of class warfare going on.Why they weren’t after him because the long-shoremen were asking for more wages, it wasbecause of their views, the damn ideologiesthat were developing in those unions that had

to do with a socialist and Marxist perspec-tives about the world and about the capitalistsystem. This had to be stamped out. And, boy,a job was done for the next ten years!

At what point did academia become so heavilyidentified with the Left? The question I’m tryingto ask was brought up by this discussion I readabout the GI bill and where the University ofHarvard president and the president of theUniversity of Chicago came out and said, “Wecannot have the GI bill give scholarships topeople, because you’re going to ruin education.It’s just going to knock down the walls of aca-deme.”

Well, all through my life, universitieswere looked upon both with admiration andsuspicion by average, middle-class people. Imean, with the ideas that were propagated.On one hand, it was very conservative, reli-gious people, who saw universities as a hotbedof atheism, you know, where professors wereattacking religion and were leading theirchildren into all sorts of strange kinds of waysof thinking, and separating themselves fromtheir basic traditions and values, family val-ues and all that sort of thing. And, also, placeswhere young people were getting away fromtheir families and doing things that theirfamilies did not want them to do, and, there-fore, the universities were doing this to them.Yes, there was that. That was very early.That’s gone on probably ever since there havebeen universities.

And then also the idea that very ques-tionable political ideas were being purveyedin universities. I can remember that veryearly. However, it wasn’t necessarily bad, itjust was where all sorts of new and strangethings are happening, and one has to be verycareful. I can remember friends of mine with


their families telling them when they wentoff to a university or college, you know, “Youwatch out. Watch out for what they tell you.You have to be very careful to use your ownhead and think. Don’t let them lead youinto . . . . You know, you think carefully, now,about everything that you’re told.” I can re-member those lectures. I don’t think I gotthem from my family, but I can rememberother kids’ families.

So that’s not necessarily a Cold War phenomenaat all.

Well, no, not yet. I can remember thisearly. There’s always been this tension be-tween the general population and centers oflearning and universities and all that. Admi-ration and suspicion all together. Academicshave always been admired as well as sus-pected. [laughter] Intellectuals are suspect justby the fact that they are specialized thinkersand sometimes believe that they know morethan they know, and act as though they do.The notion of the uppity scholar, the uppityprofessor, I can remember that when I was akid, you know. Nevertheless, admiration,that’s something one can aspire to be, too.

But the relation of this to class conscious-ness—to me that was a very importantdivision. I mean, one could be an intellec-tual in left-wing thinking, even far left, andstill be middle class, and not have lost thetrappings of the middle class. And, by theway, in the trade union movement and leftwing, they were very conscious of this; therewere terms for it. I mean, a middle-class intel-lectual who even might be a communist wasin a sense suspect, because you didn’t knowwhere that kind of combination of back-ground and thinking was going to take thatperson. And I can understand that. There aremany alternatives that such a person has in

thinking and in belief that might run counterto the pragmatic required tasks of, say, tradeorganization or activity. And certainly thatcaution about the middle class was true ofthe Communist Party, as I learned later.

I mean, one had to toe the ideologicalmark, not just because the organizationwanted power and control, but because that’sthe way you got things done. I mean, you hadto have a degree of belief, a degree of com-mitment—not just an intellectual, abstractcommitment, but a commitment in action,a commitment to do things, to get thingsdone. And that’s a struggle I think manymiddle-class people who were in the partyand in the trade union movement felt verystrongly. They were constantly reminded ofit by others. I mean, you know, hard-hat rankand filers would take you on very quickly onthis.

And could you remember any of the terms? Yousaid there were terms to describe the . . . .

They’re not coming to me now. Oh, atsea there were things like “college boy” and“sea lawyer.” The terms in the left-wingmovement also sort of identified people whoyou’re never sure which side of the fence theywere going to be on eventually.

And I struggled with this. I had a tremen-dous admiration, commitment, to the unionthat I was in—even this Sailor’s Union, aswe’ll see, under conditions which will seemridiculous—and to the idea of the labormovement. But one is tested about that. Youknow, can you carry through under allconditions? Can you stick with those com-mitments under conditions where you aregoing to be deprived of some of your aspira-tions and your interests and all that? Thatwas talked about a lot later.

459CLASS WARFARE

I can remember this kind of thing, be-cause there were a lot of people in theleft-wing movement at that time, particularlyduring the war, who had come from otherkinds of professional class interests or otherlevels of interests, who were deeply attractedto the labor movement and felt that it wasan important movement to the UnitedStates, that it was an extremely necessarykind of a direction of American energies, butat the same time, who were very confusedwhen it came down to certain requirementsof taking certain kinds of actions and stick-ing with something for a long period of time,seeing it through when it became boring andit became dangerous and all that sort of thing.You know, a lot of people sort of fell by way-side. [laughter]

And in a way, in a way, I can think of myown later years later, leaving, going to sea,not just because I had other aspirations, butbecause it was getting to be, to me, no pointanymore, because it was falling apart, youknow. But I had alternatives. I had a place togo. Whereas, many of my friends who werestuck and who lost their jobs had an awfultime, miserable time, a real depression in thelabor movement, in the seamen’s union. I hadalternatives, so I remember feeling a little . . .not guilty, but aware of that, you know. I wasable to get out, and I got out well, because Iwas given a “hail fellow” departure when Ileft to go to school, my citation from theseamen’s branch of the Communist Party,thanking me for all the great work I had done,you know. Nevertheless, I was able to leave.I was able to go to something else, and it wasvery hard for some of them to have done thesame thing.

So those are the contradictions, andthey’re there, and sometimes they were very,very severe. I can remember, you know, wholegroups of people pulling away from the labor

movement because they had other ways togo. And sometimes even betraying it becausetheir commitment wasn’t that deep and sure.And there were all kinds of names and epi-thets for this kind of thing, and I don’t recallthem right now.

Anyway, so here we were back in thestates, with all these questions. And I’m sureit was true of many of the guys that I waswith and many other people: “What now?”And particularly in the labor movement andthe seamen’s union.

Already in February, 1946, the Commit-tee for Maritime Unity was just forming inWashington, and there was a convention onthe West Coast, trying to form a united frontof seamen. See, what were all those unions?There was MFOW (Marine Firemen, Oilers,and Water Tenders Union), the ILWU(International Longshoremen’s and Ware-housemen’s Union), MEVA (MarineEngineers Association), MCS (the MarineCooks and Stewards), and the NMU(National Maritime Union). Those were thesort of core of this attempt to form a largerseamen’s maritime association in the coun-try. And that was going on in the early partof 1946, as I got back.

I was aware of all this, aware that therewas a tremendous ferment on the waterfront.They were seeing all kinds of anti-labor leg-islation; they were seeing crisis coming interms of contracts with the ship owners. Andmy union was looked upon as the holdoutthat was not going to take part in all this.

Lundeberg was talking about, “This is apolitical organization. This is the wrong timefor seamen to be demanding not only wageincreases, but all kinds of . . . forty-eighthours and all that sort of thing.” There was awhole series of demands the unions weremaking, legitimate ones, to put them in linewith American labor in general. I mean, all


sorts of demands about working conditions,slight increases in wages, the conditions hav-ing to do with health and medical care, aboutleave—having short vacations after a certainnumber of trips and time put at sea. All sortsof things that had always been in the offingand thought about, but it was figured nowwas the time to do it. So the CMU, the Com-mittee for Maritime Unity, managed to get atremendous amount of support among thesecore unions.

That was going in early 1946, when I gotback, but I didn’t know what I was going todo. Here I was, floating around; here wasKathy and Anya, now a little kid, a beautifullittle girl, was growing up. Kathy and I stillhad that little place in Alameda, but whatwas I going to do now? Was I going to lookfor a job? Was I going to do something, goback to school? And what I was saying was,“I think I’m going to stay. I’m going to gointo trade union work”—the only thing Icould conceive of at the time that had to dowith a sense of a purpose.

To me, “Here is something really mean-ingful in the world, and I have been in it,and I know something about it, and I wantto do it.” At the same time, I had this han-kering to write—I mean, I was doing a littlewriting, and in fact had just won a seamen’sshort story contest. I had won that, and acouple of my stories had been printed in smallmags, and, you know, I was feeling somethinglike a writer. And I knew a number of peoplearound the Bay Area who were doing thingsof this kind—some of my old associates andfriends and my friend, George Leite, with hismagazine, Circle. And so, you know, I had anumber of alternatives and pulls and direc-tions. See, this was the middle class.

But what really got to me was this feel-ing of great purpose, something ofimportance—the labor movement and

seamen’s unions and the now-pendingstruggle going on at the end of the war aboutwhether or not merchant seamen, in particu-lar, and longshoremen were going to berecognized for not only their contributionduring the war, but if they were going to bebrought up to the level of other major unionsthroughout the country and other laborers.And I saw this as an element of a class wargoing on, you know.

Yes. Well, it was a real turning point that youcould be part of.

Yes. Yes, exactly. And I probably was atthat time thinking more and more as a Marx-ist. The kind of Marxist I was, was a kind of,not derogatory, but a funny term, a “hard-hat Marxist.” You don’t know much aboutMarxism, but, you live it; you go out on theline with a hard hat. [laughter]

But I was feeling all this stuff through thekind of reading I had done, the literature, andthe people that I knew. I was feeling moreand more left, and the friends that I had onthe waterfront who were communists werevery, very congenial associates to me. I likedtheir points of view; I liked the commitmentthey had to the union; I liked their under-standing of policy, their understanding ofevents, of the relation of unions to govern-ment and the whole social system. They weremuch more social thinkers than other peoplethat I had known. And they had a purpose.

Did you know them as communists? I mean,were people identifying themselves as commu-nists?

Yes. This was open at that time. I don’tremember any secret communists in thatperiod. I mean, there were a lot of peopleproud to be communist. It was quite open,

461CLASS WARFARE

and that’s why the next year or two was sucha trauma, when it became dangerous to be acommunist. I always felt very comfortablebeing . . . I was determined to be open if Itook on ideologies of that kind.

But anyway, I found this a congenial at-mosphere. I liked the camaraderie, the senseof a united purpose. The analysis of eventsmade sense to me. The role of the Left andof trade unions made sense to me, you know,the ideological leadership. And by the way,looking back, when I think of the apoliticalAmerican public and labor force today—largely apolitical—there was somethingrather positive and wonderful about that sec-tor of labor that had an ideological direction,that had a politics, had a notion of politicalstrategy and where to go and how to work,and a sense of long-range tactics and goals.You know, that was a wonderful thing. Thatattracted me—the major unions as thespokesman for the working class, as peopleleading the way to some kind of goal, social-ism or communism, whatever, all of whichfit in very well with any idealistic conceptsthat any of us may have had. That was a veryattractive thing.

And I have to say this, and I’d say itagain—not only don’t I regret it, I’m ex-tremely grateful for that period. It waspositive; it was positive for many people thatI knew. It gave them great raison d’etre, away of thinking about themselves that waspositive. A lot people that I knew, who hadbeen seamen or in other kinds of work in la-bor, found in this kind of environment a senseof power, empowerment, and a sense of dig-nity and pride—a pride in what they were.And I don’t cut that. That was great.

And in the ideology itself, to the degreewhich Marxist concepts were presented insome kind of direct and original way, there

was a kind of truth. And I still think that. Imean, I think Marx was a tremendousthinker, made a tremendous contribution toworld culture. And Marxism ain’t dead.[laughter] It ain’t dead, and it won’t be, nomore than God is dead. God ain’t dead, ei-ther. He’s loud and clear. [laughter]

So, anyway, these were the conditions Iwas in, and what was I going to do? Here Ihad a wife and a child. Kathy was working,which helped, and I made a small contribu-tion on these trips. But that wasn’t going togo on; and I had to find my way with all kindsof fantasies about what I was going to do.

I had little odd jobs. I think through theCalifornia Labor School or somewhere weheard that we could get jobs with the SocialSecurity Administration. Kathy and I bothgot jobs, handing out checks and keepingrecords. Well, this certainly wasn’t the kindof job I was good at. As I remember, I lasteda few weeks, and Kathy lasted a lot longerbecause she was a reliable, orderly person.But, hell, I think I must have given out hun-dreds of dollars. [laughter]

I couldn’t argue with people. If they saidthey needed it, I would sign for it and puttheir name on the list. And I think little bylittle, some of the authorities around therebegan to suspect that something was wrongin that particular window. [laughter]

And the line was getting longer and longer be-hind your window! [laughter]

Yes. [laughter] And I had to wear a coatand tie, and at that time, in those days, un-der those conditions, that was to medemeaning.

Had the terms “blue collar,” “white collar” beencoined at this point?


You know, I don’t think so. I think thatwas more in terms of East Coast and clericalkinds of work and things of that kind. I don’trecall it, though it may have been. But I don’tthink that was a common term.

So, anyway, there were jobs like that. Atleast that was one that lasted a few weeks,and we made a little money.

54FISHING FOR ANSWERS

Y FRIEND, Bob Nelson, who wasnow a second mate or somethingin the Master’s, Mates, and Pilots

And how do you know you’re going to catchany fish?” Those were the days when youcould catch salmon in San Francisco Bay orjust outside.

So I spent hours and days on that littleboat, worked my tail off. And Bob was reallyvery good. I mean, he knew about the en-gine. The engine was, of course, all rusted. Iremember it was all taken apart laying aroundon the deck, in pieces, and he was going overit with steel wool, cleaning and polishingeverything on the damn thing, and that tooka long time. And I was mostly chipping paintand caulking—I did a good job, a hell of abig job—and pumping out the bilge so thatwe could caulk the bottom and all that sortof thing. Over the period of weeks and weekswe finally had a boat, but we didn’t then havethe trolling rig that we needed. I rememberthat Bob knew all about these things—a veryinformed guy. God, he knew about every kindof line and pulley, things that you needed fora fishing boat.

So by this time Kathy was really sure thatnothing was going to happen. [laughter] Andwe were barred from her parents at this point

MUnion, was in town, and we got together.And we’d always had this dream of getting afishing boat. He had found one, an old,broken-down, leaky, dismantled fishing boatthat he got for, I don’t know, a few hundreddollars. At least it would float, but everythingneeded to be done to it. It was about maybea twenty-five, thirty-foot boat, and it had amast. The mast was still there. But all therigging was gone. And it was, oh, rusty; thepaint had all peeled; it was a mess. But itfloated. And the bilge was full of waterbecause the pumps weren’t working, andthere were leaks. So he had gotten this thing,and he had it docked somewhere in SanFrancisco, at some dock. And he said, “Let’sfix this damn thing up and go fishing.” Well,this was just made to order for me.

I had nothing else going that was reallyof interest and fascinating. And so I startedwith him. Kathy was very askance, and proba-bly for good reason, about this. “How long isit going to take you to fix this damn boat?


to eat. And I think that I had certainly usedup all the paychecks from the last trip, andthere was very little. I was under tremendouspressure with Bob to really do it.

I remember going over with Bob to SanFrancisco and applying to the InternationalFishermen and Allied Workers Union. Weapplied for our union book and filled out allthe papers and were interviewed and all thatand finally got a union card—I still have myFishermen’s Union card. [laughter] And sowe were all ready to go, but we still didn’thave our trolling gear, you know, the twotrolling extensions that go out, one on eachside of the boat.

Bob knew a place way up in north bay; Iforget the name, but it’s a point way be-yond . . . oh, gosh, almost to Martinez. Thereon a projection of land were young eucalyp-tus trees growing in abundance, and that waswhere a lot of the fishermen went to replacetheir trolling poles. It’s no longer there, it’sall cleared. I remember we spent half a dayfinding just the right pole. We got two orthree extras to make sure they were right, orwe had for replacements if they dried up andwarped. And so we cut down a number ofthese poles and whittled them on our littleboat.

Bob had finally gotten that engine go-ing, which was a miracle, an absolute miracle.I remember the day when it started, youknow, putt, putt, putt, putt, putt, . . . andcrun, crunch, and then it would stop, andhe’d have to go in and do something. Finally,the damn thing, you know, putt-putt-putt-putt-putt, and we had a motor. [laughter] Thescrew was bent, I remember, and it was hardto steer, and we were going to get a new one.

But, anyway, we were able to get up there,and we got these poles, came back, and riggedour little boat. And we had a rather nice-looking, little boat. It was named, of course,

because of Bob, the Peer Gynt. He was hungup on Ibsen and the whole mystique of PeerGynt, so this was the Peer Gynt. And hepainted the name on the side, and I’d done alot of the varnishing, and it was a seaworthy,little dump of a boat! [laughter] And therewas a cabin. We could even sleep aboard, andwe had a little gas stove or kerosene stove, tocook up some coffee and stuff.

I never brought Kathy down to see it. Iwas scared. No, I wasn’t scared, I take it back.I just thought she would look at it . . . . Kathywas pretty sardonic at times, and I assumedshe was going to say, “You guys are going tomake a living off of that thing?” Yet we haddone it, and I was so very proud of it.

It must have been about May of 1946. Ittook us a couple of months, and then westarted to fish. That was it. I was afraid tohave Kathy see the boat or pry into our plans.I was scared of her insight. [laughter] Well, Ihad every reason to be scared. We wentout . . . . Oh, by the way, all the Italian fisher-men, you know, were looking at us like, “Whoare these gazoonies coming into our union?Look what’s happening to our union.” Youknow, the old Italian fishermen there at theunion hall and . . . was it Pier 39? It was wayout near Fishermen’s Wharf, their office.And, you know, we were really Johnny-come-latelies, a couple of nuts with our horrible,little boat. [laughter] But it was a seaworthy,little vessel!

And so we went a couple of times troll-ing. And we knew the right thing about bait,and we knew about how to handle our linesand all that. Not one damn fish. And we wentout four or five times, trolling in places thatwe . . . . However, it was a bad time of year,anyway, and most of the fishermen were goingway out in the Farallons. A few were fishingin the Bay; they knew what to do. In fact, alot of them were net fishing, and we were


trolling, which was high class, you know, butrather inappropriate at that particular time.And for days we didn’t get one fish. And itslowly dawned on us. We weren’t no fisher-men! [laughter] We weren’t going to make aliving fishing! It was a horrible revelation.

But Bob said he was going to keep theboat and wait until the time was right, but Icouldn’t wait. I mean, you know, he was asingle guy. In fact, he could tie the thing upand go to sea again and get a check. I had toworry about what I was going to do.

As June approached, it was clear therewas going to be a major strike. It was set forJune 15, and we’re talking now about some-time in May when this fishing venture hascome to an end. And I have the choice nowof taking a ship and getting out and makingsome money. But at the end of the war, Icouldn’t really explain this to Kathy, youknow, rather than staying and fighting to stayashore and to find a job and all that, takingthe easy way and going to sea and being gonefor another few weeks or a couple of months.

It was embarrassing to me to even . . . totry to figure out what to do about this. Andthere was a strike coming up, and I began tobe swept up in the spirit of that, you know,particularly because among the SUP leader-ship this was looked upon as this horriblecommie strike fostered by the Committee forMaritime Unity. And on the other hand, allthese other guys that I knew, particularlyaround the Maritime Bookshop, were talk-ing this thing up as one of the great momentsin West Coast labor history, equal to 1936 inthe formation of ILWU and all that. So, youknow, I was getting swept up in the feelingabout this thing. At the same time, I had tohave some money. [laughter]

This kind of retrospect, you know, canbe very confusing and a bit overwhelming,because when I think of those few months

between the time that I got off the Neptune’sCar (it was in the early part of January) andthe end of May, June, those few months wereso loaded with things that I was involved in,trying to work out. The kind of pressure thatcame from having to make some decisionsand then not knowing quite how to go aboutit, not knowing what to do. Going to sea hadbeen for a number years the only thing that Iknew how to do. I was a passing good sea-man, and I could get ships easily. I was agreen-card, able seaman. And even thoughit wasn’t much money, it was a way to get ajob. I could get one tomorrow. But beingashore, and this horrible prospect of how wasI going to get work, and what kind of work?And then behind it all were a number of dif-ferent pulls.

There was within me constantly the idea,“I should go back to school.” After all, I’dgotten an A.B. from University of California,and there I was in the Bay Area, with theuniversity right there, and yet I knew Icouldn’t afford to go to school at thatmoment. I had to earn a living of some kind.

Kathy was working, which was very good,off and on. She had various jobs. At one pointI spent a number of weeks with her with theSocial Security Administration in the EastBay, giving out checks, making out checksto unemployed and people who had SocialSecurity checks coming. She was able to getme on, as well.

I recall the feeling of shame that I hadwhen I put on a tie and a shirt and a jacketand slacks. [laughter] I felt I was in a play ora charade. I’d get up in the morning early toget there by eight o’clock and shave and puton these duds, which had been laying aroundin our closets for a long time. And here I wasdecked out like a gazoony going to work, in-stead of putting on my usual dungarees that Iwore all the time. And I had the feeling, you


know, I really was a misfit in that particularsetup. I would go into work and here were allthese guys, these women, at these little win-dows. Each window had a line sometimes allthe way out to the street, of people of variouskinds—mostly people that looked like work-ing class or impoverished—lining up to gettheir checks. And Kathy was a very, verymeticulous and careful worker. She would askquestions, then she would make out the formsfor her people very carefully. And I was look-ing over to see how she did it and what shedid, but I felt it hard to turn anybody down.

I would ask the questions, but I believedeverything they said, like they had to havethe money. If they didn’t have some kind ofa permit they were supposed to show, thatthey had picked up their last check, or hadn’tpicked it up . . . I began to pay no attentionto that, and I was giving out checks.

Well, I would say in about three, fourweeks, Kathy was getting very annoyed withme because she knew that something waswrong at that window, and I began to realizethat this wasn’t my gig. [laughter] Also, I hadtoo many other things on my mind. I wasconcerned about getting down to the water-front every day or two and seeing what wasgoing on, and checking in at the union, see-ing what kind of ships were going in and out,talking to people that I knew, and keepingtrack of the developments in the labor situ-ation on the front. And, also, this greatfeeling I had that this was a kind of turningpoint in my life, and I had to figure some-thing out.

Now, I’m not sure that that was before orduring the GI bill of rights being made avail-able to servicemen, as they were coming backto the country, and whether the Seaman’s Billof Rights was being talked about or pushedat that time. But merchant mariners had nobuffer, no fallback, even though they had

been told that it was expected, that all themerchant marine would be treated like therest of the armed services. In fact, we’d goneto sea, originally, at the beginning of the war,with that kind of slogan, that we were mem-bers of the armed services, and we were doingan important job during the war, and thatwe expected that our rewards at the endwould be similar to the armed services. Buthere I was, and here were a number of othermen that I knew, probably in the very samesituation, trying to figure out what now?What were they going to do with their lives?Or how were they going to get back into ashorelife, having been away for three, four years atsea or abroad, doing quite different work, andnow had to return, many, who I’m sure likeme, had families.

And had the GI bill or the Seaman’s Billof Rights applied to us, I don’t know whatthat would have meant during that particu-lar crossroads in my life. I’m quite sure I wouldhave gone back to school if I had had theopportunity. I couldn’t borrow any moremoney from my folks or Kathy’s folks. Theyhadn’t much, and they hadn’t given us much,but sometimes it made the difference betweenbeing able to pay our rent or eat. What moneyI made at sea often was enough if I had a goodtrip, and I came back with a good payoff. AndKathy working helped a lot. And yet therewere times like the one right now there inearly 1946 when things were very slim. Imean, Kathy’s wage at the Social Securityoffices wasn’t very much, and when I wasworking there, that helped, but I wasn’t go-ing to go on doing that, and she wasn’t goingto go on doing that. So then what?

Just the thought of going back toschool . . . there was a kind of a deep, nos-talgic desire, I suppose, to return, but also atthat point in my life, I felt that I’d had a lotof experience, but that I was ignorant, that


there was a lot I didn’t know that I wantedto know. [laughter] There were things that Iwanted to go into. Also, in that I thought ofmyself as becoming something of a writer, Ifelt that I needed more background in litera-ture; I needed to have some background inhistory. In my reading I realized there weregreat gaps in my knowledge, and I thoughtthat going back to the university would helpme fill in those gaps.

Also, I remembered my courses in anthro-pology, and I had done some reading, youknow, while I was at sea. And that was a pull,you know. That was one of the things that Ithought I wanted to go into with more detail.I wanted to immerse myself in information,rather than merely experiencing, as I’d beendoing. It was all very important, and I wasglad that I’d done it, but now here was a kindof a moment of truth; I had to decide onthings.

Then those two pulls, you see . . . writ-ing and returning to sea, which even then Isaw as a very unrealistic goal for myself—togo back to sea. You know, what was I goingto do? Should I be a sailor the rest of my life?Oh, even if I was a good writer, go to sea andtry to write myself out of it? [laughter] Or gointo trade union work, which at that pointwould not have been possible for me becauseI didn’t have that much experience, but itwas one of the things in my mind? I’d beenvery interested in labor, the history of laborin this country and the development of tradeunions, and I had a sense of loyalty to theunion that I was in, even though I was be-ginning to be a little wary of its policies andthink that maybe I was in the wrong union.There was then the pull of the imminentstrike and all of the discussion going on onthe waterfront among people that I had metand knew, about what the problems were andwhat they were going to be in the next few

months. The Committee for Maritime Unityhad met in Washington, I believe in Februaryof that year. This was a new organization offive, six, or seven unions, maritime unions,that had banded together with the idea thatthey were going to have to face the ship own-ers and demand some kind of compensationfor the period of the war in which the unionshad given up a lot of their rights and givenup a lot of demands, and now the war wasover, it was time to develop some kind ofequity.

I remember the CMU not only called forunity of all maritime unions in the event ofstrikes, which was probably the most impor-tant plank that they had when they met inWashington, but that they called for somekind of national uniform agreements fromship owners across the board on equal payfor equal work and on organizing the unor-ganized. One of the problems looming in thepicture was the pre-war problem of what todo about non-union, unorganized workersbeing used as scabs and finks during times ofstrikes, or even during regular, normal times,being hired through the back door by ship-ping companies. The old crook system waslooming as possibly returning—people beinghired off the docks, rather than through theunion hall.

All that was the concern of the unions,and they wanted to develop a national re-search department in order to research theeconomics of shipping in the world and polit-ical action. And part of that was internationalcommunication with unions elsewhere in theworld—international union organization. Allof these things I found very interesting, verycompelling, and sounded like somethingworth struggling for, fighting for.

So here this strike was coming up on June15, and it looked like it was going to be amajor one; there was a lot of excitement. And


here I was, milling around like some kind ofa loose cog in a wheel, trying to decide whatI was going to do with my life. This, I found,a little embarrassing to be worried about whatI was going to do with my life, when most ofthe guys that I’d worked with and were onthe front didn’t have any choice of what theywere going to do with their lives. They eitherwent to sea or they starved, or they foundthemselves as unemployed workers standingin lines looking for odd jobs anywhere theycould get it on the front. Yet I also knew anumber of men that I worked with who werein a similar plight with me. They had somekind of aspirations to go on to certain profes-sions or to go into some kind of businesses orto pick up where they left off years before,and there was this disquieting sense of beingin an interim, being in some kind of hiatus.And I was one of those. I don’t think I reallyknew how many others were in the same spot.I just knew I was.

So all this was going on in that two orthree months; at the same time Bob Nelsonand I were out every spare minute we had onthe damn Peer Gynt, trying to get or keepthe boat running, and to see if we could fish.[laughter] And as I said, we weren’t success-ful.

Kathy, of course, for good reasons, wasurging me to quit going to sea. My family wasdoing the same thing. “Now, it’s time,Warren. You know, the war is over. You gotto pick up the pieces and get moving!” AndI didn’t want to move in any of the direc-tions that I could think of. Even going backto school sounds like something too far-fetched at the moment. I mean, how could I,with a wife and a child and with no skillsand no money at the time, go back to school?It wasn’t like when I was single and the yearsbefore when things were cheap. But it wasgetting more expensive to go to school and

more expensive to pay for rent, more expen-sive to live. And we had a daughter, andpossibly more family coming. And somehowor other that was just a dream, the idea ofreturning to school, although it was alwaysthere.

When you did think or dream about going backto school, did you always have in mind going andstaying in the Bay Area and going to Berkeleyspecifically?

Oh, sure, because it would have beeneven more far-fetched for me to think ofgoing away to some distant university. Theexpense was bad enough where I was! Here Iwas, within blocks of the University ofCalifornia, and I knew people there, and Ihad friends that had gone and were goingthere.

And it was still a very exciting atmosphere. Imean, it was everything that you wantedfor . . . .

Ooh, Berkeley was a great university,even then. [laughter] But yes, it had a greatattraction; it was the lodestone. And I usedto go up there and hang around people that Iknew, certain professors that I knew in theEnglish department, in the history depart-ment, now and then visit them. Paul Radin,I would visit him when he was in town, and,you know, it kept alive that spark, that feel-ing that I would go back. However, I had tosort of discount this in my life, because itwasn’t realistic at the time; I needed a job!

I had to have a job, and I had to have ajob that I could do, and I felt terribly inept. Ithink it’s very hard to explain something likethat. A guy goes to sea for four years, youknow, a highly skilled seaman, and then feelsutterly inept ashore. When I would think of


various jobs, I realized I would have to trainto do them.

All right, so I did have some jobs. Onething I could do was standby work out of theunion hall. There were jobs frequently on theboard. You’d go where a company wantedsomebody to stand by on the ship while itwas at dock or while out at anchor, and thecrew had left and been paid off, and only theofficers were coming and going. And you’dgo out and stand by, a sort of watchman, orthey might hire two or three people to standwatches and all that, taking the place of thecrew, doing odd jobs on the ship—cleaningup, scraping, painting, polishing, seeing to itthat instruments were clean, and all that sortof thing. These were sometimes right in SanFrancisco Bay, or, at the most, on a shuttleup and down the coast close by, down toMonterey or San Pedro, or north to Seattle.That was the longest.

And I didn’t take any of those, becausethe situation at home was such that I reallyfelt I had to stick around. And Kathy wasgetting very tired of my absences, and I wasgetting very tired of them, too. I was feelingthe burden of not having had a consistentand responsible relationship at home. AndAnya was now two and half, and I just feltthe need to be around. She was a delight andbegan to react if I went away and all that. SoI would take standby jobs in the bay. Everyfew weeks I’d stand by a night or two out onanchor by a dock and made fairly goodmoney, because there was overtime involvedand all that. So a little came in from that,that was very helpful.

Nevertheless, it was sporadic; it wasn’twhat you can call “a job.” It was just a seriesof little jobs. I got into the truck driversunion, and I would drive just delivery trucksto stores, delivering various kinds of com-

modities to stores. And I did that for two orthree weeks at a time. Odd jobber.

It was very nerve-wracking, as I remem-ber, because all during this were these pulls. Imean, I had to go over to San Francisco tothe union hall—I wanted to do that. I hadto hang around with my friends over thereand talk about what was going on. And thewhole thing . . . when I think of that threeor four months, I don’t know how one doesall those things at one time! It was doing justtoo much at one time. I guess the word isflailing. I was flailing. And then, the othermajor pull was my writing. About that time—I have mentioned this earlier—I won amerchant marine short story contest for oneof my stories, and Joseph Henry Jackson, whowas the literary editor of the Chronicle at thattime, was one of the judges. And he wrote along column in the Chronicle, touting this asone the best short stories he had read, and,“Here was d’Azevedo on his way to being agreat writer,” and all that. Well, this was verycharming. It was very invigorating. At thesame time, what was I going to do about it,you know? [laughter]

I was working on a collections of stories—that’s right—called Sargasso, because thewhole idea of the Sargasso Sea was a kind ofan important metaphor, symbol in my mindduring that period. I had four or five stories,and I was going to finish up two or three moreand put this little book out called Sargasso.Well, Jackson had mentioned that in theChronicle, that d’Azevedo was about to pub-lish this book. Now, based on that, I gotletters from Houghton Mifflin and two orthree other publishers, asking me, you know,would I send them the manuscript? Theyliked my story, and they wanted the book.

Well, this was a whole other thing. Thismeant sitting down, taking the time, finding


myself a space, and getting some writingdone. I was also doing a little painting, and Ihad sold two or three paintings at the UnitedSeamen’s Art Exhibit in New York, and thatwas delightful.

But, you know, these things come far andfew between, and in the meantime, I had toearn a living. I had to figure out what I wasgoing to be doing. So it was quite a morass, astew.

Could you explain the metaphor you were refer-ring to, the Sargasso Sea metaphor?

It was an important metaphor to me, be-cause the Sargasso was that great, mysteriousarea around the Caribbean with all the weirdmyths and stories about strange happenings,lost ships . . . . Of course, up to this day, youknow, airplanes are still reported lost in theSargasso and all that sort of thing. And sto-ries of flotsam, these strange floatingislands of seaweed with various kinds of seacreatures attached, using the bottom of themfor food, and with long, trailing tentacles. Imean, a mysterious and wonderful area. Ididn’t have to develop much of a myth, be-cause there were many myths about theSargasso Sea, but the idea of what theSargasso was was for me a metaphor for yearsI’d spent at sea, for things that I’d seen andexperienced. In fact, that phrase, “adrift inthe Sargasso,” was for me a powerful image.

Was it sort of the idea that the things that endureor float to the surface or have some meaning orwhatever, are somehow nevertheless accidental?Is that part of it, that there isn’t a necessary singletheme of cause and effect?

[laughter] No. No. It’s just that it was thiswonderful, mysterious, mirage-like area thatI had been through and could sort of see why

people felt this way. When there are nostorms, this flat, glassy sea with clear water,loaded with jellyfish, and at night, highlyluminous. And the sea just seemed to twinklewith all sorts of light at night.

But then there were also stories about theSargasso. During the slave period, slave shipswould come through the Sargasso, and therewere reports of these deep fogs and mists thatships would be lost in for days, and then com-ing out, would tell stories about how they’dgone around in circles, and their compassdidn’t work, and . . . . I mean, just a place ofmarvelous mystery and of myth and fiction.Most of it was just fiction. You know, eventoday, a squadron of planes goes off, and thendisappears in the Sargasso, you see. Well, allthrough the last three, four hundred years ofhistory, these stories about the Sargasso havecome up. So to me it was a metaphor for thatmysterious area of the world and oneself—adrift in the Sargasso, which, in a way, is agood metaphor for that four years I spent atsea, I think.

So, anyway, all that was going on betweenJanuary and May. Also, in May the CMU hadhad a convention in San Francisco. They metto reaffirm the unity of the West and EastCoast unions, maritime unions, and also seta date for a strike. June 15 was the deadlinethey gave to the ship owners to renew con-tracts with the changes and demands thatwere made by the unions.

And those demands were, when I lookback, very minimal. I mean, you know, forty-hour week at sea, overtime, and an increaseof wages that I think was seventeen dollarsor something like that a month, certain safetyregulations, health care . . . various kinds ofdemands I don’t remember right now. Butthey were very sort of ordinary demands. Andwhen you look back, I mean, they were mini-mal, except to the ship owners it was


considered to be the end of the world. “Theseare the commie unions asking for too much.”

The SUP that I belonged to took a simi-lar . . . at least the leadership took a similarview. In fact, Harry Lundeberg and the lead-ership of the union said, “The commie unionsare now striking in order to get power and todrive us off the West Coast, to take over.”

And it’s interesting, the SUP had alreadygotten some of those advantages already intheir contracts. They had a nice buddy-buddyrelationship with some of the ship ownerswho saw the handwriting on the wall andthought, “Let’s take care of this union, andthis will put the other ones on the spot.”

A lot of us could see that happening. Andeven some members of the SUP that I knewfelt that this was a very, very risky and a slimystrategy on the part of their own union. Andso all this was happening.

Oh, by the way, I have to go back to myaward on the short story contest. Not onlywas Joseph Henry Jackson one of the judges,but Albert Wetjen, who was a minor, butwell-known writer of sea-stories. JaclandMarmer, also a well-known sea-story writerat that time. And who else? Oh, C. S.Forester, author of the Horatio Hornblowerseries. And then Herbert Diamonte who hadbeen one of my professors at the universityEnglish department, and Claude Mayo, whowas superintendent of the California Mari-time Academy. That was a weird, strangebunch of judges. All of them but one saidthat my story was really was the quality ofDefoe. I guess it was Marmer who said hedidn’t like my stream of consciousness styleand that the content was a little bit over-board, but he said it probably was the beststory. They all liked it except for C. S.Forester, of the Horatio Hornblower series.[laughter] He wrote very straightforward

adventure tales of the sea, which I had read alot of when I was a kid. And he said he didn’tthink there was much in the story. He wasthe only one that was negative.

What was the name of the story?

That was “Pier”—just about a pier-headjump.

Oh, “pier,” the pier you tie up to?

I originally called it “Pier Infinity,” be-cause that was my cosmological reference.But this young editor that I’d sent it to ofInterim in Seattle said, “Nobody will knowwhat you’re talking about. That’s OK to callit ‘Pier.’” I just thought of a pier-head jump,getting a ship at the hall, and then gettingready to go, and getting out to Pier 60, wayout at the end, taking cabs and going downthe dock, leaving everything behind, andheading out for lord knows where. You didn’tknow where you were going. It’s called a pier-head jump when you get a ship, and you haveto be there that same day, practically.

Oh, I see. So no preparation at all . . . .

It means the ship is leaving, and you gotto get your ass out there right now. I had afew hours, and I just, you know, droppedeverything and went. So I wrote about that,about this business of breaking with the shore,getting on a ship. The minute you jump onit, the moor lines come in, and off you go. Imean, it was that kind of a story, and it wassort of “stream of consciousness.” I don’t thinkanybody talks about that now, but old C. S.Forester didn’t like it, that stream of con-sciousness, like Joyce and others were writing,and it was avant-garde at that time.

55TROUBLE WITH THE SUP

WAS GOING TO SUP meetings regu-larly. I kept up my dues always, and I wentto every meeting when I was ashore, and

Yes, “and these guys now are going to messeverything up and it’s the commies that aredoing it.”

Was that effective?

You know, let me think of the guys that Iworked with in the SUP. They had heard allthis stuff before. You sit there in the meet-ings, and you let the leadership rant and rave,and you go out and go about your business.But this was getting serious, because every-body knew that something was coming up.And there were a lot of guys that I knew inthe union who’d sit around talking, saying,“We should be joining this Committee forMaritime Unity, we should be joining thestrike. And, you know, we’re not only goingto be left behind, but it makes us a phonyunion not to be involved.”

There was all that kind of talk. But I don’tknow, I imagine there were many who be-lieved exactly in what the leadership wassaying and many who just didn’t give a damn.I mean, it’s the same kind of mix you’re get-ting in the American electorate today—thesame kind of a thing in the union. [laughter]

II saw this growing move within the SUP, dis-tancing themselves from the CMU, andmaking statements that the CMU and thethreat of a strike coming up was really a plotwith the commies, you know. And actually Ithink what was going on was the SUP wasworried about their diminished power base,that they would be left in the lurch.

At the same time they also had a prettygood, at that time, agreement with the shipowners, and they wouldn’t have wanted thatjeopardized. And here now was this CMUrepresenting a lot of maritime workers, andfrom the point of view of the SUP, commu-nist led. This wasn’t really the case, but therewere certainly a lot of communists in thoseunions, and there was a much more left-wingorientation to policy. But Lundeberg used thecommunist label as a way of whipping hismembership into line to oppose the strike.

So it was effectively kind of the idea that, “Gee,you’ve got a good deal, and we’ve negotiatedthis . . . .”


But I was all fired up, and a few of theguys I knew were all fired up about it. I had avery romantic concept of trade unionism thatI’ve already talked about earlier. But I felt adeep loyalty to the idea of the union. I was amember of the Sailors Union of the Pacific,and damn it, I wanted to be a good one. Andafter the mutiny, even though I was a littlebit discouraged by the reaction, or lack, tomy coming back with this horrendous tale ofreal abuse at sea, I nevertheless felt that if itwasn’t for the union, we’d be back before the1930s with crimps and the worst kind of con-ditions aboard ship, and that people like meprobably would never have even dreamed ofgoing.

Did you ever write a story about the mutiny?

No. I was going to, but while it was hot Ididn’t do it. No, I don’t know why I didn’t. Ihave a lot of letters that give a pretty goodpicture, but no, no I didn’t. I didn’t writemany stories, but the ones I did were good.

That’s important.

Yes, it is.So, you know, as a kid from a relatively, I

suppose, secure middle class family at thepoint when I left home, and as a college boy,from the crew’s point of view, it was an en-tirely new experience to learn what it meantto be a member of a trade union, and I wasdeeply affected by it. This meant a lot to me.It became the scaffolding on which a lot ofmy reading went and the development of sortof a left orientation to class struggle and tosocialism, the kind of foggy socialism that Ihad in my mind at the time. Of course, a lotof this was syndicalism.

Actually a friend of mine, who I’d knownat school, who I have mentioned before,

George Leite, used to argue that I was ananarchosyndicalist, and that was fine. But,you know, “Don’t go too far left, or you’regoing to end up in the hands of the commu-nists, that’ll be your finish,” and all that. Infact, he wrote me a postcard, a very sarcasticone when Nelson and I were trying to getthis fishing boat, Peer Gynt, going. [laugh-ter] I think he was a little jealous because hewanted to do the same thing. He and I hadalways talked about getting a fishing boat,and here I was getting it and all that sort ofthing. But nevertheless, he wrote this letterin which he says, “When did you become aproletarian?” [laughter]

And then he takes me to task for think-ing that I’m a working man, given my pastand all that. And this hurt, this bothered mebecause it was partly true, and one of thethings that I was also very concerned aboutand aware of. And he found this Achillesheel, and he was poking away at it.

And then he says, “You know, you guysgot a boat called Peer Gynt, so why the helldon’t you read what Ibsen said. You know,Ibsen was a kind of a radical anarchist, I sup-pose, in his political thinking.”

And then George sends me this quotefrom Ibsen—I’m not sure where it camefrom—“The state must go,” it started out,“nor will I have anything to do with revolu-tion. Undermine the state concept. Establishfree choice and its intellectual implicationsas the soul determineth for a union. That isthe beginning of freedom. That is worthsomething. A change in the form of govern-ment is nothing but a fussing about degrees.All that is just nonsense.” Well, that’s proba-bly the last word in anarchism, and he couldhave been a Wobbly, you know.

So George, as a guy interested in the artsand something of an artist himself, was partof the reason why I was withdrawing from so


much of that. This was the sort of rarifiedworld of the avant-garde intellectual, who,at the most, was a nihilist. You know, “Tohell with everything.” And, “Down with thestate. We don’t need states. The beginningof union is to do away with governments, doaway with everything.” And, you know, I feltthat what I was hearing here was the kind ofprissy intellectual prophylactic world isolatedfrom the real world that I felt I was dealingwith; this was the artist vanguard, the artistprophet, the artist guru, and all that sort ofthing, which I had a certain sympathy for,but at the same time, here I was at the pointof my life where I was trying to make a liv-ing, trying to figure out what to do with mylife and I was getting this kind of crap, youknow, from a friend of mine, really kind oftelling crap. It made its mark because thosewere the things I was worried about, con-cerned about.

And he had read this draft of mine, TheEnormous Outhouse, my second article that Inever published about Henry Miller, aboutwhat Miller was doing. I had great admira-tion for his work until he began to talk abouthimself as this poor deprived artist. Why isn’tthe United States doing something for itsartists? It does something for its screen stars,does something for this and that. Well, Iagreed, but the point is there was somethingabout it that sounded childish and naïve andbeneath him, and so I was reacting to that.Here was a guy I’d admired who I thoughtwas acting like a fool. So I overreacted in away. Nevertheless, that was part of all thisstuff that was going on at that time. And whata soup, right? [laughter] I think I was react-ing to what people and Americans inparticular, the set that I had once been partof, do. They tend to make icons and heroic,almost mystically heroic figures, you know.The heroic artist kind of thing that might

apply in a few cases but is most often a partin a drama. It’s a posture, and I react againstthat. I have never had any use for gurus ofany kind.

But wasn’t there quite a following? I mean,weren’t people clustered around Big Sur? Wasn’tthis when Henry Miller was in Big Sur and . . . ?

Yes, there were not a lot of people, butyes, there was Anaïs Nin—I think I’ve men-tioned this before—Durrell, the earlypre-beat group. I had been down there. I don’tthink I met Miller. I met his girlfriends, hiswife, and Jean Varda the artist, and Jaime deAngulo who wasn’t part of the group, but hehad a place down there. Yes, it was a kind ofa center, and Miller was sometimes there, andthen George Leite went down there. I thinkhe did most of the work on the early issues ofCircle down there. It was exciting and a mar-velous thing; but this business of somehowturning an individual into this god-likesprite—I’ve always reacted against that. Idon’t think I’ve had any gurus in my life. I’veknown some and I’ve been interested inthem, but the nearest might have been HarryBridges for awhile. But there was nothingsaint-like or Christ-like about Harry.[laughter]

There were great figures that I’ve had afeeling that I would probably agree with andsupport and follow. Not really follow . . . Inever felt like I wanted to be a follower of anindividual who had a mystique or a philo-sophical view of the world. And if they talkedabout or put themselves in that role, I alwayshad a deep reaction against them, a negativereaction. It’s one thing for people to look atthem that way, but if somebody takes them-selves seriously and actually promotes thatview of themselves, they’ve lost me, youknow. Well, I felt that Miller had done that.


Oh, yes, and my reading at the time . . . .How did I have time to read? But I did. I re-member re-reading, I think, or reading TomPaine’s Age of Reason. The long discussionhe had of the place of organized religion, Iremember, threw me back to Feuerbach, andto Ingersoll, the sort of atheistic orientation.[laughter] Well Paine didn’t write as an athe-ist, but he certainly laid the groundwork forit in the Age of Reason. You know, he proudlydenounced . . . .

So this is still a persistent theme. I mean, you’restill very interested in the role of religion.

Oh, yes.

It’s what you were observing.

Oh, god yes! Oh, yes. Yes.

Well, what was going on in . . .

In religion?

. . . formal religion at the time? I mean, wasthere something in particular that . . . ?

Nothing that I was connected with ex-cept, you know, through my parents’ families.They were very religious, but nothing newor different. I don’t remember the evange-lists who were running around making a noiseat the time. But, no, I’d already disconnectedmyself from any formal religious interests, butI still had a sort of a religious orientation tothings. I still do. The word religion doesn’tcover it—a feeling of the grandeur of thecosmos kind of thing [laughter] and a secularhumanistic religious orientation that I stillhad, and I was still concerned and interestedin anything that was written or said about

this, and so Tom Paine was one of my read-ings at the time.

But mainly, I was reading people likeMaxim Gorky, who I thought was a masterfulshort story writer; I was reading his shortnovels and stories. And this gave me someidea of another kind of writing I might do,which, by the way, I tried later, and very un-successfully. When I tried to write sociallyconscious stories and write in a more con-ventional style, though I wrote well, to me,they were dismal failures. I have numerousmanuscripts of attempts to do that, becausethe left-wing socialist realism had begun tomake sense to me. To me, it was reasonable,but I realized it killed whatever I had, that itwasn’t for me. Steinbeck was, to me, a greatwriter. Dos Pasos, Theodore Dreiser, peoplelike that, were great conventional writers,and I admired them, but when I wrote thatway I felt it wasn’t me, it wasn’t right. Thekind of writing I did and would have goneon doing was much more experimental,avant-garde, close to poetry and all that. Thatwas a struggle.

Do you think you were exploring that kind ofwriting, too, in an attempt to kind of bring yoururge to write into some sort of form of social rele-vance so you could pursue it?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I felt that, you know,what I had experienced and what I was see-ing I should be able to write more directlyabout. Now, there was a way of doing it, butI didn’t find it at that time. I would have hadto struggle and work very hard at it and con-centrate at that to find my way through thatproblem of realism against experimentalavant-gardism and how to merge them. It canbe done, but I didn’t do that.

And so I was reading, you know, tryingto get models—Gorky, Dos Pasos, Steinbeck,


and Dreiser. These people were very compel-ling writers. I still respect them. They’re greatwriters. But I didn’t feel that I would everwrite like that. One reason I tried to was thatone of my hopes at the time was if I couldever write a sort of a straightforward story ornovel, I could get a fellowship to Stanford orsomeplace like that in the writing depart-ment. I was thinking of trying to get into oneof these writing programs. And my attemptswere rather dismal, as I remember, very forcedand not right, not the easy flow of my earlierwriting. So, this was a rough three or fourmonths, I guess, when I’m adding things uphere! And also the whole business of tradeunionism and work, labor; the whole ques-tion of labor was not only symbolic, but areal thing to me. What little I knew of Marxand some of the Marxist writers, the businessabout class consciousness, I was mulling allthese things over. I didn’t know much aboutit. I was very poorly read in this, but the littleI read had registered to some degree: Thewhole idea of recognizing that one’s work,the way one worked, affected one’s conscious-ness, the way one saw the world and whatone felt about the world. I realized that overthe past three or four years, I had lived in anenvironment in which my attitude towardthe world had shifted, I mean, my feelingsabout things, my sense of values, of what wasimportant and what wasn’t, and who werereal people and who were bullshit artists, youknow. All these things I was working over.And one thing that I did know, and part ofmy loyalty to the trade union movement atthe time, was my recognition while I was atsea—despite all the things that went wrongand all the people I didn’t like as well as thoseI liked and all the unpleasant things as wellas the powerful, exciting experiences—onething that I remembered most of all was thecommunity of work. How doing the same

kind of work, how a group of people workingtogether, no matter what their differences are,find a way to get along and to solve problems.

I think that came out really compellingly whenyou were describing the rhythm of handling thecoal, because you certainly described the drudg-ery, but you also described something else thatsort of unified the work gang.

Oh, yes. It’s a kind of music, a kind ofdance, where you’re so aware of other peopleand where they are and what they need andwhat you can’t do to disrupt it and what youmust do to carry on. And it gives you energy,gives you a tremendous amount of sustain-ing energy.

Well, then you could take that as a meta-phor for the whole business of work. Onelearns to accommodate, to labor with othersand to understand the world in the terms ofthe needs of those others and yourself. Allthis fit into my sort of emerging left wingphilosophical consciousness, I suppose: classconsciousness and the whole idea of theMarxist superstructure; that the base of somuch of human conscience in life is one’seconomic position and labor, where one is.It opened up things to me like why peoplethought the way they thought, in terms ofthe kind of world they lived in, the kind oflevel, you know, of my own parents and myfriends, the kind of lives they had lived, theway they earned their living, had a lot to dowith the way they looked at the world aroundthem, not entirely, but to a considerable ex-tent. This was something that never hadreally occurred to me until this sort of laterperiod as I was moving into the deep doo-doo of decision making about the world andmyself and all that. [laughter]

And also, I had done a little reading onthe history of the SUP and realized that the


earliest founders were communists, you know,back in the 1880s, 1885 or something likethat. You know, the International WorkingMen’s Association, out of which the SUPcame, was founded by two or three commu-nists, among others, and here the union wasdenouncing communists! [laughter] And thekey figures in the early strikes, recognized bythe SUP but minimized in their historicalstatements, were communists.

That stuff began to register on me, youknow, that the real action here, the thingsthat had been done, the important thingsthat were happening even right now in May1946, it’s the communists on the waterfront,giving leadership to the trade union move-ment and giving it a policy, good or bad. Theyare the ones who were out front. They werethere. They were on the spot. That was veryimpressive to me.

The ones that I knew on the front wereall guys that I had a lot of respect for: BillBailey and Walter Stack and Alex Treskin—Treskin comes up in a little differentcontext—and later on Pat Tobin, who was aclose friend of mine. These guys and oh, onesthat were killed during the struggles—well, Iwon’t mention their names here—but theseguys were, to me, brilliant laboring people.They were hardworking, highly aware,knowledgeable people in the labor move-ment, and they had the respect of the peoplein their unions. You know, even those whomight be opposed to them in terms of theirpolitical views recognized their value as mem-bers of the union. These were guys that couldbe counted on to stick with something, to dosomething, and they were militant. Theywere militant, and they were outspoken, andthey could talk. They were great soapboxers,which always helps in situations like that.

OK. About the sailors union: in 1885, theCoast Sailors Union was formed, and Andrew

Furuseth, who was a more conservative leaderof the union, nevertheless was a great laborunion leader. Later on he became very reac-tionary. After the turn of the century andafter the first world war he became not onlystaunchly anti-communist but somewhat re-actionary in his decisions. But he had been agreat union leader. He helped form not onlythis SUP, but he had been a very importantpart of the earlier union struggles.

And then, of course, in the 1920s theIWW, the Industrial Workers of the World,were calling for one big union, and they weremostly syndicalists, anarchist-syndicalists.There were some communists among them,also Trotskyists, and the whole business ofTrotskyism is another matter. But they werepart of the formation of this union that I hadbelonged to, and this was a pretty known andradical bunch. In 1920 to 1922, I guess, or1923, there was a great West Coast water-front strike, and the Wobblies (the nicknamefor members of the IWW) had been very in-strumental in that and had been some of thekey figures.

They also helped form the seamen’s clubsalong both coasts. These were little clubs,usually in the missions, like the Seamen’sChurch Institute in New York. Missions havethese institutes all over the country, butwithin them, these seamen would form theseseamen’s clubs, which were radical syndical-ists, sometimes commie, clubs.

When you say syndicalist, I don’t know whatthat . . . .

Syndicalism promoted one big tradeunion over the world. Eighteenth-early nine-teenth century socialism—the camaraderieof the working class joined together in onebig union, and therefore, all these littleunions are piddling things. And so the anar-


chists, Wobblies, you know, their idea was todestroy the company. [laughter] You can evendestroy a lousy union by warring from within.It would seem to be nihilist to other people.It had a name. But some of these Wobblieswere just plain anarchists, you know, destroy-ing, throwing things overboard. “The hellwith you, to hell with governments.”

So anyway, these very radical sorts hadbeen very much a part of the formation ofthe SUP. So I began to think well, “Whathas happened to this union; the changes thathave taken place, particularly underLundeberg after Furuseth and everything?”Under Lundeberg, there was sort of this daisy-chain setup with the West Coast ship owners,you know.

Can you talk more about the seamen’s clubs?

The seamen’s clubs were essentiallyformed by IWW-member seamen who, whenthey’d get together ashore, would have thesediscussions that were Marxist as well asTrotskyist and just plain working-guy syndi-calist.

And the relationship to the seamen missions wasthat they would just simply use the missions as aplace to gather?

Well, yes. Here they were staying in . . .they’re called missions, but they really werelittle hotels with cheap food. The Seamen’sChurch Institute was a very good example—it’s still going on in New York—and they werein almost every big port. The missions wouldset up some kind of place for poor, lonelymerchant seamen, and little did they realizethat they had this nest of vipers . . . plan-ning strikes and the end of the governmentand all that sort of thing. [laughter]

This work consciousness was very impor-tant to me, the idea that I had really, for thefirst time in my life, understood the power ofcommon work and as a glue of human rela-tionships and the basis for an orientationtoward life in the world—that one’s view ofthe world is based upon one’s close, hard,comradely work with others. This meant alot to me at the time. I romanticized it, I’mquite sure, but it was important.

And I was reading Dubois, The World andAfrica, which I mentioned before, I was al-ways reading in that. To me, that was apowerful book. It had come out, I think aboutthat time. And of course, my scripture for thattime [laughter] was The Myth of the NegroPast, by Herskovits, which I always went intowhenever I was trying to think through theproblem of race relations on the front, andnot only at sea.

I think I mentioned earlier a deep prob-lem that I had about the fact that our SUPcrews on deck were lily white and about thestrong anti-black feeling in the SUP, asagainst this other union that was ending seg-regation and putting out a tremendous amountof propaganda on race relations and openingup the union to all comers and had them onboard ships. I mean, we could see them, youknow, the “checkerboard crews,” as we calledthem—the guys that I was hanging out withcalled them.

Oh, and then I ran across a little pam-phlet at the Maritime Bookshop onEmbarcadero by Herb Tank, who was a mem-ber of the National Maritime Union. It wascalled communists on the Waterfront, and itcame out in 1946. I got a number of copies ofthis little booklet that sort of dealt with thehistory of the waterfront, the strikes andstruggles from the point of view of the Com-munist Party and what the Communist Party


had done. Well, I read that over and over,and I gave it away to some of my friends. It’sprobably one of the bases of why they taggedme. But I thought it was just a marvelous left-wing pamphlet. Herb Tank was a good writer,and he laid it out; it was open and frank, youknow. We communists have done this, andwe have done that.

Well, I was thinking about that, too, youknow. Where was I politically, where was Iin terms of my general view of things? Otherunions were pulling themselves together, rev-ving themselves up for this coming strike,June 15, and there was an awful lot of striketalk on the front about this that was to takeplace in a few weeks.

Is there any activity particularly around May 1on May Day?

If there was I don’t remember. I don’tthink I went to a parade like I did later, butyou can be sure there was a lot going on onMay Day in those days.

Anyway, this is toward the end of Maywith the strike being talked about for just afew weeks later, June 15, and I think I’d justcome in and just made the SUP meeting aftercoming off the ship that I had been a standbyon for overnight. I was on my way home, butI wanted to go to the meeting first and thenI would be going across the bay to Alameda,later. I think I called Kathy and said I’d behome later because I have to go to thismeeting.

So we went to the meeting, and therewere quite a few guys there, and there wasthe usual business meeting first, talking aboutthe problems with ships and thieves andthings of that kind. And then HarryLundeberg got up and started talking aboutthe coming strike and about how the SUPcould not allow itself to be pushed around by

these other commie unions, that it had itsown independent work to do on the frontand it would do it, and they would keep agood eye out on what these guys were goingto try to do, on and on and on. And I remem-ber getting very upset, more and more angry,really.

I was with a friend of mine—I’ll use hisnickname, Sharkey—a very good friend ofmine, and I’d shipped with him a number oftimes. He was a very hardworking, good-hearted guy, very simple and direct and allthat. And he and two other guys were sittingwith me, and right after Lundeberg spoke, Igot up and just asked a question.

I said, “I’m just asking, you know, as amember of the union, I want to know why itlooks as though we’re being asked to gothrough the picket lines of these other unionswhen they strike. Are we supposed to go onthe ships through their lines? You know, I’venever done this before, and I thought ourunion believed in the solidarity of the work-ers,” and all that sort of thing. And then I satdown, and there was complete silence in thatroom. I’ll never forget it. It was my first expe-rience with mass pulling away. [laughter]

Censure?

Well, not censure so much as just,“Wowee!” you know, “This guy’s crazy,” youknow. “He’s way off beam.” [laughter] No, itwasn’t censure so much as just shock. No-body did that at these meetings, and I wasstupid enough not to be aware that you don’tdo that at Harry Lundeberg’s meetings, at leastnot that way.

He got up and ranted and raved for aboutten minutes at me, calling me a commie. Youknow, “We got the commies in the union,we got this going on,” and then laying outhis view of the strike, and we were going to


have to strive to stop it. And then he stoppedtalking, and couple of other of the leadersgot up and carried on the meeting andLundeberg got up while this was happening.He went and talked to two or three great bigbeefy guys right next to the podium, and theywere talking and looking in my direction,while the meeting was going on.

I think I was probably scared, as they say,shitless and didn’t know it. [laughter] I justwas thinking, you know, “My god, what ishappening now? What is going on?” Andthese new guys went around talking to othersall around the edge. They were all standingaround, like, well, Harry’s goon squad—thesegreat big guys standing around the edge of themeeting, you know, about every twenty feetlike an armed guard. As the meeting wenton I thought, “Well, d’Azevedo, you’ve doneit now. You’ve opened your big trap and hereyou are.” And I remember taking out myseaman’s wallet and then handing it carefullyto Sharkey.

I didn’t know what was going to happento me. You know, they might take away myunion card I have an early union card. I hada good union card from the beginning of thewar. I think it was down to . . . I don’t know,thirty-eight hundred, or forty-two hundred,which was an early card. After the war, mygod, there were guys who have cards way upin the twenty, thirty thousands. So, you know,I didn’t want that taken away from me, be-cause I thought that they were going to tryto do that.

I’m thinking, “What are they going to tryto do to me? They’re going to try to some-how disgrace me or something.”

Well, I had a little money, not much, andI gave it to Sharkey, and he put it in hispocket. And the meeting was over, and I re-member I felt like a condemned prisoner. Igot up, my knees were shaking, and yet I felt,

you know, “I’ve got to do it.” I know therewere a lot of guys in that room I know agreedwith me, but they would never have been sodamn stupid as to do that.

I remember there were some guys that sortof walked next to me and bumped into meand looked friendly and then moved away,but most of them just went down the stairs,the long stairway you had to go down to ClayStreet; this was the old building on ClayStreet. And the others just sort of lookedaway, and nobody wanted to be identifiedwith me except these few who were showingin some kind of little way, you know, “Toobad, Whitey, but . . . .” [laughter]

And the crowd went down the stairs, andso I went down the stairs with Sharkey whowas behind me. We get out to the street, andthere as the rest of the meeting is dispersingor going off, was a circle of about I’d say ten,twelve guys, big guys. And as I went throughthe door, the big guy at the door shoved meinto the circle, and for the next ten or fif-teen minutes I was beaten, pushed from oneto another. I tried to fight. I feel proud ofmyself. I stood on my feet. I never went downbut I was beaten to a pulp, because I’d bepushed from one to another, and each one asI got to him would, you know, hit me.

What time of day is this?

This was night, around nine o’clock orsomething like that.

Were there people just walking by?

Oh, no, Clay Street in those years wasempty. Except for the meeting, nothing wasgoing on and it’s right down by the water-front. I don’t think anybody . . . but later,some cops came. Oh, yes, the cops came, be-cause some of these guys had told them that


a guy was being beaten up. That’s the bestthat they could do for me. I think maybeSharkey had gone and done this, you know,called for help. Anyway after about ten min-utes, I was a bloody pulp, and yet I stood onmy feet. And to this day, I’m proud of that.But, you know, [laughter] what could I do? Ihit and all that, but . . . oh, one of the guyswas a pugilist, had been the lightweightchampion or something, and he was the onethat shoved me, and he would just give methe worst of everything.

So in a few minutes more, I think Iwould’ve gone down, but a couple of police-man came and broke it up and said, “Whatthe hell’s going on here? What is going onhere?” And these guys pulled back and said,“We don’t know. We don’t . . . .” Oh, there’ssomething about a goon squad that’s the mostterrifying thing in this world. I have the great-est sympathy whenever I read anything in thepress about somebody who’s been descendedupon by a group of guys who have beatenthem up or give them a bad time. The senseof helplessness is enormous. You just feel likeit’s the end of the world. Literally anythingis going to happen.

And all I remember feeling in kind of adaze was, “I’m still on my feet. I’m still on myfeet,” you see.

So these police came up to me, two guysand said, you know, “What’s happened? Well,what happened here? What did they do?What did these guys do?” And the first thingin my mind with this ingrained union loy-alty, was I wasn’t going to turn anybody overto the cops, you know, the goddamned cops,even though the cops had helped me, stoppedthe beating and kept me from getting killedfor Christ’s sake. [laughter]

And, you know, they’re asking “Whathappened?” and these guys are standing

around watching me. So I felt very impor-tant. And I said, “I fell down the stairs. I felldown the stairs.”

“What are you talking about? You didn’tfall. We saw these guys pushing around.”

I said, “No, they were probably trying tohelp me. I fell down the stairs.”

“Well, then there’s nothing we can dothen,” you know.

“Well you can tell me where I can getsome help. I’m bleeding.”

So one of them took me around the cor-ner. Somewhere down there there was somekind of medical center, little place in a holein the wall, and I got bandaged up andpatched up and cleaned up a little bit.

Sharkey came with me. Sharkey couldn’tdo anything, but he stood by. He says,“Whitey, that was the most terrible thing Iever saw, and I didn’t know what to do, and Iwould have . . . couldn’t fight ten or twelveguys.”

I said, “Forget it, man. I understand.” ButI was a wreck, and he saw me home acrossthe bay on the night train, the old train thatcrossed the bay. Here I was, I looked likesomebody coming out the hospital, you know.

Did people just sort of ignore you or . . . ?

Oh, no, no. [laughter] They were won-dering what happened. And, of course, thenI got home. It was terrible. Kathy was justterribly upset. And fortunately Anya wasstaying with her grandmother at the time.Yes, boy. Anyway, I had to explain to Kathythe whole thing, and she took it pretty well,but I mean, I think it was very hard on her. Ifelt awful, you know. Here I was, I was sup-posed to be looking for a job and figuring outhow I hoped to get on with my life, when Igo over and get dumped, you know.


It took me a week or two to repair, andmy face was banged up for months after. Butfortunately, no broken bones or anything.

Or concussion or anything like that.

Yes, Well not that I know about! [laugh-ter] Well, look, I mean, who knows? I lovethat. Anyway, no, I just was bruised, cut,banged up. I fortunately didn’t lose any teeth.I could have. I had oh, bruises all over myupper body, you know, black and blue, butno broken bones. I think I had a sore rib ortwo for a few weeks, but I was lucky. Oh, andI had a bad foot, ankle, I’d sprained or thatsomebody had stepped on or . . . you know, Iwas limping, and I looked like hell. And myeyes were mostly swollen shut.

So you were around the house? I mean, youdidn’t go to anymore meetings?

[laughter] Not for awhile, not for a fewdays. No way. No, I didn’t go back to the hall.So I was at home for a few days, but oh! I didget up. I was so deeply . . . not only upset

but outraged by this, that I got up the nextmorning and I wrote a statement describingwhat had happened, because I knew that theywere going to try to get me now. I was goingto be expelled or something. They were go-ing to have to do something about this. Thismeant something to the leadership there.They were going to use me as some kind ofan example.

So next day or two days later, I got a let-ter, a copy of charges filed against me, bysomebody—I forget his name—boat numbersomething or other, charging Warren“Whitey” d’Azevedo with disrupting a meet-ing and disrupting crews that he worked onby passing out commie literature and on andon. These were charges, filed by them. And Ithought, “Oh, this is it. This is how they doit. This is their way of doing.” And thenanother letter came saying I should appearfor a hearing in two weeks or something likethat to face these charges, and I had no inten-tion in this world of going up to any meetingat that hall, you know, to face any charges,and wasn’t able to for awhile. [laughter]

56JOINING THE NMU

FEW DAYS LATER an interestingthing happened. A knock came atthe door, and there were three guys

one day, and it was Scotty Edwards, I guess . . .one of these guys said, “Come on in here,”and introduced me to a bunch of guys on thefloor, saying, “This is the guy. This is the guythat took on the SUP and told them off.”And by the way there was a big article in thePeople’s World, the local communist paper, theparty paper. Everybody read the People’s Worldin those days. I mean, even if you weren’t . . .it was a well-known paper.

And there was a big article on this poorguy in the SUP who had been dumped, youknow, stuff these guys had heard from mewhen they came over to visit and they imme-diately guided the press to this story. That’sthe way the party worked, and I had no ob-jection to this. To me it was fine, you know.They were on my side, somebody was on myside and understood. And I thought, “My god,I’ve been acting like a communist, so maybeI am.” [laughter] You know, “Maybe that’s theway it is.”

And they gave me a union book, and theygave it to me with great fanfare. You know,“Hey, Whitey, we’re glad to have you.” Daz,Whitey, whatever. “Glad to have you in thisunion, here’s a book, and we’re making you

Athat I knew from the front, from the MaritimeBookshop, I knew to be communists: AlexTreskin, and I forget . . . Scotty Edwards wasone, Bill Bailey and two or three others.There were about three or four guys. Andthey brought me some candy or something,you know, very nice . . . . [laughter]

And they said, “You know, we heardabout this goddamn thing and we want youto know that we understand what happenedto you.” They were on a recruiting mission. Ididn’t realize it at the moment, but later itoccurred to me, and I thought, “Well, whynot?” you know, for Christ’s sake. They werenot only sympathetic, but they also said,“And we’re inviting you to join the NationalMaritime Union. You would be welcomed.In fact, the book is waiting for you if you wantit.”

Well, that pretty well set me up. Youknow, and I thought, “Ye gods, there is somejustice in this world,” you know. [laughter]

And so, you know, it took me a couple ofweeks or so, but I went over to the NMU


an offer right now. You can be a member ofthis union right now and can ship out of thishall any time you want.”

Wow, you know, what a feeling. So fromthen on the NMU hall, which was two orthree blocks up the street on Drumm Streetfrom the old SUP hall . . . I used to go upand down there to get to the MaritimeBookshop past the SUP hall, and I had thiswonderful feeling, “Well, you sons of bitchesup there, here I am,” you know. And I’d goto the coffee shop with some of my buddies,never alone for awhile.

Yes, I wondered about that.

Oh, no. I had to go with people for awhileuntil we saw the lay of the land. But I met upwith some of the guys, the leaders of the SUP.Wiseberg was one of them, I think. Anyway,and I went up and said “Hi,” and all that.You know, they were being very pleasant. Tothem it was all in a day’s work; they had usedme to intimidate the membership. At thesame time I felt pretty good because I hadbeat them one. I was now a member of therival union, and glad to be. And, you know,so what are you going to do?

Oh, yes! Oh, god, yes! There was thatwonderful moment a few weeks later. Thestrike was almost on, and I was on the frontand part of the strike committee. Just fromthe floor, you know, people were asking, “Doyou want to be a member of the strike com-mittee?” And I had gone to one of the NMUmeetings and I raised my hand, and we werethinking, “Now, how are we going to reachthese SUP guys about the strike?”

So I was part of the committee that madea poster, and we titled it “Appeal to Reason.”And I think this came from something AndyFuruseth said that went way, way back. In

great big block letters, we appealed to themembers of the SUP to not fink on us in astrike, to support the strike or at least not gothrough our lines, you see. Oh, I rememberthe wonderful feeling I had being part of this,to do this, you see, because it was my ownfeeling, and now I could express it and do it.

So we made these big posters. They werebig. They must have been three by four orthree by five, these enormous posters, and wetook them up to some shop we knew uptown,and they ran them off for us—I don’t know,about 100 copies. And then how to get themout. We were going to plaster the waterfrontwith them. There were about ten of us, thecommittee, and oh, it was wonderful. [laugh-ter] All my feelings of anger and resentmentleft. I mean, it was so positive. I was doingsomething right in the right way.

So one night was chosen. We were goingto paste these all over the telephone polesand all over the sides of buildings all throughthat part of the waterfront. But what aboutsafety? Supposing they had their goons outbecause they might have gotten word?

The longshore came in on this, and Iwould say about ten cars of longshoremencame, organized in a couple of days. Theywent on both ends of Clay Street, the twoblocks where the SUP hall was, from DrummStreet to the end of Clay Street on theEmbarcadero, and pointed their headlightsdown both ways so we had a highly illumi-nated street. It was bare and nobody was out.I don’t think anyone was in the hall, youknow. [laughter] And they said, “Now,d’Azevedo, this is your job. You’re going topaste it on the door of the SUP.”

And I went there with this bucket . . .somebody gave me a bucket of paste and Ipasted two or three of these great big postersall around, right on the front door and on

487JOINING THE NMU

the sides and a couple on the street. [laugh-ter] And then the cars pulled away, and I hadthe most wonderful feeling of what would youcall it? Retribution. [laughter]

But . . . well, that doesn’t capture it. Itwas bigger than that. It was . . . you know,this was justice and I felt good.

So that was really the end of that par-ticular episode. From then on I got very muchinvolved in the NMU. And how did I makea living? [laughter] Those problems that I’vebeen talking about were still there. And thereI was swept up into this, willingly, but at thesame time I knew that I was avoiding majorproblems. And I don’t think Kathy was happyabout this, but she supported me in thesethings.

Well, that dumping at the SUP hall, lateMay of 1946 created something of a turningpoint for me. Actually, it made some deci-sions for me in that a lot of my personalconcerns that I had been having about whatI was going to do seemed pretty well cut outfor me. I felt very strongly there was no turn-ing back now. I couldn’t just leave thewaterfront like I was being urged to do bysome people that I knew, and by family, tocome ashore and stay ashore, the war wasover.

But in a way I was out of one war andinto another. There was a war going on onthe waterfront, and I had just seen one aspectof it that hit me personally. A lot of the thingsthat I had been thinking about having to dowith the seamen’s and waterfront tradeunions on the front in San Francisco and theBay Area had begun to play out, and itdawned on me that this was a very criticaltime. Not that I made any concrete decision,but I was sort of swept along by events.

An organization called the Committeefor Maritime Unity had been formed in

January in San Francisco, partly under theleadership of Harry Bridges with the leadersof five or six local unions also taking part.The idea was that there was going to have tobe some kind of concerted action with re-gard to the changing situation on the frontafter the war.

The ship owners were already making allkinds of threats about taking away the unionhiring hall and about lowering wages, sayingthat they were too high, which was ridicu-lous. The seamen were getting at the mostthirty-seven cents an hours, and for manyseamen there was still a fifty-six-hour weekinstead of a forty-hour week. Conditionswere, if anything, worse right after the warthan during the war on ships.

Also, shipping was getting tough. Thereweren’t as many ships plying. In fact, someof the jobs that I had during that period wereshort layover runs, taking a ship up to SuisunBay for what’s called the “mothball fleet.”And a lot of American ships were beingturned over as foreign flag ships, reducing theunion aspect of the maritime trade. Andthings were kind of tough.

A lot of seamen weren’t able to get ships.They were out of work, and there had to besome kind of concerted action, and theCommittee for Maritime Unity was an orga-nization that had a program, a clearly definedprogram for presenting demands to the gov-ernment by June 15 of the year, just a fewweeks off from the time that I left the SUP.

By the way, I don’t know if I mentionedit, but the charges brought against me by theSUP were that I had distributed communistliterature aboard ships, which in part mayhave been so, but it wasn’t just CommunistParty literature; it was trade union literaturethat was produced by a number of the unions.And as ship’s delegate on the ships that I was


on, I always thought it was a good idea tobring these things aboard. Sometimes whatwe called the “phonies” aboard the shipwould throw them over the side. But, never-theless, I would take them and leave themaround in the mess rooms, and others wouldleave other kinds of literature. So it wasn’tjust my own doing. But that was an excusefor making charges against me.

Another charge was that I had revealedthe contents of a meeting, which was againstunion rules. That was, I suppose, a legitimatecharge. On the other hand, after being beatenup and close to incapacitated for two or threeweeks, I felt that I had to present my side ofthe story. And I did, and I wrote a short two-or three-page statement in which I outlinedwhat had happened at that meeting in lateMay and the fact that I was dumped, and thisgot into the People’s World, the left-wing,Communist Party newspaper in the Bay Area.And I guess that was all right with me; thatwas the only way that my position could bedisseminated. And that was, by the way, doneby these three or four guys who came to seeme in Alameda after I was dumped, came overfrom the NMU, and they were members ofthe party, as I remember. And I was alwaysgrateful to them for, you know, the concernthat they had, offering to help me get intothe National Maritime Union.

Was “getting dumped” the vernacular or euphe-mism for getting . . . ?

Beaten up. Getting beaten to a pulp.“Dumped.” I mean, dumped by goons.

And so I wanted to show my position andalso give my book number in the SUP, be-cause they tried to say I didn’t have a booknumber. I had an early book; I’d been in theunion for four and a half years, and I was abona fide able seaman and a good seaman,

recognized to be a good seaman, and had beenvery loyal to the Sailor’s Union.

Did the mutiny ever come up in any of thesecharges?

No. But it came up in my mind . . . whenI reflected, you know, at that time, that I’dalways thought of Harry Lundeberg earlier asa great union man, as a vigorous, militantunion guy who had been in part of the earlystrikes and a protégé of Andrew Furuseth,although Lundeberg declined in his lateryears. Here his position was clearly changedfrom the kind of militancy he had demon-strated earlier. He had been arrested formutiny in Norway when he was on a ship inthe Indian Ocean, and, you know, this wastouted around among the membership as oneof the signs of his great militancy. And, also,he had walked off a ship sometime in the early1930s, I think; walked off a ship that he wason because he wasn’t going to go throughpicket lines, and, I thought, “My god, youknow, this guy’s a good leader of this union.”

So when I was dumped for raising ques-tions within a meeting about going throughpicket lines, to me the irony of that createdsome disenchantment with the leadership ofthat union. I developed other kinds of feel-ings of disconnection with the unionlater—that is, its position on minorities, par-ticularly on Negroes. In those days we referredto African-Americans as Negroes.

There were those lily-white ships, andthat had begun to bother me, and I wonderedwhen they were going to change their policy.The other unions on the front, the five orsix maritime unions and the Committee forMaritime Unity, were all desegregated andhad desegregated crews. And the Sailor’sUnion of the Pacific continued its very, veryrestricted policy. I don’t think there was any

489JOINING THE NMU

ruling on this. That was their position: youdidn’t hire blacks. I can remember in Seattleone time seeing a dark-skinned guy cominginto the hall to get a union book and beingtold by the dispatcher, “I’m sorry, we don’ttake Negroes.”

And he says, “I’m not a Negro I’m . . . .”I forget what he said. He was either an In-dian or a Mexican or something. But, “Sorry,go and see the business manager,” and, ofcourse, he didn’t get hired. But that was thegeneral thing. It was a reactionary union asfar as race relations were concerned.

And although that wasn’t the entire sen-timent among the members of crews that Iwas on, it was strong enough so that had therebeen any black person sent out from the hallto take their place within a crew, a lot of theguys that I used to sail with in the SUP wouldnot have allowed him in the same fo’c’s’le,might not even have wanted him in the messroom eating with them. Now, of course, therewere blacks sometimes in the steward’sdepartment, but from that point of view,that’s where they’re supposed to be—servingfood to the mess. And there were some onthe black gangs (engine crew), but, “Sure,what do you figure, those guys downthere . . . .” As long as they weren’t livingwith you, it was all right.

It reminded me, also, of those incidentsup in the Bering Strait, with the question ofwhether Eskimos could eat aboard our shipor not, particularly way up at Point Barrow,with the Inuit guys, who were very hungryand wanted to eat on board ship, and my ownproblems about that as a delegate—how tohandle it.

So all those things were a source of fric-tion in me, about, you know, what I felt aboutthe union. Nevertheless, I had a loyalty tothe idea of the Sailor’s Union, its history, thefact that it had been involved in some of the

very earliest seamen’s struggles on the WestCoast. And I felt proud of it—up until thevery last. And when that happened in thehall, I’d already begun to feel dissidentenough so that I felt I had to raise my voiceabout it and say something.

But I expected I’d get support. I thought,you know, that somebody would say, “Sure,why not?” or that even Lundeberg would say,“We don’t intend to walk through thosepicket lines.” Of course, at the time, he wasletting it be thought that he wasn’t going torecognize the June 15 strike organized by theCommittee for Maritime Unity. That doesn’tmean that he would have actually gone aheadwith that, because a lot of his members wouldnot have gone through picket lines. But Ithought, you know, there would be some dis-cussion on this. Not a bit. Just, it was broughtto a close, the discussion, and a few minuteslater I was dumped.

So to me that was a turning point. Therewas something to me wrong with that union,something basically wrong, and my loyaltytoward it was considerably diminished.Maybe I retained a loyalty toward its historyand what it had stood for but not toward whatits role was in the present maritime situation.

So that was going through my head, andI felt I had to stick around the front. I joinedthe National Maritime Union, as I’ve alreadysaid, and I felt I had to stick around untilafter June 15, at least, and see about thestrike—taking some part, not just leaving. Itwas the wrong time in my view, to leave, andI didn’t want to.

Kathy went along with me on that, but itwas very hard for her. She was hoping that atlast I’d stick around and either get a job or goto school—at least be a more consistentmember of the family than I had been. And,of course, this was a problem for many sea-men, and I had, I guess, a lot of support in


the sense that most of the guys that I knewhad the same kind of problem.

Things were getting very tight on thefront, and June 15 did come, and the strikedidn’t take place because the ship ownerspartly settled at that point. My feelings aboutthe SUP were exacerbated at that time, be-cause the Committee for Maritime Unitynegotiated a settlement of something like aseventeen dollar monthly raise, which seemsterribly small now, but it was something, butthe trouble was, there weren’t enough shipsfor people to even be making their monthlysalary. And confirming the forty-hour week,and confirming the use of the union hiringhall, rather than hiring overseen by the shipowners. And, of course, no good union wouldhave accepted that.

And while this was going on, the SUP . . .Lundeberg was carrying on unilateral nego-tiations with the ship owners, and gottwenty-two cents an hour and a better settle-ment, which of course meant to everybody Iknew collusion that one had always suspectedfrom Lundeberg and his ilk, talking about hisgreat independent union that wasn’t goingto join with the commie unions. What hedid, he did an end run. And the ship owners,quite willing to divide labor on the WestCoast, gave him a better settlement in orderto keep the kettle boiling.

And it did, because immediately then theCMU—Committee for Maritime Unity—put up a challenge to the ship owners, sayingthat they were going to strike later in the year.I think they set September as a possible strikedate, unless they got the equivalent of whathad been given to the Sailor’s Union in theirsellout, as it was considered to be by thepeople that I knew, and certainly by theNational Maritime Unity people, as the mostobvious indication of collusion betweenunion leadership and . . . .

It happened also later. Lundeberg did thislater on with the Taft-Hartley Bill; he madehis own independent . . . went and saw Tafthimself and worked out a deal for the SUP.In every case, this undermined the unity ofthe waterfront unions and got him somethingat the expense of other unions. So that helpedme confirm my view that I had done the rightthing and that I was on the right track.

Other things that were happening at thattime on the front . . . . I was hanging aroundthe Maritime Bookshop, my old digs, and theCalifornia Labor School, where there were alot of people that I found very congenial, alot of very left-wing people. And the thingthat struck me at the Maritime Bookshop, Ibegan to be aware of the kind of literaturethat was available.

There were numbers of pamphlets andvery good materials on the “Negro Question,”as it was called in those days, and for example,the struggle against white chauvinism. Andthere was a considerable kind of developmentof literature on the question of race relationsthroughout the CIO unions, but particularly,I think, headed by ILWU and the seamen’sunions on both coasts.

And that I found very exciting. It wassomething, you know, that I felt in a sensehungry for: where was there leadership . . .policy leadership with regard to the wholequestion of the role of the African-Americansin American society, particularly at work inthe industrial unions? Here was laid out apolicy, what to do—how to go about recruit-ing, bringing in Negroes into the union, andseeing to it they had a chance to move upinto leadership.

The NMU had African-Americans in theleadership, in the top leadership, FerdinandSmith and others. I’m not going to name allnames here. I’ll name names only of peoplewho were self-admitted and known left-

491JOINING THE NMU

wingers, otherwise, I probably will not dothat. Not that they’d mind, but why do it?So, anyway, here in the top leadership of theNMU, and then I learned also in theAmerican Communist Party, were African-Americans in top leadership. And I’d comefrom a union in which I hardly ever sawblacks, except either in the steward’s depart-ment or in the engine department, and onsome ships none at all, and where the issuehardly ever came up except in a negative way.And here, suddenly, the whole thing wasopen. The world seemed to be open. This wassomething that excited me a great deal. Herewas an opportunity, yes, to link myself tosomething that I saw as positive.

Also, strangely enough here, back in the1940s, pamphlets on the “Woman Question,”on male chauvinism, and I can’t help butinsert here that there’s no doubt that the leftwing in the United States in the 1930s andthe 1940s were in the vanguard of thesemovements: I mean, clearly defined policieshaving to do with the necessity to hirewomen, necessity to have them in the unions,necessity to have not only women’s auxilia-ries, but women in leadership, and to fightfor the rights of women in various industries.Also, very profound discussions about the roleof women in families and the obligations ofhusbands, and taking swipes at seamen andlongshoremen for, you know, not doingenough to see to it their wives have an oppor-tunity not only to read and go to meetings,but to take part in activities and to have somerole in the movement.

I found this exciting. You know, no oneelse, as far as I know, was talking about thesethings. If there were such other movements,they were awfully quiet. These were clearlydefined policy statements, propagandistic toa considerable degree, and most of themCommunist Party literature. So little by little

I began to think, “Well, ee-gods, the sourceof a lot of this thinking is the CommunistParty itself.”

I’d always sort of wondered about that,and the fact that the party people that I knew,even some of the most uneducated, working-class guys who were members of the party,had positions on these things. They werecommitted to expressing themselves at leaston these matters, taking a stand, and regard-less of their private lives, they at least tookthese positions in their public life. And Iadmired that.

So, see, the June 15 date went by, and Ididn’t have any job, so I began taking againmore of these standby jobs—taking shipseither to the mothball fleet at Suisun or justaround the Bay.

You mean by that actually going with the shipsthat were going into mothballs?

Taking them up there, helping to dis-mantle them, putting them in mothballs, andstanding by guarding them. [laughter] Thenthe crews would come aboard. I don’t knowwhat union handled those crews, but theshipyard and the mothball fleet crews wouldcome aboard and start dismantling, taking offusable stuff, and leaving them just a shell ofthe former self.

I must say I pilfered some things now andthen. I’d pick up these beautiful brass fo’c’s’lehooks and various kinds of brass fittings thatthey were just pulling off and putting in piles,you know, in the middle of decks. And I re-member taking a few of these in my pocket,and I had them for years, just admiring them.These beautiful solid brass hinges. They don’thave them on ships anymore. Beautiful stuff.

All these ships then were left at anchorand tied up, and that was our job, to help tiethem up and get them in shape for long-term


storage. So I took a number of these ships,and that was fairly good pay when you gotsuch jobs. There was a lot of competition forthem. But the few I had certainly kept a littleincome coming in.

When you say there was a lot of competition,was it strictly a matter of being there when theopportunity came up, or . . . ?

You mean getting jobs?

Yes.

Oh, well, through the hiring hall youhave a number. You come in and you regis-ter, and then you got a number.

But you have to be there, don’t you?

You have to be there. So, you know, I’dwait, and then I’d see my number. If it wasn’tgoing to come up for a couple of days, I mighttake off, but you better be there when yournumber is called, or have an excuse that’svalidated, or you’re out of luck.

So if you had valid excuse, then you wouldn’tnecessarily lose your place in line?

No, but it had to be awfully good, likeyou were sick or something, like a doctor’sexcuse, or you had to be awfully good at fak-ing it. You know, there’d be too many guysbehind you raising hell if you didn’t have agood excuse. No, it was tough, and there werea lot of guys looking for work.

So the few times I was able to get one ofthese was a lot of overtime. You know, mygosh, you might make as much as seventy-five cents an hour or a buck an hour, or alittle extra. [laughter] And then there wereships taken now and then to other docks,

from one dock to another in the bay oraround outside the bay down the coast. Tug-boats were very important, but that was atugboat union, a different union. And, yes,there were some guys struggling to get thosejobs, getting into those unions or into thelongshore union. I did do some longshorework on temporary permits. That’s anotherthing, yes—on temporary permits, when theyneeded extra men, and there weren’t enoughmen to fill the dock crews. I did a little ofthat, but it was hard to get on because thosewere good jobs, well-paid, hard jobs. But, youknow, they would line up their own peoplefirst.

This was the beginning of a kind of de-pression on the waterfront, and one of thebeefs of the unions was that the United Stateswas allowing American ships to go under for-eign flags and non-union crews and was notbuilding its own merchant fleet. And so therewas a lot of action in Washington by the na-tional NMU and other seamen’s unions,trying to get the government to continuebuilding ships and using them in the post-war trade, rather than allowing the shipowners to circumvent the trade unions. Sothere was a real move-on to pitch out themilitant trade unions at that time, and it wasa clearly defined, concerted effort. And theTruman administration wasn’t too helpful inthis, and that was another beef we had, thatTruman allowed himself to be maneuveredon these matters, as far as the big ship own-ers were concerned.

So, anyway, during this period, when Iwas sort of humping around on the front, try-ing to get jobs, I was learning an awful lotabout the five or six other unions, meeting alot of people from different unions—theMarine Cooks and Stewards, the MarineFiremen and Water Tenders, and theILWU—and making some very good friends

493JOINING THE NMU

in the National Maritime Union, and beingsort of, I suppose, taken in as a kind of neo-phyte by some of the far lefties.

Alex Treskin (he’s now dead) was one I’llname in particular: a wonderful guy, one ofthe men who had come over to Alameda,and he was a red-hot commie. And, youknow, he always was called the “party hack”by the non-communists. “There’s a real partyhack.” He was an open, soapboxing guy, andyet a very good guy—very hardworking, verycommitted, and he, I guess, could be consid-ered an exemplary member of the waterfrontCommunist Party. He was very vocal in theunion. He was at all the meetings, the NMU.He was always up with the party position—known for that, openly so. His views weren’talways accepted, but often he made such goodpoints that his position was accepted.

And others, like a good friend of mine Ican name, Pat Tobin, whom I got to knowvery well. In fact, later I shipped out withhim a lot as a partner. And people like DowWilson, whom I admired—a young guy, withwhom later I helped to hold and organize theUnion Oil ships, a very clear, very intelli-gent, brilliant, young guy. I don’t think hehad much formal education, but he was veryclear, very on the ball. Whitey Hansen wasanother and, oh, a number of others. BillBailey, who wasn’t NMU, but a marine fire-man and well known, almost famous,ex-communist on the coast [laughter]—andby communist, I mean up until recently, hewas sort of the spokesman for the Left in vari-ous documentaries and things of that kind.An ex-communist only in the sense that theCommunist Party almost dissolved later on,but, nevertheless, great guy. Walter Stack—the wild man, but a wonderfully committedguy. I’ll never forget Walter. He was a verywitty guy, and he used to tell stories. He was

very anti-psychotherapy, as it was the thingto be, you know.

Is that right?

If you were left wing, Freudian psycho-therapy was bourgeois individualism andsubjectivism and could be misleading and allthat. But, anyway, Walt had been doing a lotof reading, particularly about Pavlov and con-ditioned reflex, and he found that veryinteresting, but he was very cynical about it.He said, “What is this goddamn conditionedreflex thing, you know? What good is it go-ing to do anybody in this world, anyway?”He said, “I had a dog one time. I had a dog,”he says. “You know, and that goddamn dogwould piss on the floor. And I couldn’t get itto stop, and every time it’d do it, I’d pick itup and put it out the window. Yes, on thefirst floor; just throw him out the window.And the next time he’d do it, I’d put him outthe window. You know,” he said, “thatgoddamn dog. You know what he finally did?He would piss on the floor and jump out thewindow!” [laughter]

He had a whole number of conditionedreflex stories, but that was one that I remem-ber that I liked. And then he would tellstories about how he worked in a slaughter-house at one time when he was younger, andhow he hated that goddamn job, and hehated the floor manager. They were killingsheep—way at one end of the yards they werekilling sheep. They’d put them on these con-veyor belts, and they’d start butchering themat one end. And he says, “I was up at theother end where we had the heads, and I hadto take out the eyes.” [laughter] “And we’dtake the eyes and put them in a pile, to go ona conveyor belt. And they’d go by, and thisgoddamn floor manager would be over at the


end, and he’d be watching, counting everypiece that went by, and checking up on us,and guys would get fired. And it was hot andsweaty and smelly, and what a horrible,goddamn job.” He said, “Every time I eatmeat these days or eat meat on a ship, I thinkof those goddamn conveyor belts, and . . . .”And he says, “But I had the job of eyes. AndI hated this guy, this manager.” And he said,“I started piling them up, like a little pyra-mid, with all the eyes looking in onedirection. [laughter] And I had them focused,so when they’d go by him, they would belooking right at him, right up at him—allthese eyes staring at him!” He says, “Youknow that guy? I don’t think he knew what Iwas doing, because he began to think therewas something happening on that conveyorbelt. And you know, he left the conveyor beltand began to stand around at the beginningof the belt, so that he couldn’t see.” [laugh-ter] He says, “Well,” he said, “maybe that’sconditioned reflex, too. I don’t know, but,”he says, “you got to use every weapon yougot in this world.”

So I just told that, because somehow orother it wasn’t just political talk. There werethese wonderfully bright and aware and cyni-cal guys on the front.

So I recall that during this period AlexTreskin, this wonderful guy, began talking tome about the party. Why don’t I come to themeeting? Why don’t I think about joining,because he says, “You know, your attitude ispretty good. You seem to know a little bit;you’ve been around the front.”

I had been doing some work at the unionhall. I would help pass out leaflets for theunion and oh, I don’t know, a number ofother things that I did, little things around.Oh, I took minutes of meetings occasionally,because I could write fairly fast and type themup. And though they had secretaries, I’d help.

And little things like that. So I began to bethought of as a guy who’s, you know, a likelyparty member.

So I decided to go when the party had ameeting on Broadway in San Francisco, wayup at the end of Broadway. And so I tookKathy. We went over one night, and therewas this big . . . there must have been six,seven hundred people or more. I mean, theseare the days when the Left had somethinggoing for it. And here were mostly waterfrontpeople and their wives and all that, and mem-bers of the party or prospective members ofthe party. And they had a meeting, and theytalked about the waterfront situation; theytalked about the world situation, what wasgoing on, and various kinds of congressionaland senatorial acts, and who was good andwho was bad, and local elections and thingsof that kind. And it was very interesting,because, you know, here were some peoplewho had some idea of where they were goingand what they wanted to do, and they had aprogram.

And by the way, there were a lot ofAfrican-Americans there; there were a lot ofNegroes. Not a lot, but, I mean, I’d say, youknow, there were forty or fifty, which was alot in those days to be around, and these weremostly longshoremen and marine cooks andstewards guys and their wives.

Well, there’s a lot of de facto segregation in thoseyears, too, wasn’t there? I mean, not just insti-tuted. I mean, you rarely saw trulyintegrated . . . .

Oh, yes. Oh, no, it was very unusual. Herewas a group that was desegregated, wide open.There were a number of Chinese there whowere very active in some of the unions,Mexicans, and, you know, it was just a mot-ley bunch, and I felt very . . . I don’t know. I

495JOINING THE NMU

felt good about that. It made me feel I was inthe right company, the right climate.

Kathy was a little uncomfortable, becausealthough she was very progressive, as myfriend Trot—one of my seamen friends—would say, “Hey, Kathy’s a very progressivegirl.” In those days progressive meant liberal,you know. You’re a good, liberal person, butnot really left enough, you see. But she wasprogressive; she was a progressive, at least,I’d say.

At least progressive! [laughter]

She was, you know. She was certainly pro-union. She was very militant about that andabout the women’s questions and things ofthat sort. A very advanced thinker, but thiswas a little bit further than she was ready togo. But she went, and she watched with greatinterest and has said she even enjoyed it.

But then to me the topper was, at the endof the meeting, Alex jumps on the table wayat the end of the room and opens up singing“The International,” you know. I’ll never for-get that. This whole group burst into singing“The International.” And I was thinking,“Here San Francisco, California, six hundredor eight hundred people are singing ‘TheInternational.’”

And what it brought back to mind, some-thing very moving, is that when I was on theYPO, way up the Bering Strait on our way toPoint Barrow in 1944, we had passed throughBig and Little Diomede Islands and the nar-rowest straits between Kamchatka andAlaska, and Sparks got on the radio a broad-

cast from Kamchatka; it was “The Interna-tional” sung by the Red Army Chorus, andthat’s a pretty powerful bunch of singers.

And here it was, we’re in the middle ofthe war, and, you know, concerned about subsand everything. On the one hand we had“The International,” and on the same pro-gram, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sungwith a great big orchestra and all that. And Iremember feeling this wonderful sense of abizarre connection between two cultureswhen I was up there. Here was the passage-way where the Big and Little Diomede Inuitand Aleutian peoples would go back andforth in the wintertime on the ice toKamchatka with their families and over toAlaska. And nobody could control them.The Americans were worried that they werespies for the Soviet Union, and vice versa,and here they’d go back and forth. And here,right up there we’re getting both “The Inter-national,” sung by the Red Army Chorus, amagnificent chorus, and then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And I remembered at thattime thinking, you know, these two anthems,what they meant to me and to others that Iwas with, was, two great countries, two greatcultures, finally finding some kind of rap-prochement during the war. And here I wasin San Francisco with Kathy listening to“The International,” Alex Treskin on thetable, and I was thinking, you know, “My god,here I am in San Francisco, and they’re sing-ing ‘The International,’ you know.” [laughter]That’s been always to me a very movingthing.

57THE COMMUNIST PARTY

’D ALWAYS FELT that I was a very, verypatriotic American. I always felt that Icould never have been committed to any

belong to. They merely admired certain fea-tures of it, and certainly the communistsadmired what they thought to be the social-ist development that had taken place and thegreat improvements in Russia since the revo-lution. All these things were very importantideas to them that should be applied in theUnited States.

So it was more like a model that was admired,rather than . . . ?

A model. The Soviet Union was a model.Therefore, during the war, at least, to pro-tect the Soviet Union against the attacksupon it . . . all the way back to when theWestern countries—England and the UnitedStates, in particular—were supporting thewhite Russians against the red Russians, theBolsheviks, all the way back to the idea thatthere was an element in the Western world,the capitalist world, that was out to destroythe Soviet Union and its gains, this madesense to me. And I felt very identified withthat idea.

Iother country at that time in my life, thatthis was my country. I was very proud of itsheritage, but I always find that the heritage Iacknowledged was a dissident heritage—Imean Tom Paine, John Brown, Lincoln,Frederick Douglass, all the great dissidents,the abolitionists, were to me the real heri-tage. And then there was another darkheritage, which was that of the Right, thatof the reactionaries and conservatives. Verysimple-minded, but, I mean, you know, I feltvery patriotic in that in a sense I felt I woulddo anything, take any role to support what Iconsidered to be the positive side of the evo-lution of American democracy.

So the concept of belonging to an orga-nization which promoted and felt connectedwith another country like the Soviet Unionwas a little problem for me—not a big one—because none of the communists that I knew,at least not to me and not in the literaturethat I read, ever took the position that SovietUnion was the country that they wanted to


Well, I can see it. I mean, you were living it—the whole dispute between labor and the shipowners circumventing . . . .

Well, sure. And the Soviet Union wasbacking the trade union struggles in theUnited States and all over the world.

And ship owners, I mean, the way you describedit, were reactionary wanting to go back to totalcontrol.

Yes. But they are bastards, is really oneway to say it, you know. The Soviet Unionat that time was backing trade union move-ments throughout the world. Internationaltrade union movement was very strongly sup-ported, and I guess there were a lot of Sovietrepresentatives in it. And this left-wing tradeunion American movement was identifiedwith the international trade union move-ment. So the Soviet Union had a verypositive place in the world at that time, fromthe point of view of the American Left whowere not necessarily at all interested in de-stroying the United States, you know.[laughter] It was just the opposite; the ideawas that the only way the United States couldsurvive was to have a rapprochement. Lateron would be the breakdown of the Tehranagreements and all that sort of thing withRoosevelt, and then the Cold War began.

What agreement?

The Tehran Conference. Churchill,Stalin in 1942—something like that, 1941,1942 . . . had been a great moment to a lotof people not necessarily left-wingers. Youknow, Europe, England, United States, andthe Soviet Union had joined in this under-standing about their role in the post-warworld in supporting democratic movements,

things of that kind, and cooperation with oneanother. [The Tehran Conference was actu-ally in 1943. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalinmet and agreed on Allied war plans and post-war cooperation in the United Nations.] Sowith the breakdown of that after the war, andthe beginning of the Cold War, there was agreat deal of bitterness about the UnitedStates taking the wrong turn, that it was nowcapitalist interests, the corporate interests ofthe United States, who were going to see toit that there was not going to be a continuedrapprochement.

Now, at that time, I wasn’t aware, norwere most of the people I knew . . . or wedidn’t believe the things that were going onin the Soviet Union that we would havedeeply disapproved of. In fact, to this day, I’mnot so sure how much of what is reported isreal. Nevertheless, obviously Stalin was adespotic character and became that in his life,and the attacks upon him by his own partylater on, certainly revealed a lot of the thingsthat were wrong within the Soviet Unionthat were sometimes terrible, terrible things.Nevertheless, at that time, I don’t think wetook that seriously, and we didn’t believe that;we saw this as propaganda.

I have to say right now, regardless ofwhether this was true or not, I think the posi-tions that we held in those days were goodones. The positions in the trade union move-ment, positions about race relations, aboutmale-female relations, about the prospects ofdemocratic reform within the UnitedStates—all these things are as important nowas they were then, and the Communist Partywas the vanguard of those movements at thattime.

So it wasn’t until years later that I beganto realize that there were things about notonly the American Communist Party butabout the Soviet Union that I would have


deep criticism of. But I wasn’t the only one.A lot of people were also beginning to havedoubts. And it was very tragic. It was a tragicbreakdown of what I considered to be a veryimportant movement in the United States.

So at the time, I was coming to this in areal way, and at that meeting, by the way, Idecided to join the party. And I have to saynow, too, I never got a card; I never was a“card-carrying communist.” But I don’t re-member anyone who carried a card. I thinkcards were way back at the turn of the cen-tury—the IWW. And early communistmovements, as well, might have had cards,because there were so few people, you had tocarry it to be identified. On the other hand,it was dangerous to have one. I don’t remem-ber any member of the Communist Partycarrying a card. You paid dues, had your duesjust like you were a member of the party. Ialways got a kick out of that. You know, “Areyou a card carrying member of the Commu-nist Party?” [laughter]

I could honestly say, “No, I never had acard!” [laughter]

Yes, you could honestly say no! [laughter]

They never had them. And the “redcard,” which everybody thought you had . . . .You know, obviously, a communist has got ared card. They don’t got no goddamn card.

So it was about this time, after I becamea member of the party, that I became awareof this famous Duclos letter. Jacque Ducloswas a member of a French party, who wrote aletter actually to all parties, mainly directedto the American party, criticizing the posi-tion of the American Communist Partyduring the war period when Earl Browder wasleader of the American Communist Party.Browderism, as it began to be referred to, wasa period of a united front of all progressives

in the country. A dissolution of the Com-munist Party as such—that is, it became thecommunist political association instead of theCommunist Party of the United States. Thewhole idea was to develop a broader rapportwith various segments of the American pub-lic, who were progressive, and who one couldwork with to develop new strategies and newprograms in various organizations and in la-bor and on the front. So in the period priorto my joining the party, there had been thispopular front type of orientation of theCommunist Party.

And is that what you said became known asBrowderism?

Well, yes, then Browderism began to bea bad word. That is, that Browder had in asense undermined the militancy and powerof the party and its correct program, becom-ing a social democratic liberalism.

So in the early 1950s this was a very realthing going on within the party. There was alot of contention, a lot of argument. In fact,I appreciated this, as I liked this sort of openparty, and people were arguing about policy,arguing about what they should be doingwithin the party.

The early 1950s?

Early 1946. The 1945 Duclos letter hadbeen like a bomb, very much like theKhrushchev speeches later on about Stalin.It really hit all the far Left very hard and waspicked up, of course, by the press. Oh, god.You know, “This party can’t get itself to-gether” kind of thing.

And the fact was, these wonderfully fruit-ful discussions and arguments were going on.A lot of people left the party at that point. Alot of people who had been sort of popular


front people and progressives, liberals, whohad in a sense worked with the party and allthat, began to withdraw on the basis that thiswasn’t what they had in mind. So there weretwo sides to this question being argued aboutBrowderism you know.

Earl Browder actually did something veryimportant for the American communistmovement by opening it up—I mean, fromtheir point of view—to a larger playing fieldwith more people involved, and the party wasprobably at its largest during the war. Andthere was a great deal of excitement in theliterary field and in the theater and in film.That’s the period when all the great left-wingers were writing scripts and writing greatfilms. Later, of course, they were brought be-fore the McCarthy committee, and thatended their careers for a while. But it was avery lively period.

The people who had been involved onone level saw this as being the proper rolefor a party in the United States. Then therewas the other side . . . I can remember manysides, but the main other side was that thiswas an incorrect Marxist position, that bydissolving the Communist Party publicly,they had taken away the revolutionary char-acter of the Communist Party.

And by the way, that word revolution getsbandied around, and I don’t recall any com-munist that I knew—on the waterfront even,or in an industrial union—ever thinking interms of armed insurrection against theUnited States. That wasn’t the kind of revo-lution meant. No, things may come to that,but nobody thought in those terms. Thatwasn’t the way you thought of revolution. Itwas a hard-hitting political fight, struggle fornot just reform, but for change—getting itwhere you could—and that the unions werethe main weapon. The working class of theUnited States is the one that could make

these changes, and that that was revolution;that was the concept of revolution. Anythinglike the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inRussia was something considered not neces-sarily possible in a country like the UnitedStates. You didn’t have to do it that way. Youhad other ways to move within a large, quasi-democracy, like the United States. You hadall kind of instruments to use to carry out arevolution.

Yes. Well, I mean, you had access to the pressand everything.

Yes. Right and you moved by enteringinto various organizations and presenting aprogram and then called for change. That’sthe way the people that I knew thought aboutit, talked about it. And no one carried gunsor prepared themselves for armed insurrec-tion, though they were accused of that, andthe press was constantly full of stories aboutarmed insurrection and this sort of thing.[laughter] “The communists are trying to cre-ate a revolution in the United States.”

Was there any kind of move to . . . like guncontrol?

At that time?

You know, did we have that at that time?

Well, it was illegal, Penny. It was muchmore illegal to have guns in those days thanit is today. Carrying a gun made you immedi-ately . . . that was a felony to carry a gun. Infact, I’m not very clear on this, but nobodyhad guns. Nobody cared, nobody talked aboutgetting them and using them. But whatamazes me now is, here was a movement ofpeople accused of being ready to take overthe United States; I mean, it was so ridicu-


lous when I come to think of it. “They’regoing to take over the United States by a vio-lent overthrow of the government of theUnited States,” which was the thing that youwere asked in loyalty oaths later on. “Do youbelieve in the violent overthrow of theUnited . . . ?”

I could honestly say, “No!” you know.“Change, yes.” And it might take a lot ofdoing to make change, but, you know, armedoverthrow of the United States? Nobody tookthat seriously within the party. At least thatisn’t the way you thought about it. It justwasn’t there.

Then I’m thinking of now. We have mili-tias running around the country, developinggreat caches of arms—I mean, even illegalarms—and the poor FBI seems to be unableto do anything about it, you see. And yet agroup in Philadelphia of blacks who won’tcome out of their building when they’re or-dered to, you know, the whole block gets puton fire, and people are killed. And the BlackPanthers—oh, wow! They went after theBlack Panthers lickety-split, and communistsduring the late 1940s and early 1950s. I thinkthe communists were fair game, and the pro-paganda was enormous about what they wereprepared to do. They were accused of impos-sible things that they could not have done.And then today, you know, people can de-velop caches of arms and have standoffs withlocal authorities, and the FBI seems helpless.

The FBI wasn’t helpless in those days, andthe police weren’t helpless in those days. Imean, you could get your head cracked justby passing out leaflets in the wrong place atthe wrong time in those days.

When I look back, I’m thinking, “Forgod’s sakes, I’m glad I was part of a move-ment in this country for a brief period of timewhere there was a clearly defined policy, pro-gram for change, and goals for change, in

terms of how it was to be done and whatought to be done.” A lot of them were unre-alistic, unattainable, but, nevertheless, theywere good goals, positive goals. And that’swhat motivated most of the people that Iworked with.

My connection as a member of theCommunist Party at that time was localized.I was a seaman; I was a member of waterfrontunions and trade unions. Trade union issuesand the organization activities with regardto trade unions on the waterfront were mymain concern and my main identification. Ididn’t have a lot of understanding or evengreat interest in theoretical Marxism or inthe big issues that had to do with politicalforces in the world, though I had some no-tion that I’d gotten by osmosis, you know,through others and through propagandisticliterature that I was reading and all that—allof it which made a kind of sense.

And I was aware of propaganda. I knewwhat it meant when things were biased andweighted to one side, and I could discountthat. Nevertheless, to me, what counted werethe issues, and the issues were clear and welldefined. And if the actions with regard tothem made sense to me, that was a positivething.

So I felt that being a member of the partyat that time was for me an important step.And I’m very glad that I did it, and I wouldnever regret having done it. I don’t even re-gret anything that we did at that time.

I regret not knowing more. [laughter] Imean, I wish I’d’ve had more . . . . But if Ihad known more at that time, I wouldn’t havedone all the things that I did; I would havebeen an intellectual soapboxer dissident.

I spent at least a few years being a part ofan organization that I felt was on the righttrack and doing the right thing. And when Ifelt it wasn’t, I withdrew from it, but I didn’t


attack it, because I still think it’s one of thebetter things that happened in American life.

I think the whole period of the AmericanLeft from the turn of the twentieth centurythrough the 1940s and 1950s was one of thefew bright spots in the development of mod-ern America. And that light has just aboutgone out, and it’s scary; it’s scary that it’s goneout.

I was really struck with your statements aboutpatriotism and how being left wing and commu-nist . . . but even just left wing, how the farRight has really appropriated patriotism for them-selves.

Well, they always did. Not just the rightwing-capitalist, corporate America has to usethe flag and patriotism as their raison d’être,as the thing which gives them legitimacy.“Now, look what they’re doing for this greatcountry?”

So, anyway, my own involvement andthat of the people I knew intimately on thefront was really in terms of trade union is-sues.

Most of us at that time took criticism ofthe Soviet Union or any so-called revelationsof ills within it as really right-wing propa-ganda. I think we had good reason to suspectthat, because the media was certainly not veryreliable on matters of this kind. And we sawourselves in battles ideologically, and actu-ally, in terms of our work.

But I don’t think I ever felt the SovietUnion was an ideal society. Maybe there weresome people that I knew and worked withwho looked upon it almost with mystical ide-alism. And some of them even went. Somestayed; some came back soon, you know, asit turned out to be a rather ordinary placeand not necessarily what they thought.[laughter] Others were absolutely enthralled

by it and stayed. I mean, not people I knew,but I have heard of such people, and I readabout them and all that. That never was aproblem for me personally. I had no desire togo to the Soviet Union and join in that soci-ety. I was an American. I thought that myjob was here; this was my ship, and I was go-ing to work on it. [laughter]

Also, it didn’t bother me if there werethings wrong with the Soviet Union. I didn’tsee the Soviet Union as necessarily the onlyanswer to where the world had to go. Thenand to this day, I’ve had the view that thingslike socialism and ultimate communism inthe Marxist sense have to be dealt with expe-rimentally throughout the world over time.These are evolving things, and societies haveto evolve. Certainly the first attempts andexperiments with great reform movements,with new kinds of approaches to democracyand social systems, isn’t something that’s go-ing to happen overnight or in one generation.It isn’t one country in this world or one sec-tion of the world that’s going to suddenlybecome an ideal society.

I didn’t think the Soviet Union was anideal society; I didn’t think that I would par-ticularly want to live there. It was anotherculture. It wasn’t the kind of place that I feltthat I might personally be comfortable in,though I admired what they had done, ad-mired what advances had been made, and Iadmired the fact that a good portion of thepopulation was very supportive of what wasgoing on. And certainly there were all kindsof struggles involving pogroms and assassi-nations and arrests and things like that, asone would expect of a post-revolutionarygovernment.

Right. Were you at all aware of the incredibleethnic diversity that was part of the Soviet Union?


Yes. Oh, that was the other thing: thenational question. Lenin on the nationalquestion, which everybody read. I mean, thefact of the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic So-viet Union and the problems of developmentunder those conditions. We saw it as a kindof a model, again for what had to be donehere. Oh, that’s an interesting thing, wherethat went.

Anyway, I just wanted to make clear thatthen and today I didn’t look upon the then-Soviet Union as an ideal society; I saw it asan experimental one, just as I view China inthat way. These are various experiments insocial change, drastic social change, that Ithink are remarkably important in the world.I mean, they have to take place, and overtime things are either going to go that wayor the other way. The other way is a fright-ening descent into fascism.

Fascism and communism are two entirelydifferent things, regardless of the old imageof the snake biting its own tail, symbolizingas they used to say, you know, “The far Leftand the far Right meet together.” You know,bullshit. I mean, they are different in theiraims and their organization and what theyintend to do and say they’re going to do.

Every organization gets corrupted undercertain conditions. Every organization even-tually falls apart and has to be renewed assomething else. And the Soviet Union, tothe degree to which it adopted measures, des-potic measures, that could be liken to whatwas done in fascist Germany or in Italy,needed to be broken up. And it did; it fellapart. The experiment did not work, but itmade a tremendous mark on the world whileit did work. It made a mark on a good part ofEurope and a mark certainly on the dispar-ate people of the Soviet Union of the time;it made a mark on most of Europe and a goodpart of the Asian world.

This business of “Marxism is dead,” well,the hell with it, those ideas are not dead.They’re alive, they’re cropping up everywherein the world, and they will continue to cropup. They’re part of the evolution of socialsystems, the struggle to create social systemsthat accommodate the problems that facehuman beings in the world. And that will goon and on and on. And to me it’s laughable,the business of the death of Marxism, if whatthey mean by that is the death of the Left—to hell with it. It’s everywhere. And thoseideas are alive. They’re alive everywhere.And I still hold them, and I still feel part ofthat.

I think it’s tragic what happened to theSoviet Union, only because it’s tragic that agreat experiment went wrong. And it didn’tgo wrong because it didn’t have the rightvalues, the right orientation. It did, but hu-man beings are frail. Look at this country[laughter]—the constitution and the way it’sinterpreted by some of the people in thiscountry. And, my god, if we were in theirhands . . . well, we are. [laughter] But, any-way, that’s neither here nor there.

The thing I was going to mention aboutthe national question and the Soviet Union:In the early 1930s, I guess—1930s and1940s—the Communist Party in the UnitedStates had a very militant position with re-gard to the so-called Negro question, the ideaof self-determination of the American Ne-gro. There was talk that maybe a good partof the American South, where there werepredominantly African-American popula-tions, should be made into a Negro nation,or that that was what African-Americanswanted, that they did constitute a kind ofnation in the United States. This followedLenin’s notion of the national question, andI think that was also written about by Stalinor whoever wrote for him.


So that that was one of the early views,before the Second World War came along,the very messy business of the Soviet-Germanpact in the late 1930s, which was a great prob-lem for the Communist Party, of course. Theparty and the Left in the country had gener-ally been anti-war, you know. “Stay out ofthe war; leave it alone.” Part of that on thepart of the communists, was to protect theSoviet Union. But it was a very disconcert-ing period for them. That was prior to mytime, you know, but when I look back, it wasa very real problem. Here is the Soviet Unionwho needed to be protected against the on-slaught of the capitalist West, had made adefensive pact, because, from the point ofview of the Soviet Union and the Left, therewas fear that the United States and Englandwere plotting to allow Hitler to conquer theSoviet Union. There was some reason tothink that maybe something like that wasafoot in a sense. “Stand back. Leave themalone.” So the Soviet-German pact waslooked upon as a defensive move on the partof the Soviet Union to keep the Germansoff them for a while, and only for a while,because a few years later, German armiesmoved in on the Soviet Union, and therewas a lot of suspicion in the world that thiswas something that the Western world wasnot too unhappy about. But then the SovietUnion did a great job of fending off theGermans.

Then there was a great shift whenGermany attacked the Soviet Union, andEurope was at war with Germany, andEngland was up against the wall, and theUnited States finally got into the war becauseof Japan, and there was a great shift. Nowthe Soviet Union was an ally, you know.[laughter] Now the party made its tacticalmove, shift; suddenly the war was the mostall-important thing. The war against fascism

became also the war to protect the SovietUnion.

I think these are legitimate ends, but itwas a messy strategic, tactical period of floun-dering left-wing politics and all that.Nevertheless, very logical. One could see it:so the Soviet Union is finally an ally, and,therefore, we should go to war, fight like hell.

So when we entered the war, the SovietUnion was at war with Germany, and we wereallies with Europe, and Japan was an ally withItaly and Germany, and there was total co-operation on the part of the Left with thewar effort. This was one of the criticismsposed by the Duclos letter and the anti-Browder faction later, that in doing so, theycompromised certain basic principles thatthey’d always had. One was on the Negroquestion and also on the struggle against capi-talism. Now everybody was in league withthe great corporations and the great compa-nies to produce ships, to produce materialsfor the war effort, and not in any way to inter-fere with that—a no-strike pledge in a sense,you know. The party even supported the ideaof no strikes during the war.

All right. In a way one can say that was agood policy, but at the same time the strugglefor Negro rights was put on a shelf. Negroesand the Negro question was no longer seenin terms of self-determination of a Negropeople in the United States, in a sense, anincipient nation, but was seen now as “inte-gration.” And that was the integrationistperiod. “We should now struggle to integrate,and the Negro people must be patient, mustjoin with us in getting the war won and inputting aside their grievances.” Just like labor,“putting aside their grievances in order to winthe war.” That was one of the attacks onBrowderism—you know, “You put aside basicprinciples.”


All of this brings up the case of theTrotskyites—boy, the Trotskyites on the onehand and the corporations on the other. LeonTrotsky was assassinated in 1940 or so inMexico. One story was that he was assassi-nated by Soviet agents, another was that hewas assassinated by a disgruntled SouthAmerican leftist or by somebody who wascrazy. The Trotskyists were always accused bythe Communist Party, by the Left, of beingin a sense underminers of left policy becauseof their hatred of the Soviet Union, of Stalin,and hatred of the American CommunistParty because it stood for support of theSoviet Union, which they wanted to see dis-mantled. So from the Communist Party pointof view, the Trotskyites were always sabotag-ing, undermining the left-wing—communistleft-wing, at least—efforts to fulfill the pro-gram.

To some extent I see that that was truein things that I didn’t know when I was inthe SUP, but learned afterwards, because Iwas doing some more reading about its his-tory. For one thing, the so-called Trotskyiteshad a major role in the development of theSailor’s Union of Pacific. At the very timewhen communists were being kicked out and,like myself, called a communist . . . not atthe time kicked out of the union for a posi-tion, but suspected of being a “red.”Trotskyites were in the leadership of theSailor’s Union of Pacific, the Trotskyites andthe old Wobbly anarcho-syndicalist element,who I have a certain admiration for. But Ibegan to think about the link between thesyndicalists and the Trotskyists, as, in a sense,not only sharing anarchistic, but sometimesnihilistic views. You know, “Bring down thewhole structure; let it fall apart. And thenout of the ashes comes the new world.” Youknow, “If you can’t win, destroy. Throw thestuff overboard.” [laughter] “Wreck the com-

pany—everything.” And we had a view, rightor wrong, that a lot of the intellectualTrotskyites on the waterfront would rathersee a program destroyed or a beef lost thanallow the communist Left to have any creditfor what they accomplished—that in a sensethey were destroyers. Well, it’s known thatin some cases, Lundeberg, for instance, wentdirectly to corporations, the ship owners, andto politicians to make deals, to undermine,to sidestep the Left. So this kind of wrecking(we considered it union wrecking) and thewrecking of the left program was part of thewarfare on the front. I mean, “a Trotskyite”was the worst thing you could be called. Nextto a phony or a fink, a Trotskyite, from thepoint of view of the Left, was the worst thingyou could be called.

And I must say that from my personalconnection with the few I knew asTrotskyites, I always felt them a little slimy.They were intellectualized; I thought theyhad come into the labor movement as equalsto the Communist Party people, but, never-theless, saw themselves in a sense asintellectual leaders. They saw themselves assuperior to the people they were workingwith, that they had . . . .

The thinkers versus the doers?

Yes, that they had some ultimate knowl-edge which nobody else had. Now, that’smaybe unfair. But I felt that the ones that Iknew personally, there was something aboutthem that I didn’t like but that could havebeen just a bias that I had developed on thefront.

So the relation of that to the race rela-tions aspect is that the Trotskyists in the SUPnever raised the issue of race relations, neverraised the question of hiring blacks. Thatleadership was silent on this, to me was an


indication of not only wrecking of the leftprogram as part of their strategy, but that theydidn’t want to take on an issue that was sodeeply ingrained in the culture of the peoplethey were working with. They didn’t wantto take on racism. They didn’t want to haveto struggle and fight against these deep-rootedprejudices that existed, and the people I wasworking with did. They risked their livessometimes, risked their lives to get blacks onships. Two or three guys that I knew very wellwere killed in Galveston, Texas, and inHouston, for just that issue—bringing blacksaboard ship, getting them from the hiring hallto the ships, and the goons trying to keepthem off. Floyd Hayes was a young kid that Iadmired a lot—he was killed in Houston. Outon the railroad tracks goons attacked him andkilled him because he had insisted upon . . . .

And what year . . .

Well, that was a year later during the1947-1948 strikes. But, anyway, that issue wasvery much alive. As I remember, theTrotskyists, unless it was something theycould use to disrupt a meeting or disrupt aprogram, never brought up the race relationsissue. They were afraid of that.

There were a number of African-Ameri-can and other minorities who were very, veryactive members of these other unions on thefront. I mean, it was to me a pleasure to gointo the ILWU hall and see all the African-Americans waiting, along with the whites,for jobs. And in my own union, to have blackmembers of the union (now, there weren’tmany, but, you know, they came and wentout to sea and back) attend union meetings,talking aggressively, talking authoritatively,making demands, arguing with the leader-ship, arguing with other members of theunion—this kind of aggressive dignity . . . .They had a place; they belonged. And I de-lighted in that, and it convinced me I wasright when I saw that. I felt what I was doingwas the right thing.

Of course, later, during the strike itself,when the strike finally came, this to me waseven more important. I began to see howvaluable it was for that union to have thisnon-segregated membership and how uglywas the poor SUP with its all-white crews,trying to get on the ships and fink on us dur-ing the strike. And black members of ourunion fighting like hell—well, that’s becausethey weren’t going to let that union take theirships, see. So it was quite a time.

58THE PUBLISHED AUTHOR

H, DURING that year . . . I’mspending an awful lot of time on1946, but it was crucial, and it was

but he had a knack for it. He had the lan-guage and the feel for it in the way that Iwouldn’t have had. And there was one otherwhose name I don’t remember. There wereabout twenty guys, I guess, and they wouldmeet at the California Labor School once ortwice a month when they could and talkabout their work and read their stories andthings of that kind. And you didn’t read yourown; somebody else would read your story.

So one of my stories, “Deep Six forDanny,” was read by . . . who was it? I forget.And read kind of well. And there was a kindof a stunned silence, because it was very, very,avant-garde, subjective, and poetic. And, asI remember, it got a hell of a lot of criticism,for, you know, quaintism—dealing with thequaintness of the sea and people in it, andfor picking out the kind of things that hademotional and poetic value, but, you know,where was the real guts of it? That was onetype. Then there were others who, you know,liked it, particularly Sam (I won’t mentionhis full name), who said, you know, he wisheshe could write like that. And, well, I wishedI could write like he did. [laughter]

Oduring that time that galvanized me to theidea that maybe I’d go into trade union work,maybe that’s where I would stay. On the otherhand, I knew that I wouldn’t do that. I knewthat that wasn’t my forte. I would not be ableto have a sustaining power or the kind ofmind to do the kind of work that I admiredcertain others doing. I mean, the tremendouscommitment, the focus, the hard work. Icould do that, but not for a lifetime. Not as aprofession, you know. And yet I had greatadmiration for it, and I wanted to be part ofit for a while.

Oh, yes. Well, I think it was during thatperiod, that there was a little group calledthe Progressive Seamen Writers or somethingof that kind. And I’d already won an awardor two and had some of my things published.And, oh, yes. There were two members ofmy union who belonged to it. One guy—Iwon’t mention his name—was a good writer.He wrote conventional sea stories and laborsea stories, which I wasn’t able to do well,


And it was a very enlightening thing. Imean, it was hard, and I remember beingdeeply bothered by the criticism and, youknow, partly agreeing with it, that althoughI thought what I had done was artisticallyvalid and good, that I had missed out on re-flecting what I knew and thought objectivelyabout situations.

Social relevance, do you think?

Yes, but I wasn’t writing about the bigissues that were facing these guys then—notthat a writer has to. But that in some way orother it was detached. It was . . . I wish Icould find the words for it . . . that it tran-scended the situation. It dealt with emotionaland spiritual problems, you know, which areimportant and good, but, then the questionwould have to be, is that all I had to say aboutthat world? Is that what I had to say? And Iasked myself that.

So I was troubled. I had problems aboutthat, and I remember trying to write otherkind of stories and, in my own mind, failingmiserably.

I just wasn’t going to be a working-classwriter; I wasn’t, you know. That isn’t what Iwas. However, those subjects I could writeabout in my own way would not be necessar-ily acceptable to some of the people that Iworked with. I began to realize that the kindof artistic images that one makes on one levelof observation are not going to be meaning-ful or acceptable to the very people you’reconcerned about, if you don’t have the lan-guage and you don’t have the gut issues thatthey’re concerned about, you know, at heart.The other thing I could say was, well, thisother kind of writing that I do brings outthings that people in their reflective mo-ments, and in time, see in themselves, allthat. On and on. I can’t really talk very flu-

ently about it now, because it’s to me verycomplex. But, nevertheless, it was a problemin artistry for me, an artistic problem, as wellas a personal problem within myself.

But in a way, it seems to have some really directparallels between being an anthropologist observ-ing and accurately communicating some realityand the political consequence of having done so.

And more than that. It’s like the discus-sions that have been going on, on reflexivityin our field now about what relevance doesit have and how does it communicate to thevery people you’re working with? What isbeing returned to them? What’s the feedback?You see.

And I suppose it was the same kind ofthing going on in my mind at the time: Whatrelevance does what I’m writing have, asmuch as I feel that it’s artistically sound,meaningful, important, and there is an audi-ence for that out there somewhere? Not herewhere I am working; not in this world. I don’thave the tongue, or the mind, that experi-ence to be that for these people that I’mworking with, in terms of what’s going onnow around us. Rather than thinking ofsomething transcendent that goes beyond allthis that in some kind of timeless way hasmeaning, power, what’s the relevance now? Ihave fed from this trough, these people thislast four or five years of going to sea and be-ing a seamen. I have fed from it; mynotebooks are full of observations aboutthem. But how can I translate that to some-thing meaningful back to them?

And I’m not able, apparently—at least Iwasn’t at that time. And what I was writingbegan to kind of pale in my mind as being . . .oh, having what was then called bourgeoisidealism involved, dealing with the world asquaint. Not that I thought it that, but it might

509THE PUBLISHED AUTHOR

come out as quaint, making the feelings andthe emotions of somebody going to sea ro-mantic, romanticized. Even Melville did dothat. I mean, Melville had more of the sea ashe knew it in his work than I would in someof those stories, as much as I thought theywere good, and others thought they weregood.

But those discussions were good, becauseI heard some of the guys’ work and thoughtsome of it was lousy, and I thought, “Oh,Christ, you know, this guy’ll never be awriter.” Others were really brilliant, wonder-fully sharp, focused kinds of observations andstatements about a way of life. Others movedaside and talked about families and talkedabout relationships and things of that sort.All were very real things, and here was myhighly specialized, effervescent, avant-gardekind of writing. I struggled over that.

It was part of a struggle that never gotreally resolved, but I felt that I was not goingto be that kind of writer—wasn’t going to bea writer as a profession, because I didn’t trustmyself to really do what I wanted to do withit. I think. I’m not sure about this . . . talk-ing about things I haven’t really worked out.

Well, it’s also the question that we’ve raised muchearlier on—who you were writing for when youwere writing, because maybe you didn’t wantto . . . .

Oh, yes. Well, at that point I was strug-gling to know and understand andaccommodate and be accommodated by thisworld that I was working in. And I was highlysensitized to the way those people felt aroundme, and what I did in support of it.

The upshot is that during this particularperiod I questioned whether or not I couldbe or wanted to be the kind of writer that Ihad thought of being in the last few years.Other kinds of issues, other kinds of interestshad taken hold. And I guess I didn’t feel capa-ble of approaching those issues with the kindof writing orientation and skills that I had,and I didn’t know if I could make that tran-sition—whether or not I could ever write insome way that fit the role models that I hadat the time in literature, whether or not Icould ever write, “a working class story ornovel,” whatever that might mean. Whetheror not I could actually express those kinds ofissues, those kinds of observations, and thosemeanings. I didn’t feel that I was ready to dothat or didn’t even know if I was capable ofdoing it. And at that time other things wereoccupying my mind totally. I was completelyinvolved, really, in understanding the kindof world I had moved into, where at last Iwas in the crucible of what might be calledthe working-class crisis and learning about itand feeling that in a way that was my job;that’s what I had to do.

59MOVES AGAINST LABOR

OW, THIS WAS in the spring of1946 when I was now a member ofthe National Maritime Union and

the union. They really cared. They had a tre-mendous sense of loyalty not only to theunion and to unions on the front, particu-larly all the seamen’s unions, but they had agrasp of the political situation in the UnitedStates and the world, which I didn’t have.

A lot of that probably would have beenthings that if I had known more, I might havehad more disagreement with, but I didn’t. Tome it filled a great void. I began to under-stand certain kinds of forces that were at workin the country and in the world that I hadn’teven thought about before in any clear way.I began to see that the ship owners were atleast our immediate barrier to any kinds ofgains on the front, and that they were reallyunited, and that they had a good part of thegovernment with them—that they couldwork closely with government agencies andthat their pressure on the Truman adminis-tration was enormous.

And even though the Truman adminis-tration had many people in it who werefriendly to labor, and that Truman himselfmay have had some holdovers of the charac-ter of the Roosevelt administration,

Ntaking part to what degree I could in the acti-vities preparing for the June 15 strike—atleast the proposed strike on June 15. So thatI attended meetings; I attended every unionmeeting. I hung around at the bookstore,which I finally found was really the center ofthe seamen’s branch of the Communist Party.That’s where we met.

And all this time I had thought thatsomething like that was the case, but nowhere I was actually up in the back room, up-stairs in the very back room, in the little officewhere we used to meet and discuss strategyand what was going to be done, how thepreparations for the strike were being made,what our program was, how we were going toapproach certain issues with the membershipat meetings of the union. And I saw the roleof local communists in unions.

All this was to me not only very excitingbut very positive. I felt that the men that Iworked with and was meeting, learning from,were probably the most committed men in


nevertheless, the pressures at the end of thewar on the government to suppress labor, totake advantage of the strength that corpora-tions had, was enormous. And laboringpeople felt that; they knew it, also, interna-tionally.

For example, the ship owners were aware,the laboring people were aware, certainly,unions were aware, that shipping was gettingscarce; not only were prices going up withpost-war inflation and prices going up forcommodities and goods, but jobs were scarce.And the salaries: you know, fifty-three centsan hour was one of the averages back in the1940s, and guys were lucky to pull in a salaryof $130, $140 a month. Some made more ifthey could get overtime, and yet the over-time issue was unclear, and there were alwaysfights about overtime—what was overtimeand what wasn’t and how much overtime andwhat people were eligible for it.

All these things were very clear to us asan increasing pressure upon laboring peoples.And in our case, the seamen’s unions and thewaterfront unions were confronting that itwas getting impossible to earn a proper wage,and that a great many men were going to beout of work and were already out of work.There were fewer ships.

Now, why were there fewer ships? Therewere fewer ships because every day in all theports of the country we were taking ships tothe boneyards, to the mothball fleets; theolder ships were being sent up. And what washappening to the other ships? We used to talkabout the thousand disappearing ships, thethousand missing ships.

These ships were all put under foreignflags. Panama had one of the largest merchantmarines in the world, and Liberia later.[laughter] These little countries that didn’teven have navies had the largest merchantfleets in the world. And this was the dodge—

the ship owners in collusion with the gov-ernment, really—to avoid dealing withAmerican labor, avoid the impending de-mands being made from all unions, not justthe waterfront unions.

All over the country there were post-wardemands for making up for lost time. Theunions in most cases had pledged a no-strikeposition during the war, had put dampers ontheir demands, as they had a patriotic inter-est in aiding the war effort. And here, now,at the end of the war, there was absolutelyno give on the part of the ship owners to makeany kind of adjustment in our wages, aftertheir enormous profits.

Their profits were not just the profits thatcame during the war. It was not just that, butthey were subsidized; the companies weresubsidized for the use of their ships, and theinsurance covered all the hundreds of shipslost during the war. These companies got anunbelievable recompense in insurance, paidby the taxpayers. They had millions of dol-lars in profits because of the war, and itappeared to us they planned to keep them.They planned not to in any way see that assomething that could be returned to somedegree to labor.

And, of course, from a Marxist point ofview, from the Communist Party’s point ofview, this was exactly the kind of effect to beexpected, where labor was the last thing thatwas considered in production—labor as acommodity and as an instrument in utilitycould be used and discarded. We could comeand go. So 60,000 men are without jobs inthe industry. So there are no jobs, no ships.No one even considers the possibility thatthey might need welfare, they might needsome kind of aid during this period of transi-tion. That was the last thing in the world. Itwas thought of in the GI bill for the return-ing veterans, all to the good.


The Seaman’s Bill of Rights was earlierattached to the GI bill and was held up fortwo or three years in Congress. I think it wasa Senator or Congressman Case, who madea speech on the floor of Congress, denounc-ing the merchant marine as all communistswho were going to turn the guns of the shipsupon the United States, and why would theydeserve any kind of aid? And this is where6,000 men in the merchant marine had losttheir lives, the highest percentage in any ofthe armed services. And here was this insult-ing, vilifying, demeaning kind of reactionfrom our government. Well, the anger wasdeep, and particularly among left-wing labor-ing people and seamen. And it underscoredand gave credibility to all the basic Marxistnotions of the ruthless behavior of rampantcapitalism, given its head.

Were there any political figures who championedthe opposite position from, say, Senator Case? Imean, were you aware of that?

Yes. I don’t remember their names, but,yes, there were a few senators and congress-men whom we looked upon as friends in thegovernment. I’d have to go back through therecords to see who they were.

Well, one of them was Henry Wallace inthe government. And, of course, he emergedlater as somebody backed by labor as a Third-Party leader, because of his role not onlyduring the Roosevelt administration, buteven during the Truman administration. Hewas outspoken in support of labor and theneeds of the underclass. He seemed to havea clear view of the kinds of problems thatwere impinging in the United States.

But in early 1946, it is very clear . . . I mean,the GI bill had been passed, and it’s clear thatthe maritime community had been left out.

Not only that, but worse than that wasjust about this time, Truman, poor HarryTruman, allows himself to be used to callupon the veterans to go back to the induc-tion centers to join in brigades to take overthe ships if there’s a strike. I mean, he helpedto create a division. And, of course, animos-ity was easily aroused—it wasn’t there duringthe war—but easily aroused about the mer-chant marine and labor living off the fat ofthe land, supposedly, while servicemen weredying abroad, which is ridiculous when youlook at the actual facts and what was actu-ally going on in the world, particularly thenumber of seamen who were killed, the num-ber of ships that were destroyed. And thishorrible business just before June 15 . . .Truman in a sense allowing himself to be thespearhead of a threat to use veterans, andactually opening up the induction centers tomen who, instead of going into the services,could work the ships.

Apparently few veterans applied for this.It was a lost cause. In fact, it was never talkedabout after the first few attempts to do it, butthat kind of thing clearly demonstrated to uswhat the issues were that we were dealingwith and who our enemy was. I suppose atthat time in my life, I was getting my firstreal taste of class warfare.

You know, I’d read about it and thoughtabout it and talked about it, but here I wasseeing it. I was looking at it in the face, sucha clear example of class division, and of thetotal arrogance and power that was posedagainst a few thousand men who were work-ing ships—ships that were making millionsfor certain corporations, the Pacific ShipOwners Association, for example, in whichsome of the most lucrative shipping compa-nies were just pulling in millions.

When they felt that they could get a gov-ernment subsidy for getting rid of an old ship,


they would send it out to the mothball fleet,and they’d get paid insurance; they’d get paidmore for putting a ship in mothballs than theship could have been bought for. The gov-ernment could have bought the ship for sevenmillion dollars instead of giving seven mil-lion dollars in insurance and used as subsidiesfor the ship owners. So it was a rapaciousperiod of rampant greed for these companies.When I think about it now, it’s been fifty yearsago, I can get just as mad now as I got then,because it was so clear; it was clearly defined,clear-cut.

And in my view the members of theCommunist Party that I was dealing with onthe waterfront, in the trade unions, were theclearest people that I was working with. Theyseemed to know what they were going to do.They had a program, they had a goal, theyeven had a long-term socialist goal, which Ididn’t have any opposition to. I’d alwaysbeen, I guess, a quasi-socialist in my head.I’ve always thought that if the world was go-ing to improve, it was going to be toward asocialist type of organization of some kind oranother. And so that was an easy move forme from my kind of middle-class liberalism,to an idea that socialism was an end. But thatwasn’t the real issue; it was just there. I tookthat for granted.

The transition from socialism to commu-nism was to me a sort of a wild, long-rangeview, as it was to most of the guys I was work-ing with. They didn’t talk about the eventualcommunist structure of world governmentsand all that sort of thing. That was way be-yond our thinking. It was a kind of an image,an icon. “That’s a wonderful end, like heaven,you know,” but in the meantime there’s a jobto be done, and a socialist perspective wasthe clearest one that we could think of, thatanyone could think of right now for winningstrikes, winning pork chops, as we said—the

gains that were necessary for workers on thewaterfront. And that was the aim of all ofthe actions which we took.

All of the issues were in terms of whatcould be done, strategies to improve the con-ditions of seamen on the front. That was tome totally acceptable, and to the degree thatthat was Marxist . . . We used to call it “hard-hat Marxism” Marxism on the job thatemerged right out of the work that you weredoing. What you saw with your own eyes toldyou what the forces were at work and whatthe job was that had to be done.

And I still feel that way. I still feel thatmovements of that kind are the most posi-tive movements, in our society anyway, andcertainly have been in Europe and elsewhere.And whether they’re called Marxist move-ments or revolutionary movements orwhatever, there has never been a revolution-ary movement in the world in the lasthundred years that hasn’t been affected by ageneral Marxist set of principles and ideas,other than something like national social-ism and things of that kind on the other side.

Whether they think of themselves asMarxist or not, those are the values, thoseare the principles which emerge. Theyemerge out of the real situation—class con-sciousness and awareness of what has beentaken from them, the alienation that’s beencreated by capitalism or neocolonialism. It’sthere.

So the idea, you know, that Marxism oranything like it is dead is ridiculous, becauseMarxist or not, in situations—the reality ofhuman relations and oppressive societies—these ideas emerge; they’re there. The onlycounter to them is usually fascist dictatorship,something called national socialism, whichis an entirely different world in terms of val-ues, in terms of ends, and if sometimes theso-called socialist revolution begins to look


like nationalist socialism, then it’s sick. Thenthere’s something terribly wrong with it, andsomething is so corrupt at its core because ofthe human actors that it needs to be finished.

That may have been true of the lateSoviet Union. I am not ready to sign off onthat. But that can happen. It could happento China; it could happen to any of the formersocialist democracies in eastern Europe andhas.

I mean, their agonies of change are enor-mous, and we have yet to see what’s going tocome out of that. They haven’t gulped downso-called free-enterprise capitalism very eas-ily, and it’s made some terrible impacts uponthe people. On the other hand, we’ll see.We’ll see what emerges out of those changes.

In the meantime, Western free-enter-prise, capitalism in its new late form, isterribly powerful and doing its job. And we’llsee where that goes. We’ll see what happensto so-called capitalist democracies and majorones like . . . .

Well, it seems like either system, either capital-ism or communism, left on their own . . . . Imean, each needs the other for the balance.

Each has the seed of their own destruc-tion if they’re not carried out in terms of theoriginal principles.

Well, it seems also that each is a necessary coun-terpoint to the other. I don’t mean in a right andperfect world you have both systems. I just meanto even discuss these ideas . . . .

Yes. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Well,it is a conflict; it is a contest; it is tit for tat.[laughter] And if there wasn’t despotism anda ruthless, greedy capitalist system at its base,maybe there would not be the counter ac-tion that leads to dissidence and revolution.

I mean, I don’t know about that. All I knowis that this is what we have and that the abil-ity of our system to appropriate basic humanvalues in order to alienate people from real-ity is enormous. I mean, look at theadvertising industry itself, what it does withvalues.

Well, we call it advertising if it’s for capitalism,but it’s propaganda if it’s . . . .

Well, oh, it’s the most well-heeled pro-paganda that the world has ever known, andthe most powerful and the most effective. Imean, you get Coca-Cola in every countryof this world. Even people who can’t affordto buy a cup of rice can get a bottle of Coca-Cola anywhere in this world.

When I was recently in Liberia, what doyou know, in the markets where people aretrading for a cup of rice or trading for any oldtorn shirt and all that, here is a great big rackof Coca-Cola for sale for five cents and tencents a bottle as against what it would be herein this country. Anything to get people inter-ested. A big sign in war-torn, destroyedMonrovia, “This is Marlboro Country.” Hereis a sign, ten feet high: “This is MarlboroCountry.” And you look around, and you say,“Yeah! Man, it is Marlboro Country!” [laugh-ter] Yes. And they made it; they made it.

I’m being playful and cynical here. Never-theless, those kinds of feelings, that kind ofthinking, came very sharply to us back therein the 1940s, at the end of the war, whenthere was some hope that there would besome sort of changing course in Americanlife, that the so-called capitalist system wouldhave some flexibility, tolerance. Lookingback at the Roosevelt period, the New Dealand all that became these kinds of icons.What has happened to the New Deal? What’shappened to Roosevelt’s legacy? The fact that


Roosevelt himself and his administration wasconstantly under attack from the Left—“they’re not going far enough”—neverthe-less, in perspective it began to look like,“Hell. What’s happened? Even that’s gone;even that has derailed.” And we saw just theopposite. We saw a concerted move to keeplabor down, to keep it where it was, even tothe extent of getting rid of American ships

and turning them over to foreign flags. Notgetting rid of them, because the companieswere still making millions from them, but toavoid having to deal with the Americanworker, to avoid facing this obligation to payback what had been given not only duringthe war, but for a century or more of oppres-sion, of seamen, in this case. So that’s thekind of issues that we were facing.

60LEFT-WING LITERATURE

WANTED TO CLARIFY a couple of thingsthat I think you probably think self-evident,but I just want to clear it up. These meet-

dering, “What position should we take onthis? What would be the best course to takein this? What role can we play in it?” Andwe’d say, “Let’s go down to the front.” Andthen four or five of us would get together andsort of hammer out a program. “This is thebest way for us to go about it this meeting.”

I see.

“How are we going to bring the member-ship with us?”

You mean the membership of the union?

Of the union, yes. “In what way are wegoing to be able to present a program whichthey will accept, which they will understand,and yet that is progressive and moves in whatwe consider to be the right direction.”

And were there unions that were more ideologi-cally compatible? Or was it kind of split still?

Oh, there was always a split. In those dayswe called anybody who disagreed with us

Iings at the Maritime Bookshop were specificallyfor a collective of waterfront unions, or for theCommunist Party, or . . . ?

Oh, no. I probably wasn’t very clear onthat. No, it was just a meeting place. It wasthe place where we could go to have discus-sions. And it would be very informal, andthere’d be three of us . . . or more.

Oh, I see. They weren’t like weekly meetings?

Oh, no. There were meetings of the localCommunist Party, the Bay Area or SanFrancisco Communist Party, that would takeplace once a month or something of thatkind—larger meetings. No, this was just theplace where the seamen’s branch of the Com-munist Party and their friends and peoplewho had similar ideas could go and meet andtalk over things. For example, we’d be at theunion hall, and some issue would come upabout a coming meeting. And we were won-


effectively a phony [laughter] or reactionary,and in some ways I’d still say that, becausethey usually were. But, no. There were thefive or six maritime unions that had formedduring the spring of 1946, the Committee forMaritime Unity. There were communists inthem, and sometimes partly in leadership—not entirely. They weren’t controlled by thecommunists or anything like that, but therewere communist seamen among them. Sothat the seamen’s branch of the CommunistParty involved all the party members whowere in seamen’s unions. That was it. Now,there were, of course . . . .

And that included the longshoremen, too?

The longshoremen, primarily, becausethey were the most important, effective, hard-hitting union on the front. In fact, thelongshoremen gave a kind of a leadership,which was resented, of course, by the rightwing unions and certainly by the AF of L—see, these were CIO unions. The AF of Lunion, of which the SUP was part, of course,was violently opposed to the ILWU andHarry Bridges and all that—the old enemyof the old craft union people, and certainlyof Harry Lundeberg and Joe Ryan of the AFof L. And the old SIU, which was still orga-nized—the SUP was part of that—wasanti-CMU and violently anti-communist.Now, when I say that, I mean the leadershipof those unions. Actually, there were a lot ofmembers of the SUP—I know because I’dbeen a member—who were very sympatheticnot only to the Committee for MaritimeUnity and the plans for the strike that werecoming up, but were even friendly to the pro-paganda the communists were putting out,because it was clear, because it talked in termsof the issues that they were concerned about,and full of information. I mean the pamphlets

that came out from the party on the frontout of the old Maritime Bookshop. All theseviolent, marvelous pamphlets (I’m glad I stillhave some of them—they’re quite wonder-ful) on every question—white chauvinism,male chauvinism, the meaning of socialism,the national question, what happened to thethousand ships? One after the other, leaflets,which were informative. Propagandistic, sure,and biased and all that sort of thing. Never-theless, basically, what little information alot of these working guys had came from thesesources.

Now, they had their own literature. TheSIU, SUP, anti-communist literature pri-marily, claiming to be the leaders of theworking class on the waterfront. And ourquestion was, “Show us what you’re doing.”

You made the point earlier that the MaritimeBookshop was the first place you’d really seenkind of revisionist literature available, revision-ist slavery history and on black history in general.Was that literature available in any other main-stream bookstores or . . . ?

No. Just in left-wing bookstores, andthese were scattered around the country.There was one in Berkeley that I went to as astudent, and here and there, there were eithercommunist or labor-oriented bookstores thatyou’d get some of this kind of literature, butmost of it was just passed out. For example, Ibought quite a good book by Harry Haywoodat that time, called Negro Liberation thatwasn’t available anyplace except on the front.Also works by Claudia Jones and Pettis Perry,black left-wingers, and communists, I think,in some cases, writing in Political Affairs, theirarticles were turned into pamphlets, madeavailable. These weren’t available anywhereelse. I had never seen them, and by thistime . . . .


And you said even Aptheker?

And, oh, and Herbert Aptheker, a notedscholar, his work was hard to find. EvenW. E. B. Du Bois’s work.

Oh, Myrdal was probably one of the firstbreakthroughs. Gunnar Myrdal’s work on theAmerican Negro somehow hit the fan just atthe right time, the time of the UnitedNations meetings. I mean, this was such apowerful piece of scholarship. Yes, it was readwidely. But a lot of other work of this kindyou only got it through left-wing bookstores.

Earlier we used to get them on ships, be-cause they’re handed out by guys, like Ibecame, you know. I began to pass them out,too, because to me they were important infor-mation and opened the eyes, you know. You’dthink like, “God’s sakes, what they’re sayingis true. This is just the way it is. Why don’tpeople notice it? Why hasn’t it been said be-fore? Why aren’t the newspapers saying it?”[laughter] You’d get these facts that could beverified and were always later, you know.

Like now, it takes years for the press orfor institutions to face up to something thatwas said ten years before. Like, “What wasthe effect of atomic radiation?”

And, at the time, “Well, it’s nothing. Youare safe. Nothing is going to happen.” Onand on, you know. Not . . . you can’t say liesbut misinformation, dissembling all along.

The value of this literature was to makeone aware of how one was being manipulatedby the press, by owners of great corporations,by the government. Suspicious and skepticaland to question, to me that’s enlightenment.Even if great mistakes were made about it,and it was abused, it was enlightened, becausenobody else was doing it.

No, it was hard to get that kind of litera-ture. I used to take bundles of it home withme and give it to my friends, much to my

regret sometimes, because they looked uponme as getting red hot. Oh, I used to be warnedby some of my friends, “Hey, you know,Warren, for god’s sakes, what’s happening toyou? You’re getting to be, you know, awild . . . .”

When you said “take home,” do you mean liter-ally back home to the Bay Area or the . . . ?

Well, yes. Back to the people that I knewand my old friends.

Like George Leite?

Well, . . . yes, even him, but other friendsthat I had, people like Bob Nelson.

Oh, Bob Nelson, by the way, althoughhe was now Masters, Mates and Pilots andwas going to sea as a second mate and a firstmate, he was getting radicalized, and I felthappy about that. He didn’t agree with howfar I had gone along these lines.

Now, what union was he in?

Masters, Mates and Pilots. He’d gone up,he’d become an officer, and he was more thanequipped to be one, and he became a pro-gressive officer. He became a progressivemember of the Masters, Mates and Pilots,calling for, “Where are the black mates andskippers? And why don’t we have any in thisunion?” And calling for support for theseamen’s strikes. And he wrote me friendlyletters about my position on things.

However, he would stop short at the factthat I had become a commie. “Now, Warren,that’s a little bit too much. You know, youbetter watch it. You’re getting yourself indeep,” and all that. And that was the way alot of my friends felt, you know. They wereall progressive usually, left-leaning, but that’s


going a little far to actually join the Com-munist Party.

I’m not a joiner. You know, I joinedunions because that was work, getting a job.But joining a party or a movement formallywas a rare thing for me. Most of my friendswere to some extent anti-organization in thatsense. You don’t do that; you’re above all that;you’re above joining these things. But I wouldproudly state that I was an open member ofthe Communist Party, that I believed in it—not believed, but I felt that this was a useful,important thing to do.

Well, when I asked you about the meetings, Ialso wanted to try to get a picture if you went tovarious informal gatherings, and if the MaritimeBookshop was a place where people could talkstrategy and . . . ?

Yes, and they were usually informal, oversome event, some issue that we needed to gettogether and talk about.

Right. But in addition to that did you go to meet-ings of the party, big meetings?

Yes. Whenever I could, I’d go to the largemeetings, where larger issues were discussed,having to do with the Bay Area or California,positions on the political scene.

But was there a lot of rhetoric and talk, and Idon’t mean that pejoratively at all. I just meanwas there talk about solidarity?

Oh, of course.

You know, “Don’t buy Ponds hand cream,” oris that yuppie politics? [laughter]

I don’t remember that. [laughter] But, yes,we’d take positions in the larger unions about

support for other groups that were either boy-cotting or picketing or calling on, or writingto congressmen. And we would in turn sup-port certain movements. They would ask forsupport, and then we would talk about strat-egy and goals. You know, “What strategiesshould we use? What principles are we . . .what are the issues we’re really concernedabout here? What is the role of or the obliga-tion or responsibility of party people in labor?What is the best course to take in a particu-lar situation?”

Sometimes we agreed; sometimes wedidn’t. And I had more disagreement withthe larger party meetings than I had on thefront, because on the front I could see whatwas going on, and I understood the peoplethat I was with. And usually we’d come tosome understanding about how we were go-ing to do things, and I usually felt that it wasright, that we were doing the right thing. Wemade some mistakes, and then we’d talkabout it and work it out. And, now, as forthe larger party apparatus, I didn’t really be-come familiar with that till later.

But you gave me a title, the Seamen’s . . .

Seamen’s Branch of the CommunistParty.

Was that a formal entity within the party?

Yes. I belonged to that. I was inducted intothe Seamen’s Branch of the CommunistParty, which was part of the CommunistParty. And I didn’t carry a card. I just wasinducted merely by going to a particular meet-ing where two or three of us were called up,and we were read sort of the principles of theparty, and asked about our loyalty not onlyto the party but to the working class and tothe unions that we belonged to, and to soli-


darity with our members. And we said weagreed, and then you were a member of theparty, and you paid your dues. As long as youpaid dues, you were a member of the party.So I always paid my dues up until . . . .

Did you get newsletters and things like that?

Well, leaflets. Oh, there was the People’sWorld, which was the party newspaper, and Ithink still . . . .

But was there one specifically for the seamen,do you remember?

No, those were mostly leaflets, and weput out our own newsletters.

Were you involved in that writing?

Later. Oh, yes. In a few weeks I was verymuch involved in writing leaflets. I wroteinnumerable leaflets, and some of them wereopposed and discarded, because they wereconsidered to be a little bit naive and superleft, you know, a little bit overwrought, whichI was. [laughter] And so quite rightly, someof my leaflet layouts were . . . .

Were you pretty young? As a member of theparty?

Oh, at twenty-six or so, no. There wereyounger ones—I mean, there were all ages. I

would say most of the guys I knew were some-where in their twenties and thirties. I meanthere were some very young ones, with peopleeighteen, nineteen, people in their sixties andseventies. Sure, it was a wide range, but theones I knew on the front were workingpeople, and there were older ones—guys intheir forties and fifties. Yes. I hadn’t thoughtabout those things, Penny, but you’re bring-ing back ideas.

Well, when you said that some of the things thatyou produced were considered naive, I was justwondering if that was a function, too, of justyour pure . . . sheer enthusiasm. [laughter]

Not youth. I was a neophyte; I had justcome into this kind of direct relation withthe Left on the front and this kind of organi-zation. And so I was gung-ho. I was feeling,“Oh, my god, let’s get this job done! Let’s havethe working class put up a real fight here,”and all.

When I come to think of it, I was notonly naive, but worse than that—out of myelement. I mean, I was a—what was itcalled?—a left romantic, you know, and thatgot taken out of me pretty quickly. I got a lotof understanding and training about how toreach people, how to deal with issues in thekind of union I was in and the kind of peoplethat were in it.

61ORGANIZING

NE THING that I remember verysharply, somewhere there beforeJune 15 when the ship owners gave

called—Pacific Ship Owners Association hadits offices there, and a number of other largecorporations. You know, like the Wall Streetof San Francisco.

And so we called a march. And I swear—I can’t remember exactly—there had to beeight or nine thousand people in that march.It was enormous. We went up Market Street,went from Drumm over to Market, and al-most filled the street. I remember this largebunch of . . . not all seamen, there was alsomany other unions that joined in in supportof us. And here were all the people I knewand their wives. Kathy couldn’t come over,but there were a lot of women and a lot ofworking women.

It was a very, very exciting day, as Iremember, marching up Market Street. Andwe did have the feeling, you know, that thisis going to do it, you know, if nothing elsedoes. These are all the illusions one has. “Thishas got to convince them! They better comethrough.” Well, in fact, it partly did.

We went up to Montgomery and turnedright, I remember, into this kind of a WallStreet, you know, with very tall buildings on

Oin, because they saw this tremendous unityof the Committee of Maritime Unity, eventhough it had been sabotaged by Lundeberg’sSUP . . . . And they too finally joined in,because they could see this powerful solidar-ity that was on the front. And we were allset, and the strike was all set. In fact, I waseven elected to the relief and housing com-mittee and all that sort of thing.

By that time I’d sort of made my mark,and I was not shipping out, but I was doing alot of standby work and a lot of work on thefront, which I’ll talk about. But one of thethings that we wanted to do was to put specialpressure on the ship owners, to show thesolidarity of the front. So a march was calledon the Ship Owners Association onMontgomery Street. Montgomery Street . . .if you’re going straight up Clay, you run intoMontgomery Street, and that’s the veryimportant mercantile office section, and theShip Owners Association or the Pacific ShipOwners—I don’t know what they were


each side of the street. And on the one sidewere the ship owners offices in a large build-ing, and there were other offices, too. Andwe had our loudspeakers, and we played musicand sang songs, all the union songs and “Soli-darity Forever,” and all those things.[laughter] And while we were down theregiving speeches, all these windows were open,and all these little heads were looking out,all the way up, I don’t know, six, sevenfloors . . . however tall they truly were. Andthey were throwing little paper cups full ofwater down on us, so it was like it was rain-ing. It felt like it was raining. They werethrowing hundreds of little paper cups full ofwater down on us, you know! [laughter] Andit was wonderful! We looked up, and we werewaving at them and singing to them. Andthey were obviously furious, you know. “Whatare they doing? These . . . this rabble,” youknow.

With little paper cups! [laughter]

Yes. These little paper cups full of water!It was just beautiful. I mean, I’ll never forgetit, because the incongruity of it was so mar-velous. And we would shout up, “Hi,” youknow, “Come on down; join us.”

And, “Oh, no,” they’d shake their heads![laughter] But people, various secretaries andothers from other parts of the place, werecoming and standing with us, you know.

So I got this taste of rally, of mass move-ment, which I hadn’t really experiencedbefore, which was extremely powerful. Thatmany committed individuals . . . most of theguys there and the women who were withthem were loyal union people. There were alot of people there out of curiosity and allthat, but most of our union who were ashorewas there. The ILWU was there, the MarineEngineers, the Marine Cooks and Stewards.

And, you know, it was a marvelous thing.And that gave me the feeling of what thepower of resistance can be, and we stayedthere a couple hours.

The police came, tried to take our mikesaway from us, because it was disturbing theprecious work of the company offices! [laugh-ter] But we managed to prevail in that. Andso that came to an end, and we marched back.

Within a day or two, the ship owners gavein—not because of that, but because it wasobvious the union was ready to go on strike,even though the Ship Owners Associationand certain elements in the government hadtried every way to diffuse it and to disrupt itand use the AF of L against us. But it didn’twork, see, because the AF of L union saw thatthis was really going to go, and they betterget in on it, and they did.

It was a solid front, and the ship ownerscame through with part of the demands. Ithink we had a demand a for forty-hour week,and we got a forty-eight-hour week. We haddemands for a twenty-five-dollar-a-monthincrease, and we got seventeen dollars. Andthere were certain flexible agreements aboutovertime, things of that kind—but not thewhole package. I don’t remember all the de-tails here, but the unions decided . . . theCMU decided to accept that as a first step.

And then after they had accepted, theydiscovered that the SUP had made an endrun around us, had gone to the ship ownersand got ten dollars more a day than CMUhad, and gotten other . . . . [laughter] Thisis a beautiful example of ship owner manipu-lation—not just ship owners, capital . . . howcorporations deal with labor. And they feltso powerful at that time; they weren’t goingto allow these lousy, little unions to interfere.So they were willing to give up somethingjust to stop that, but also to show their

525ORGANIZING

strength, while making deals with certain ofthe unions to disrupt the unity.

Yes, because they’d know that was . . . .

Yes, right. They saw that this affected us,because we could see the break in the ranksand all that sort of thing.

So then we had to set a new strike datefor September (I forget the date—lateSeptember or something), using the powerof the CMU to put up the rest of the demandsto get what we had not gotten. And that wasthe period in which I got very deeplyinvolved in the pre-strike preparations, be-came involved in all levels of union activityand in the local seamen’s branch of the partyactivity.

I’m trying to remember what the firstthing . . . yes. The original strike organiza-tion had set up a number of committees. Notonly the CMU, the NMU, our union, hadset up strike committees and appointedpeople to different functions—finance, bud-get, welfare and housing, a food committeeto get food.

The guys were off on the beach now.There were no jobs. That’s right, all theunions had not settled, so we were still reallyon strike because of certain other unions ofthe CMU who hadn’t yet finished their nego-tiations. So the ships were still tied up. Onlya few were getting through that we’d allow.The passenger ships, I think, we allowedthrough. Any ship that had returning GIs onit or were going out to aid our troops abroador anything of that sort, any relief ships, we’dallow those ships to go, but no regular com-merce. Oh, we had committees that had toinvestigate and check on all these.

When you say, “allowed to go,” how could youphysically prevent . . . ?

Just take the pickets off, allow people togo through the picket line. You couldn’t stopa ship. [laughter] But that usually did the job,if you had a solid position on the front, otherunions tended to respect . . . very seldomwould anybody try to go through those lines.

I see. So when you say “allow,” you mean . . .

You would announce that that was open.

I see.

That was not a “hot ship,” we’d say. Therewere hot ships and cold ships. But, “Thatship’s not hot,” and, therefore, you could gothrough, and we’d take our pickets off for thewhile it took to carry on those activities. Sothat took a lot of organization. There wouldhave been committees that would haveworked getting information on . . . .

Was all this gratis? All your involvement on thecommittees—was that donated or volunteer, orwas there pay?

Not at that time. There were times whenwe got strike pay—very little, I remember.And Kathy was working at this point, and Ihad made some standby.

Well, I was still doing that. Whenever aship would come up for standby, to hold theship, or even to take it to mothballs or some-thing like that, it was often allowed . . . . Idon’t remember . . . there were certain shipsthat you could work on. It was very hard toget those jobs, because everybody wantedthem.

Right. No, I mean were you paid for the workyou did for the union.


No, no, no. There was strike pay at times;during the actual strike there was a pittancethat people got on the front.

So everybody got . . . ?

Not only strikers, but the people on thevarious committees in the union, might geta little bit more, because our expenses werevery high. We had to run around and havetransportation, all that sort of thing. But itwas very little. Gosh, I can’t remember now,but it was not enough to live on at all. AndKathy was working, and we borrowed moneyduring that period. That was a rough time.But I also remember it was rougher for a lotof others.

Toward the middle of the summer there,I became the chairman of the housing andrelief committee for the CMU—not just forthe union, but for the Committee for Mari-time Unity. And that was a eye-opener. Ilearned more about what was really going onin that world around me doing that.

In the first place, I had to find housingfor guys that were on the beach and had noplace to stay and were broke. So I and otherswould go and make deals with certain littlehotels on the front, really broken-down,fleabag hotels, dormitory kind of hotels. Andwe would make deals with them for so mucha night for seamen. We rented bunks, and Ithink in one place we had three hundredbunks in two enormous dormitories. And wehad to have guys set up to handle this, tohave a desk. And people had to have chits;they had to get a chit at the union, and thencome, so they could have a night’s free lodg-ing. And we had to have all kinds of rulesand regulations about drunks and guys whowere off their tops and all that, and what todo about them. And it was an enormous job.

Sounds like government. [laughter]

Worse. [laughter] No, it was terrible, be-cause there was so little money. I don’t know,we had to pay these fleabag hotels, you know,a buck and a half a night for these guys. Idon’t know if it was that much.

And then we had to set up soup kitch-ens. I went around with the rest of themembers of our committee, and we found onecalled Dolores and Pedro, was it? A little res-taurant down there that suddenly became themost important restaurant on the front. Imean, they agreed to serve meals at a verylow cost, like a soup kitchen. And they madegood meals, and I don’t know, it cost theunion fifty, seventy-five cents. But that wasexpensive for that many people. They wereserving 150 to 300 meals a day after the fullstrike got going again.

And then there were the welfare prob-lems. There were guys with families, and alot of them lived in hotels in that generalarea. A lot of black seamen lived up in theFillmore District and all that, but some livedin these waterfront hotels.

And if anybody looked at the waterfronttoday, they’d never believe what the water-front was back in the 1940s. I think theupscale hotel was the YMCA, you know, andthere were all these sort of little hole-in-the-wall hotels, some in quite bad condition andall that, and others not too bad. But a lot ofseamen were living down there in theseplaces at very low rent. There was rent con-trol in those days because of the war, whichlater was lifted, and all these places becameupscale and remodeled and gentrified and allthat.

So a lot of these guys were coming in,just saying they couldn’t feed their kids, theirwives, they couldn’t find jobs, and it was

527ORGANIZING

really terrible. And food was terribly highthen, as against wartime, when even underrationed conditions, what you could get wasfairly reasonable. Suddenly the prices sky-rocketed for everything. So here was no wagesor low wages and high prices.

And so our committee, one of our jobswas to go around and meet the families andsee where they were and find out what theirproblems were—do a survey. Well, that wasan extremely eye-opening and in some casesmiserable experience. There were, I guess,dozens of white families, guys with their wivesor with a child or two, or with a relative ortwo, living in one room, and one bathroomfor a floor, and cockroaches and rats andthings of that kind. They claimed things hadnot been as bad before, during the war, be-cause during the war they had money, andthey could keep things up. But now theirwhole time was spent looking for work—either he goes on the front, and his wifecouldn’t get work, and I’d see these little kids,you know, in the shoddiest of clothes, and . . .well, not even going to school. They didn’thave anything to go to school in. That wasn’ttrue of all the seamen, because some of theseamen had saved a little money and livedfairly well and were in slightly better places,but these were the ones that were down andout around the front.

And then I visited a few of the black fami-lies both out in the Fillmore district, whichwas sort of like a ghetto—I guess not a ghetto,but where a lot of blacks lived—and in otherareas, out in outer San Francisco and thenaround the front, where here and there blackscould get rooms and apartments. And thesefamilies were really in bad shape. I mean,there was no chance to get jobs. One guy, Iremember, whom I knew on the front—verynice guy—he was working part-time as a jani-

tor to make, I don’t know, a couple of bucksor whatever it was, and his wife was out do-ing washing and things of that sort. So theyhad a little money, but it wasn’t enough evento pay the rent, and they had four or five kids.And they were really a family, because theyhad relatives, who would come in and bringthem food from uptown. And I got the feel-ing it was the white families that wereisolated; the black families I felt all had anetwork. I began to feel there were two cul-tures at work here; I got the picture of twodifferent cultures.

The black families and the black seamenand their wives that I visited seemed to havesome kind of sense of belonging to anothernetwork. They were poor; they had nothingand were sometimes desperate, but theyweren’t going to starve because they hadothers.

The white families—and I’m generaliz-ing, because it wasn’t entirely this way, butin a lot of cases—were totally isolated. I feltthey had no connections, that they reallywere in desperate shape, and, also, that theyfelt more reliance on the union, in a sense,as a community. They were, in a sense, morecommitted union people because that wastheir community.

Whereas for the blacks, the union was avehicle to get something done, like getting ajob and keeping a job, which was very impor-tant to them, but there wasn’t the same senseof élan or loyalty to another organization.They had loyalty to family or to themselvesor their group. I remember at that time weused to talk about it and think of it as a reac-tionary tendency among the working blacks.[laughter] And, you know, it wasn’t; it wasthat they had entirely different . . . .

It’s almost like you’re talking about an identity.


A different identity. Although thoseunions were so much in advance of their time,as far as race relations were concerned, therewas a lot of misconception. And I remembereven at that time thinking this when I vis-ited these black families, of either seamen,longshoremen, or members of other unions,and some of them even non-union that weknew about.

There were two African-American mem-bers of our committee, and I won’t mentiontheir names because they were party guys.They were very, very sharp, very good. If ithadn’t been for them, I don’t think we wouldhave been allowed in some of those houses,because there was a lot of suspicion. Thesewere the times when even though the unionswere becoming non-segregated, there was stilla lot of feeling in homes about danger. And Ihad a feeling that in some cases that I—my-self and these two or three other whiteguys—were the only whites that had been insome of these homes, that they’d ever seeninside their own living room, sitting and talk-ing to them. If it hadn’t been for these twovery good guys that were with us, I doubt thatwe’d have been allowed in.

And the conversations were to me fasci-nating, because they didn’t have the sametake on the union or on the left-wing move-ment or communism that the whites had.They didn’t give a damn about that. I mean,I remember one guy telling us . . . a very fine,middle-aged man, who was a longshoreman,I think, saying, “Look. You know, the unionhas done fine. I’ve got a good job and we’reworking. I’m willing to go out on strike forthat union, because it’s really done somethingfor me. I don’t know where I could getanother job. And those jobs, when I havethem, we’re able to live on them.” And hesaid, “But, you know, I don’t feel as thoughthat’s where my major loyalty in this world

is. My loyalty is to my family. And as for,” hesays, “you commies,” because I told him I wasa communist, “as for you commies,” he says,“fine, do your thing. But leave me alone.”[laughter]

I mean, you get these wonderful kinds ofresponses and takes from people. I began torealize where we stood in the world, and Ididn’t think there was anything reactionaryabout that position at all. Just the naturalsuspicion, the natural self-interest of peoplewho were on the bottom. And their majorconcern had to be food on the table for theirfamily and paying the rent.

So we spent a lot of our time going aroundto landlords, making arrangements for exten-sion of time for people on rents; the uniontaking a kind of responsibility for that andsometimes getting in too deep. And talkingto these white landlords and sometimesChinese landlords was interesting, too, be-cause every now and then you’d run acrossone who’d say, “Yes, of course, you know. I’mon your guys’ side. You know, you’re right.”And, “Sure, tell them they can stay thereuntil the strike is over, and I’ll even chargethem less,” and all that. One Chinese guydid this.

But the others were adamant, you know.“They got to pay. What the hell? You strikersare just causing trouble in this town,” and onand on and on. You know, class differencesagain.

You’d see it everywhere, you know. “Youpeople are causing all . . . .”

And, of course, the press was there. Eventhe Chronicle and the Examiner were blast-ing the unions for disrupting the waterfront.“Here was the end of the war, and we’re aboutready to enter a period of peace and prosper-ity. And these damn unions look what they’redoing. They’re disrupting.”

529ORGANIZING

So you found yourself right in the middleof these issues. You saw the reality of whatwas going on around you.

And as for the African-Americans that Ihad met and that we went around to see whenI was on this committee, and the ones in theunion, that was the period in which the com-munists, as I had said earlier, during theBrowder period, had taken the view to deferthe struggle for Negro rights during the warin the interest of the war effort, like thepledge for no strikes and all that. And thenright after the war, I think I did talk aboutthe Duclos letter. Well, right after that, andthe deep, internal self-criticism that went onwithin the party during that period, there wasa shift back to the notion of the Negro con-stituting a separate nation. “Black” and“Negro”—all those terms we used to use. Infact, Negro was the term we used. That wasthe nice term in those days, the acceptableterm. Anyway, there was a shift back to theidea that the African-Americans constituteda nation within a nation, that this was inkeeping with the Marxist position, particu-larly the Leninist position on the status ofnations.

There was a lot of writing that came outin Political Affairs and many pamphlets onNegro self-determination, and discussions ofthe Black Belt in the South as constitutingareas where there were majorities of Negroes,and, therefore, that they should have repre-sentation that might make those areasconstitute, really, a nation, a territorialnation, even, if that’s what blacks wanted.Nevertheless, the idea was that they cultur-ally constituted a nation, and then from thepoint of view of political status, a nationwithin a nation. This was a restatement ofthe concept of caste. I mean, they were acaste, and no matter what else was going onwith them, they were separate, and, there-

fore, they would determine, or they had theright to self-determine, their status.

Certainly not all African-Americans atthat time would have agreed with this or eventhought in those terms, but a lot of the lead-ers, a lot of the intellectuals in the movement,in the trade unions, who saw the idea of atleast the American Negro being able, poten-tially to consider themselves a nation or anational entity, that was something that ifthat’s what they decided, it would be backedand acceptable to the party.

Now, the idea of nation, of course, is asticky wicket, because there was somethingcalled “bourgeois nationalism” and also“black bourgeois nationalism,” which meantthat the small, emerging middle class ofAfrican-Americans in this country weremostly people, who, if they talked about aNegro nation, thought of it in terms of a sortof a copy, a ditto of the American nation,with all the same class structure kept intact,and themselves as the cream on the top ofthe milk bottle. Du Bois called them the“educated twelfth,” or something like that.This elite would be, of course, the bourgeoi-sie of the Negro nation, and therefore, just acopy of what they had left. In fact, later onin my life I thought of that in terms of theLiberian experience, where American blackswent over from the South as freed Negroesand set up a caste system, a class system thatin many ways reflected what they had expe-rienced in the American South.

So that was part of the party’s position,supportive but aware of and very carefulabout that direction of nationalism. AndLenin had pointed out these dangers of bour-geois nationalism. On the one hand,nationalism was regarded as a perfectly use-ful and sometimes a very important tool inthe development of consciousness, of iden-tity, of cultural identity and solidarity among


people who had none and, therefore, was tobe encouraged where it was on that level. Butwhen it wasn’t based upon a basic working-class structure—that is, where the workingclass itself was not the one promoting nation-hood and taking a new, advanced, progressiveposition within a nation—then it was some-thing reactionary.

So the African-American members of theparty and others who supported this, whenthey wrote about it, wrote about the fact thatit first had to be a working class-movementamong African-Americans that linked itselfto other minorities and other groups withinthe total national structure—whites and all—and move for working class advancementwithin the country. And in that context,Negro nationalism made a progressiveimpact. But if it went to the idea of reconsti-tuting the class structure of the very bignation that they were becoming part of orhad a new part in, then it was reactionary.

So those arguments were going on withinthe party, and people like Haywood, oh, andClaudia Jones, in particular—I had a lot ofrespect for her—and Pettis Perry were layingout this reconstituted line of the Negronation, Negro liberation and self-determina-tion. So that was to some extent affectingalso some of the people that I knew outsidethe party in the union and elsewhere, the ideaof black separatism. Some of the black sea-men that I knew and went to sea with later,espoused black separatism, a separate state.“We’re going to have our own state, set upour own government,” all that. Well, I don’tthink that we opposed that. You only did so ifit didn’t have within it what we considered aMarxist working-class orientation to thedevelopment of socialist . . . .

When you said “we,” are you talking about thecommunists?

The communists. We, the vanguard—weguys, [laughter] we guys and gals, who werethe vanguard, and the African-Americanswithin the party. The idea was that there hadto be the class consciousness and the work-ing class struggle aspect in the developmentof whatever was nationhood, with a socialistperspective, working toward a socialist typeof organization. And then, of course, thatkind of nationhood was to be commendedand backed. But as soon as it became a Xeroxof the present structure of the American na-tion with its middle-class bourgeoisiecapitalist structure, with the workers in thesame position they were currently, then it wasreactionary and to be opposed.

So that was a real battle going on all thetime. It was a theoretical battle going onwithin the party, outside the party; theTrotskyists took this up. The Trotskyites, theSocialist Workers’ Party, was doing a lot ofwork—theoretically. I never saw them out onthe front talking to blacks. [laughter] I neversaw any Trotskyite blacks. Well, there mayhave been. But in their leaflets and all, theywere always touting this separate Negronation and the international working classinvolving the unity of all minorities through-out the world, with the American blacknation contributing to this movement. Sothere were all sorts of forces at work.

Was the Socialist Workers’ Party a Trotskyitegroup?

Their theoretical underpinning, wasTrotsky—Trotsky and his theories. The ideathat you couldn’t have socialism in one coun-try. It had to be worldwide was one of themajor positions, that anything short of that,like the Soviet Union and the Stalinists, fromtheir point of view, would fail. Partly not onlythey but others were right—Stalinism was the

531ORGANIZING

great enemy. You could not have socialismin one country, that if you didn’t have aworldwide movement in socialism in manycountries at one time, you could not possiblysurvive, that it would fall, it would decaywithin itself. In a sense what later happenedin the Soviet Union seemed to warrant that,but that’s not what they meant.

Therefore, anything the CommunistParty was for, the Trotskyists by principle hadto be against, so that there was a great deal ofundermining and wrecking that was going on,at least from our point of view. TheTrotskyists in an organization, like the onesin our union, we just knew when they got upwhat they’re going to do. Anything thatlooked like the membership was going to fol-low us on something they had to oppose andundermine, merely because it was commu-nist suggested, or they saw it as a Stalinistplot or whatever. So they were our enemieson the front. And, of course, the Sailor’sUnion of the Pacific was a hotbed ofTrotskyists, or had been in the past.

Yes, weren’t they the ones throwing the hammersover board?

No, those are the old Wobblies. Oh, no,the Trotskyists I don’t think had enough gutsto toss anything over side. Most of them wereintellectuals, and I don’t think many of themwent to sea. [laughter] They were thinkers.

There was the rumor that Lundeberg hadspent a lot of his time out at Joan London’s—that was Jack London’s daughter—at herplace out in Sonoma, someplace. Yes, thatthey had their little pads out there where theTrotskyites would go out and talk andscheme, and lead Harry in his political . . . .I don’t know how true this was, but that wasthe common talk on the waterfront. JoanLondon may have been his girlfriend, even,

but I don’t know, you know. I’m not sayingany of this is true. There were all kinds ofrumors.

It’s just what was said.

That, you know, she was a kind of apatron saint of the lefties within the AF of Land the Trotskyists and the old Wobbly typesand all that.

No, the Wobblies, even though a few ofthem were left or what little was left of thatmovement, they were anarcho-syndicalist,and they believed in one big union. I mean,their idea was to wreck anything that own-ers had. I mean, you destroyed theinfrastructure of the goddamn capitalists, andthat way would force them to face the factthat labor was the only thing that kept thesethings going, that their machinery was allmeaningless without labor. It was worthless,you know. “Wreck it. Tear it down. Destroyit.”

I knew of old seamen who used to talkthat way on many ships that I was on. “Youknow, if we were doing anything importanthere, we’d be wrecking the ship, running itup on the rocks! We can do that. We havethe power to do that. The ship owners onlyhave the power to take our labor, but we gotthe power to wreck their goddamn ships!”[laughter]

The Trotskyists only went that far whenthey were dealing with the Communist Party.The Communist Party had to be wrecked, orshould be wrecked; they shouldn’t be allowedto get credit for anything. And I suppose therewas a lot of tit for tat in that, too, but I didn’tlike the Trotskyists I knew. Not because I wasjust given a bias by the role I had, but theywere, to me, middle-class intellectuals whohad deigned to descend into the working classto give leadership.


So it sounds like what you’re saying is you feltthere wasn’t the humanist connection that thecommunists had to . . . I mean, real concernfor . . . .

Not from my point of view. I mean, theyseemed to me to be—oh, gosh, what wouldyou call it?—independent revolutionaries,moving here and there like little bees look-ing for the honey, from this flower to thatflower. I never saw any concerted, clear pro-gram on their part, though they may havehad it, if I had known more about them. Buttheir program seemed to me mostly to be tocreate dissidence, to create disagreement andsuspicion—particularly, suspicion of the lead-ership of the waterfront unions, which wasthen pretty well friendly to the CommunistParty’s position, particularly Harry Bridges,the great enemy of what we considered to bethe reactionary phonies on the waterfront.

But my memory of this is dim and biased.All I remember is what I felt about this. AndI always still have a feeling of repugnanceabout the Trotskyists that may be terriblyunwarranted, but a feeling that they wereliving in an entirely different world than therest of us were in and that they wereschemers—schemers of another kind than wewere. We were schemers but schemers towarda given set of issues that had do with tradeunion positions. We had the feeling some-times that their idea was really if you bringthe institutions down, if you destroy—they’resomething like the syndicalists—if you de-stroy, then something will come out of theashes. And I had the feeling often that theywould just as soon see a strike lost in order toteach the workers their lesson, show them thatthings aren’t to be handed to them, and thatthese guys, their enemy is really vicious andterrible and horrible. You got that feeling ofa weird bunch.

But, as I say, this is pure hindsight, purepersonal bias. Except I’ve read nothing since,in what reading I’ve done in political litera-ture or readings of Trotsky, which I findextremely difficult to read, just as I do any ofthem. Stalin is difficult to read, Lenin butI’ve read nothing in Trotsky that I feel con-genial to any view that I had. I mean, I felthis idealism was dangerous. It was the kindthat leads people to do things that are de-structive to themselves, destructive to theirown interests. You know, world revolution isa kind of meaningless slogan that has nomeaning at all, except in a very long-termview, and waiting for that before you do any-thing, before any country makes anexperiment toward socialism, you know, Ialways felt was utterly wild and ridiculous.

But, anyway, as I say, these are things I’mno expert on, and I’m just talking about biasesat the moment. So where were we now?Anywhere? Oh, yes. Among the African-Americans, the seamen, and party membersthat I knew, one of the major interests theyhad was the struggle for representation—representation in government, representationin the union. And, of course, the thing thatgave them a certain confidence in the ILWUand even the NMU and the Marine Cooksand Stewards was that there were African-American leaders in those organizations. Intheir major policy-making committees andin their structure, there were Negroes in im-portant positions, and that was one of thethings that made sense to them, and if theyhad a positive view of the Communist Party,it was that the communists fought for thatsort of thing.

But a lot of the other things, aside frombasic pork chop issues, basic day-to-day eco-nomic issues, was, I felt, part of anotherculture among the black families and seamenand longshoremen that I knew, that their

533ORGANIZING

interests in the party were really in terms ofwhat they could get today and tomorrow, andthat told them whether or not an organiza-tion was worthwhile. Could they get jobs?Would somebody help them to get and keepjobs?

The fact that we went around gettinglandlords to get extensions on rent or lower-ing the requirements of rent made more senseto them than any kind of political issue oranything else. That made sense, and it was aone-time thing. So, OK, the party is doing itnow; doesn’t mean that next year they’ll dothe same thing. These people are too hurt, Imean, not only . . . but for generations. Theyunderstood and were suspicious even of ahandout, but they were ready to work. Butthey also had this network of family.

I’m talking about, you know, a few dozenpeople, a few dozen families that we saw, sothat I can’t generalize too much. But, never-theless, I did have a sense there was somesecurity in the network of family, uptownpeople, people from Fillmore. They had fami-lies that did have some jobs, helping thepeople on the front and all that. And thewhite groups were more atomized, and as Isay, the union was for them a community.That was their community—the seamen inparticular.

This is sort of a side issue, but do you think thatthe white families actually were removed from anetwork of family—that they really weren’t fromthat geographic area—or was it just an attitude?

I don’t know. I just felt they didn’t haveit. They seemed to have no resources, emo-

tional support resources or anything of thatkind. Oh, there were sometimes just two orthree people, the man and his wife, who, youknow, he left in an apartment when he wentto sea and then with a kid or two. Whereasmost of the black families had a lot of people.Not only more kids, but other members ofthe family. Even these very run-down roomsand hotels they were in, there were maybefour or five people sleeping in a couple ofrooms and everybody using a kitchen fromtwo or three other rooms and apartments.There were a lot of people, a network of co-operation, which, as I say, was not presentamong others. I may just not have been ob-servant enough, but I early got a feeling thatthis was a difference.

I had a sense of cultural difference thatwas deeper than just being a member of aunion or a seaman or whatever. And the long-shoremen in particular . . . these guys hadhad fairly good jobs during the war, made verygood money, and they were ashore, you know,and they had families. And there was a feel-ing that their main concern was keepingthose families fed, and that the union wasjust a vehicle for them.

I didn’t get a feeling of great loyalty,except among the left-wing African-Americans, who could see the role of theunion in a longer range struggle for status andposition and things of that of kind. But I maybe wrong on that, but I just had that strongfeeling at that time.

62OPTIMISM

WANTED TO ASK you how the problemsyou’ve been describing square with theimage that I’ve always had of the post-war

of optimism about winning the strike, opti-mism about what you would have after webeat those goddamn ship owners, and therewas always the feeling it was going to get bet-ter rather than “It’ll never get better,” whichyou hear now, you know.

Right, the apathy.

You hear everywhere now, “Things arethe way they are, and get what you can foryourself, because it’s a rough world out there.”And we didn’t feel that way.

Well, your attraction to the party and the oppor-tunity to be part of some fundamental kind ofsocial change sounds very optimistic to me.

Yes. I thought the party was one of themany answers that there was to social changeand to the direction that our country shouldgo in.

And your expectation that the country wouldchange, that fundamental social conditions couldbe changed.

Iera as being this great period of opportunity foreveryone?

Well, but that’s exactly what the generalclimate was. Before and during the war, therewas in a way so much different than in con-temporary American life. There was a senseof hope, the sense that the future is going tobe better, things were going to improve, therewere going to be more opportunities forpeople to get back during a period of peace,and to have a better way of life. It was a gen-eral feeling of opportunity. Despite thedepression, despite the horrors of the war,there was this quite different atmosphere,quite different mood in the country.

And at this point that I’m talking aboutnow [after the war], with the disappointmentsand the anger of people against ship owners,against the government, and seeing somehowtheir hopes for change diminished and allthat, nevertheless, there was the idea that youcould do something about it. There was a lot


Yes. Oh, I did believe that there was logicand reason and intelligence within govern-ment and even in politics, and even amongcorporations and in the capitalist class. Imean, there was reason to feel there were ele-ments who would be supporting us. By theway, the whole movement for a Third Partywith Henry Wallace and all that was, we felt,a mass movement of the more positive, far-reaching, vanguard movements among themiddle class and the capitalist class that sawreason. [Henry A. Wallace (1880-1965)was elected Vice President in 1940 withRoosevelt and was presidential candidate forthe Progressive Party in 1948.] I mean, imag-ine thinking that Henry Wallace would bepresident of the United States. That showshow optimistic we were and maybe naivepolitically. We did believe it was possible. Wedid believe it was possible.

You didn’t you say, Kath? Yes?

Kd: I really never did.

Well, except you went to meetings andwrote me letters on the LP St. Clair aboutthe wonderful meeting you went to whereWallace spoke, and there was such a whoopin the air, and people were so excited.

Kd: Yes. That’s true.

You didn’t buy it yourself. [laughter]

Kd: No! I didn’t think it would carry.

Yes. Well, in a way I never actuallythought we . . . . But I thought it would makea very important mark in American politicallife, that it would make a change. And, infact, in a way it did.

It did?

Yes, it did. But the point is we thought itwas going to be a more powerful statementthan that.

Well, being the generation I’m a part of, I can’thelp but make . . . when you’re . . . when youtalk like that, I just think of all these parallels tothe attitudes that were so prevalent in the 1960sthis real expectation that things would never bethe same afterwards, and many things have notbeen the same. But the expectation was for somuch more, that there wouldn’t be this reaction-ary . . . .

You felt this optimism.

Oh, yes, the same level of enthusiasm and . . . .

Well, so that was a carryover from the1940s and 1950s.

Well, that’s what’s so interesting.

And it took a long time for deep, pro-found cynicism to set in or disappointmentor a feeling that the whole thing was circu-lar, you know.

Just before you came today, I was watch-ing television, which, by the way, I had neverseen television back in the 1940s. [laughter]I mean, we didn’t have television. We hadthe newspapers, radio, and leaflets. Never-theless, I turned on the news and saw thearrival of Pope John Paul—or Juan Pablo, ashe is called in Havana—being greeted byFidel Castro, dressed in a business suit andlooking very distinguished in his beard andbeing extremely nice and helpful to the oldpope as he walked him to the podium wherethey spoke. And I tell you, it gave me a tre-mendous sense of the span of time to hearFidel make his first remarks.

537OPTIMISM

In the first place, I’ve always seen FidelCastro as one of the heroes of the twentiethcentury. Regardless of whatever may comeout in the future about that regime, nobodycan take away, from my point of view, thegains that were made in Cuba, in theCaribbean, and in Latin America because ofthe 1959 revolution that Fidel was one of theleaders of. And here he was, this guy whowas managing to sustain his situation, to sus-tain the remnants of the revolution againstthe most powerful nation in this world, theUnited States. To me, there’s somethingheroic about that in itself.

Now there could be characters who thinkit would be wonderful if they were deposedand gotten rid of. However, I can’t think thatabout Fidel Castro. I see him as a remarkablypositive influence in Western hemispherelife.

Here, he gets up and says very quietly andcalmly . . . his first remarks were to the pope,“Before Europeans came to this little island,there were many, many people here. Therewere hundreds of thousands of who livedhere. They’re all gone. They are gone. Theywere destroyed; they were decimated by get-ting enslaved, by disease, by outrightgenocide. Then came the people from Africawho were brought here to take their place,and they’re still here; their descendents arestill here among everybody else. We are nowa very, very complex society, and yet we’vehad to suffer many, many, many difficulties.And those are the people you see here today.”

And as the camera went through thecrowd and the honor guard that had comeup to honor the pope, every other one of themwas black. And I’ll tell you, there was some-thing kind of . . . I thought, what an imagefor the world to see that in this place wherefifty years ago I can remember Havana andCuba meant marimba bands and sort of light-

skinned Hispanic orchestra leaders—I can’tremember some of their names—goingaround the country and on the radio, and sto-ries of casinos and the high life and all that;never anything about the outlying districtsof Cuba. And now those people, at least, havecome forward. And even though there’s stilla lot of poverty, there’s education—illiteracyis probably one of the lowest in the hemi-sphere—a health system which at leastdelivers what they’re able to deliver equallyto most of the people. And I thought, “Well,what a marvelous statement,” you know,watching this.

And then comes the pope, a very digni-fied, tottering old man with great powerbehind him, representing one of the mostpowerful domains in the world (the Catholicchurch), and he stands at the microphoneand says in his quiet voice . . . . I think hewas speaking Italian in translation. I don’tthink he was speaking Spanish; I think it wasItalian. And the first thing he says was he isgrateful for the welcome he received from thepeople of Cuba. And for the whole speech,he spoke of the gospel and the reign of JesusChrist and of the mysterious ways of God,and that he saw now the possibility for thechurch to grow and to return to its formerglory.

And I’m thinking, “Former? Former gloryand eminence? What was the church doingduring the Batiste regime? What was thechurch doing at that time? What would theyhave done to the few—like, later on in LatinAmerica, the liberation Catholics, whomthey ex-communicated by the hundreds—what would they have done if somebodywould have stood up and spoken for the kindof things that the revolutionaries did a fewyears later?”

Nonetheless, it was a powerful speechabout the importance of faith and justice.


And I’m thinking, “Justice, buddy. Whatabout justice for the Indians?” Oh, and hisadvisors didn’t tell him not to say this; theyshould have. He mentioned ChristopherColumbus, when Christopher Columbuscame and planted the cross. And I was think-ing, what are they doing? Fidel had just gotthrough saying that right after this theIndians were decimated.

Anyway, that throws me into gear, backalmost fifty years, when at least on the water-front in our union and other unions of themaritime union group, preparing and in-volved in the strike, we were passing outleaflets in support of the people of Cubaagainst their regime, against their dictator-ship; threatening often to refuse to load shipsthat were carrying cargos that were . . . . Infact, we were doing that in cooperation witha lot of South American seamen’s unions. Wewere in a kind of an agreement that we wouldnot unload certain cargos if they were onstrike, or if they were in any kind of diffi-culty, we would support them. So there wasthis international aspect that was extremelyimportant.

We were very aware, and always in ournewspapers and leaflets, we were alwaysbringing up the Cuban situation andGuatemala and Peru and Chile and Brazil andexamples of terrorist and fascist-orientedregimes, dictatorships, which our corpora-tions were supporting. Our ships werecarrying cargos from these areas, an extremelylucrative kind of a business.

With the war over, we felt that there wasa great move now to remove the power ofthe trade unions—particularly seamen’sunions and longshore unions—in this kindof protest against certain kinds of foreignshipping, and in the demand for wage in-creases, et cetera. We knew that our strikewas in relationship with and in support of

the Hawaiian sugar workers and the Cubansugar workers. The reaction of the ship own-ers and large corporations in this country andof the government, the Truman government,we knew was now to restrict the growingpower of the unions in the post-war period.

And one of the things that made this veryclear was the Marshall Plan. Marshall hadmade an extremely positive and we thoughtprogressive plea for aid to war-torn Europe,aid to Japan and to Germany for Europeanrecovery. The European Recovery Act wasin the making, and yet we suspected andknew just exactly what was going to happen,and it was happening there in 1947 and 1948,that part of the European Recovery Act—what became known as the MarshallPlan—was no longer exactly what GeorgeMarshall had suggested; part of it was thattrade would take place and commoditieswould be moved in the least expensive way.

Well, what did this mean? We saw whatwas happening. Half of the American mer-chant fleet was now being turned over tosmall countries (like Liberia). It was no longergoing under the U.S. flag; they were goingunder foreign flag ships. Well, the wages weresometimes half or even less of what they werein this country. So one of our worries andfears was that the real strategy of therightwing in this country, and of the ship-ping corporations, was first to remove thebasis of our strength, which was our jobs. Ifyou remove ships from the American flag andyet keep them under control of the Americanowners, you are doing part of the job; you areweakening the unions.

Part of our strategy was to maintain thestrength of the seamen’s unions and continueto crew the ships that we’d held. And littleby little, they were being removed; there werefewer ships. By 1948, it was getting very clearthat shipping had diminished to such a degree

539OPTIMISM

that there was a kind of a depression in theshipping industry for seamen, not for the shipowners.

Not only that, but the ship owners werecollecting these enormous insurance subsi-dies for ships that they’d lost during the war.Billions of dollars went back to the ship own-ers for ships that they had lost. Nothing wentto the crews that had manned these ships,and the Seaman’s Bill of Rights went downthe drain in very short order. Any kind ofaid to the seamen who had worked on theseships was fought tooth and nail in congress,and yet the ship owners were taking in bil-lions in insurance policies that were tax-payerpaid for the ships that they had lost. So thesewere part of the issues.

And somehow when recently on TV we[Kathy and Warren] were listening to Fideland John Paul . . . [laughter] the wonderfuldifference in their approaches to the worldbrought this back to me. Back there fifty yearsago, we saw this kind of thing coming. It’sthe kind of thing we were fighting against.And I must say that if I had not been in theCommunist Party and on the waterfront, Iwould never have thought of these things inthis way. It never would have come home tome so directly. Maybe years later I would havereflected this intellectually, I would have readand begun to understand historically whathad gone on.

But I feel that I was living it. We wereliving the period in which—because of thisvanguard kind of revolutionary organizationthat we were a part of, because of its Marxistorientation—we were probing, curious,demanding answers, suspicious of bureau-cracy, suspicious of governments and theiractions, and it brought about a kind of a con-sciousness that I feel very grateful for. I feelthat this was a turning point in my life, atleast, and may have been for many others that

I knew at that time. There were some whowere this way their whole lives, but it hap-pened to me in my twenties, when I beganto feel that I was involved in a very directway with historical events and seeing themwith a kind of a clarity that, by the way, Marxcalled “true consciousness.”

I hate these old terms, nevertheless, “trueconscious”—meaning seeing things as theyare, rather than as they are dished out to youthrough media, through the power of gen-eral knowledge, through the views that arecontained by and from the traditions of yourbackground, and all that—meant suddenlyseeing through and saying, “My god! This iswhat’s going on, not this that I’ve been told.It’s this!”

And this sort of enlightenment tookplace among many people that I knew, sea-men that I knew, while they were at sea andduring the period of strikes. There was thiskind of deep emergence of an awareness inpeople’s minds, ordinary guys. It was asthough they suddenly saw, they suddenlyrealized what was happening, as though thefog had lifted. And, “My god, there it is. It’sas simple as this.”

And class-consciousness—as much asthat can be distorted and lead people into allkinds of extreme and probably distortedviews—nevertheless, to some degree, it ledto a clear picture of the kinds of issues thatwere involved and who was taking what side.“What side are you on?” That’s a little songwe used to sing, a great union song, “Whatside are you on?” And I think that businessof seeing sides, seeing class division, under-standing some of the forces that work in itwas what that experience was for manypeople.

I talked to somebody just the other daywho had been in the National MaritimeUnion at the same time I was. I didn’t know


him, but he was on one of the Union Oilships that I’ll talk about in a few moments. Iwas on another ship, and we were both del-egates. And he’s now still in the union. Icalled him, because I couldn’t remember whatyear it was that we lost the Union Oil ships.So I called him.

And here he is in a hall in which veryfew seamen are now being sent out. The hallprobably services a couple of ships a week orsomething of that kind. And the trade unionsituation seems to be dead. This is after fiftyyears since the period when it was among themost vigorous set of organizations in thecountry. And now there is this lapse into akind of a depressive mode for seamen’s unionson the coast. The ILWU is still strong, butnot like it used to be, not with the same kindof far-seeing programs that it used to have.

So he said, “Why are you asking?” I said, “Well, your secretary said that you

were the only one who had been around longenough to know anything about the 1940s,the last fifty years.”

“Well, that’s right. I was sailing UnionOil ships.”

And I said, “Well, so was I.” Well, cer-tainly within a moment, we were talking acommon language.

So I said, “Well, what year was that?”He said, “That was 1946.”I said, “How could it be 1946? I was sail-

ing on Union Oil in 1948. In fact, I was onthe St. Clair for a whole year. That was mysource of income.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “I guess I forgot. Iguess it was 1948. That was when they startedbeating us to shit.” [laughter] “Yes,” he says,“It used to be we could tell the ship ownerswhat was going to happen on ships, but nowwe have to beg them . . . ask them what we’regoing to do. And there are not many shipsleft, and we lost Union Oil.”

All that was happening in 1948—that’sabout the time that I saw the handwritingon the wall. And then the other issues hadto do with wages. I mean, you know, we weremaking thirty-five, fifty dollars a month, andduring the war it was up to seventy-five or ahundred and we were working a fifty-eighthour week.

The pork-chop issues, as we used to callthem, had to do with getting down to at leasta forty-eight hour week. That was what thestrike was going to be about, that and havingsome kind of health measures and securityfor seamen—recognition of time off whenthey got ashore so they could see their fami-lies, various kinds of things that had beendenied them all during not only the war, butbefore the war. And the view was that theship owners were making an enormousamount of money. The profits were enor-mous, and there was an expansion of thetrade, while every move was being made todiminish the income of seamen, even dimin-ish the power of the unions.

And then the Taft-Hartley Bill was in themaking at that time, which was one of ourgreatest targets, because it took the positionthat the hiring hall could not be the exclu-sive way to hire a seaman. And there was thebeginning of the anti-communist crusade.That trouble-making left-wing people in theunion should be dismissed, gotten rid of. Andthis gave rise to, a few years later, the screen-ing process in which left-wing seamen witha left-wing record or even a staunch tradeunion leadership record were denied the rightto go to sea. That happened just after Istopped going to sea.

And in a way, I wish I had been aroundwhen that was happening, because it wouldhave sort have given final closure for a periodthat to me was very important and wouldhave helped me see the thing much more

541OPTIMISM

clearly in terms of what was happening toseamen. I saw this actually somewhat from adistance, because I had then gone back toschool and all that. Nevertheless, all thesethings were in the offing.

China was an issue. This was the periodin which Chiang Kai-shek was beginningnow to get in confrontation with the Left inChina, and the preparations were reallyunderway now for a revolution that was go-ing to take place a few years later, the Maoist

movement. And the United States was sup-porting the most, right-wing elements, andencouraging Chiang Kai-shek to take such acourse. And so we were opposed to that.

All these things were going on. I wouldsay the seamen’s unions—and other tradeunions, where the Communist Party was soup on what was going on and gave so muchleadership to an understanding of events—was one of the great advantages of that period,one of the great advances that were made.

63STRIKE

OW AS I THINK I’ve mentionedbefore, I had just gone over to theNMU a few months earlier, and

growth and development and that the unionsare trying to get political leadership in theUnited States, and this was not going to hap-pen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But the union position was so strong thatby June 15, the ship owners signed a con-tract in which we got the forty-eight hourweek and a number of our demands, andeverything seemed to be fine. There was nostrike, and everybody had gone back to work.

But as September came along, we sawanother problem looming. The Sailors’Union of the Pacific, that had been my goodold lily-white union, had worked up a settle-ment with the ship owners on the West Coastgiving them an extra five dollars a monthwages. And the SUP in the Gulf had gottensomething like ten dollars. Well, this createda great disparity. Now we saw it exactly forwhat it was.

This is the kind of divide and rule thingof many power sources, and in this case,American ship owners. They were seeing away to divide the unions: “OK, you damnedreds in the ILWU and the NMU, we’re go-ing to show you! The SUP is a union we can

Nhere comes the strike. June 15 passed with-out a strike, because the ship owners settled,because there was such a strong labor front.Truman had announced that he would nottolerate a strike, and that he would get thetroops out, if necessary, to run the ships. PoorTruman. I guess he had his positive points.And this poor guy, though, he didn’t knowwhat to do with the fact that there was thisstrong Committee for Maritime Unity, and atremendous amount of support from the restof the trade union movement in the countryin 1946, and international support.

Trade unions were declaring all over theworld, especially Latin American and theCaribbean, that they would not work cargosof American ships during a strike. Well,Truman announced that if there was a strike,he was thinking seriously of putting thetroops out to do the work, and also that thepolicies of the unions about hiring halls weremuch too stringent and that this was inter-fering with American trade and American


get along with, and we’re going to give thema better settlement.” They did.

Well, of course that meant we had to putup a fight. So we declared September 15 wasgoing to be the day to strike. And we did goon strike, and we were on strike for weeks.

And that was a difficult one, because oursupport was not as good as it had been, but itwas still good. People were tired of the strikesand threats of strikes, and other unions werehaving their problems. Nevertheless, we wereon strike and that’s when I was elected justafter being a few months in this new union,chairman of the housing and welfare com-mittee for the maritime unions in the BayArea. I think I talked about this experienceof setting up soup kitchens and hotels for fouror five hundred men all over the Bay Areaand learning an awfully lot about the condi-tions under which seamen lived when theywere ashore—about their families, and aboutthe various segments. The black seamen, as Ihave talked about, at least the ones that camefrom the San Francisco area, had a muchmore secure kind of community situationthan whites. And so did the Chinese.

I don’t know if I mentioned the Chinese.There were a number of Chinese seamen, notso many in the NMU, but certainly in theMarine Cooks, and Stewards, and some ofthe other unions. And I got to know two orthree of the Chinese seamen very well, andwe’d go out to Chinatown.

I recently saw a documentary on thedevelopment of San Francisco Chinatown,which was fascinating, because I had forgot-ten so much that had to do the ChineseExclusion Act back in the early part of thecentury. Then the earthquake in whichChinatown was laid bare. It looked as thoughan atomic bomb hit it along with a good por-tion of the city, which by the way, a lot ofthe people in the Bay Area were delighted

with. I mean they had wanted to get rid ofthe Chinese anyway, even though theChinese were supplying a tremendousamount of cheap labor and all that. Never-theless, the Chinese, the Mongolian, theoriental shadow loomed over the West Coast.

In the period when I was growing up, Ithink I mentioned, my Aunt Edith whose oneprejudice was with what she called the“Chinks” and anything “chinky.” She wouldhave nothing to do with anything “chinky,”and she was terrified of Chinese.

Now this wasn’t true of my mother. I don’tthink it was of my mother’s other sister, and Idon’t remember it in the family, you know,an anti-Chinese feeling. But my aunt had itfor some reason. She would not go toChinatown. Didn’t I mention that she wasafraid of being taken, that there would be trapdoors in the street and she would be sold intowhite slavery?

She was an hysterical lady, but I lovedher anyway. Aside from things like this, shewas a quite wonderful person. [laughter] Butanyway, this was during the period followingthe First World War where that feeling aboutthe Chinese was still extremely strong in theBay Area.

The Chinese were really not comfortableanywhere else outside of Chinatown. Youdidn’t see many of them around town exceptthe few that were working in various busi-nesses and lower-level employment. Likeblacks, you just didn’t see them. We “whities”just did not see these people who were tak-ing away our civilized life, et cetera.

So there’s where my aunt grew up. Shegrew up, you know, in the early part of thecentury in Oakland and in the Bay Areawhen the strong anti-Chinese feeling wasdeveloping or had developed, so that by thetime I knew her and grew up in the 1920sand 1930s, she was still imbued with this feel-

545STRIKE

ing. She wouldn’t eat Chinese food, becauseit was full of dog and rat and lord knowswhat . . . oh, and bug juice—all these ter-rible things. Oh, it was wonderful when Ithink of it. I think it’s one of the reasons whyI used to hang around and get Chinese food.I loved it. It was my reaction to that.

So anyway, all that was in my mind andmy memory, because I guess I really was a BayArea person, where I’d grown up; it was myturf. So I knew these two or three Chineseguys that I liked a lot. A couple of them wereon my committee, and I was always awarethat they were always a little bit more alooffrom what was going on than the others. Imean, they had families. They had places togo. They had their community, where we guyshad family scattered all over the area. Ourhomes were in god knows where—Berkeley,Oakland, San Mateo, or from some otherstate. And most of the Chinese guys camefrom that area; this was their home.

And I’d go out with them sometime, be-cause we were working on the Third Party,trying to recruit people or register them forthe Third Party. I remember I went to theirhomes, to little flats and apartments andthings like that in Chinatown. They wereextremely polite. They were not militant, norwere these guys.

They were supporting the strike becauseit was their work, and they were a part of thecommunity of seamen as well. And theyunderstood—probably in a way better thanthe rest of us how difficult it was to fightbureaucracy and big power. And so I alwaysfelt that they were very sort of low-key abouteverything, and I used to sort of propagan-dize them and try to get them excited aboutissues. And they were extremely polite aboutit and nice, these guys. But [laughter] it didn’tregister. I don’t recall any Chinese orJapanese . . . . Well, there were hardly any

Japanese around at that time in the maritime.But I don’t recall any Chinese leadership inlabor issues at the time.

✧

When I look back, it’s a matter of greatsatisfaction, in a way, and wonderment abouthow a group of men like the seamen who werearound the front at that time, and the lead-ership in the unions, how they could organizethese strikes and the picket lines. It was amaz-ing the amount of solidarity that existed; thatyou took this rabble from the waterfront . . .from waterfronts throughout the country,with a lot of foreign seamen as well, and coa-lesced into these well-organized little groups.All spontaneous, all organized for maintain-ing picket lines, maintaining soup kitchenswith Marine Cooks and Stewards runningsoup kitchens ashore instead of on ships, andfinding money. In fact, I remember going outand hitting up all kinds of small businessesand people in the community for donationsfor the soup kitchens. All this going on, spon-taneous organization.

I remember being in wonder about it, howwe managed to do it, carrying on for a num-ber of weeks a successful strike with guys reallyvery hungry, people in need with familieseither elsewhere or in town. And we had asort of a welfare committee going out col-lecting clothes, collecting food, bringing itto various families. Milk for the kids, I re-member that we used to go to grocery storesand . . . .

By the way, the Chinatown grocery storeswere extremely helpful; they gave more thananybody. Yet they didn’t talk of issues or any-thing, but they gave. So we’d go up there alot.

We got most of our help from lower-middle-class businesses—the small busi-nesses, not the big ones—smaller. The bigones were always saying, “You guys get off the


street. Stop. What the hell are you doing?You’re wrecking this community,” and allthat. The San Francisco Examiner was alwaysloaded with headlines about how we weredestroying the economy of the West Coast.But you didn’t hear that from people who hadsmall little shops and little grocery stores onthe corner. They always gave something—abag of fruit and this and that and the otherthing.

So you learned a lot. You learned a lotabout where the support was, and you got itfrom people who didn’t even particularlyknow why you were striking. They justthought strikes were good. Anybody that cre-ates trouble is OK. You know, “Yes, give themhell!” That kind of thing. But if you askedthem what the issues were, they wouldn’tknow.

But that kind of feeling, and then the soli-darity on the front with hundreds andhundreds of guys, every morning collectingto go out and replace the guys that were onthe lines with their little fires in ash cans andall, keeping warm. September is pretty coldin the Bay Area. That part I remember nowwith great warmth, the sense of solidarity,which some people grew up with, and I didin a sense in my family, but not in terms ofworking, a feeling of solidarity with otherpeople doing the same kind of work. And thatwas, to me, a revelation, and an importantone and made a shift in my view of things.

Oh, by the way, during this period, theCalifornia Labor School was going full blastwith classes in history and language, blackhistory and world history and literature.That’s where I met the writer’s group, theWriter’s Workshop that met at the CaliforniaLabor School. I’ve just recently discoveredthat Alexander Saxton, whom I knew . . . .He was a radio operator in the radio operator’s

union and chairman of that writer’s group andhad written two novels at the time, and I’vejust been asked to review one of them thathas been reprinted after all these years. TheGreat Midland. And I really didn’t knowabout his novels. I just knew he was a writerand that he had published. But now I findout that he had written two novels duringthe 1940s about workers’ conditions andstrikes in Chicago.

And you’ve just recently been asked to reviewit?

Yes, by the Nevada Historical SocietyReview. [laughter] And I was called, would Iwant to do this? Somebody said, “This mightbe your era.”

And I said, “What are you saying, sir?”[laughter]

And he had heard my remarks at theMcMillan lecture a few weeks ago, and I said,“Well, send it to me.” And here it was, AlSaxton’s novel.

So I called Al Saxton. He’s retired andhad gone into history at UCLA. And so wereconnected. I said, “Al, I’ve got a picture ofyou on the waterfront back in 1947 giving aspeech at the foot of Clay Street at a rally.Are you interested?”

“Oh, yeah!” So anyway, he was chairmanof that group, and it was there—I think I ear-lier talked about this—that I began to realizethat the kind of writing I was doing was notthe kind . . . . Although I liked what I didand thought it was fairly good, I didn’t feelthat I was able to write the kind of thingsthat I was experiencing. I didn’t feel that Iwas either ready to do it or that that was go-ing to be the thing that I was going to do. Sothat was a great transition for me, too, dur-ing this period. That’s very complicated, and

547STRIKE

I’d have to take a long time to try to explainwhat was going on here.

Well, it sounds like, to be consistent with a num-ber of things that you’ve already said, that youhad certain demands that your creative life beconsistent with the social good you were tryingto . . . .

Well, I don’t know if that was a demandof mine. I think it was just a fact of life that ifit isn’t, you feel disjointed, you know. I don’tthink that I made that demand; I think thatlife made that demand on me. “How can Ideal with this?” And I remember trying towrite some stories about the front, the littletime that I had for that. And it was kind ofinteresting and good, but when I looked atthem, they were kind of dead. They didn’thave the fire and . . . . They had the feeling,I mean, the ideological orientation and allthat, but there was something missing interms of myself that had been in my earlier,more romantic, more idealized work. And Irealized it was a great gap between what I hadbeen and what I was becoming.

And one thing that occurs to me that washappening to me, was I was getting humble.I felt like I was ignorant. I didn’t know somuch. There was so much I didn’t know aboutthe world and what was going on that Iwanted to know, and I felt that I really neededto be a student. I needed to study, I neededto know more about history.

It was either that or becoming a tradeunion pie card! for the rest of my life andtrying to get . . . .

What’s a pie card?

An official, somebody in the trade unionmovement, paid by the union. Somebody

whose career is that. So that was one possi-bility, because I was very attracted to the tradeunion movement and all that. But on theother hand, I didn’t think that that was myforte; that’s not what I could do well. I didn’tfeel confident about myself in that. I felt thatmy class background would interfere with ittoo, that I had so much to relearn and to re-live. The other thing was just to learn more,you know.

I felt that I was stupid about so much ofthe world, so much of what was happeningin the world, that I didn’t have the kinds ofdata, the kinds of information to make goodanalytic judgments, independent ones on myown, and all that. And what the left-wingand the party and the trade unions had sup-plied to one degree, in terms of giving mesome kind of orientation and explanation ofevents, I wanted to be able to do myself. Ialso wanted to be able to be critical of that.You know, I wanted to be meta-critical, in asense. [laughter]

Anyway, that was going on. And then,of course, this was my first break. I mean, itwas almost a year since I hadn’t gone to sea.The transition from one union to the other,preparation for the strike, and then the strikein September, and here I was pretty much awaterfront activist and participant. I was get-ting now and then a little strike pay andthings, but it was extremely minimal. Thoseof us who were sort of full-time doing strikeduty, and the membership too, we’d get some-thing. I forget what it was, but it was minimal.It was a few dollars a day kind of thing, andthat wasn’t enough to keep the family up.

Kathy began to get interested in earlychildhood development, and she had a jobat a nursery school in the Bay Area inBerkeley. She loved it and was able to makea little. It wasn’t much, but with that and


borrowing and scraping here and there, wewere getting by. But it was a rough time.

I was totally involved in the waterfront,and it must have been very hard on her. Butshe was young and healthy and handled itreally well. [laughter] This was near 1948, justbefore Erik was born, and Anya was three orfour years old.

Oh, I have to do a little déjà vu anecdotehere. We had moved . . . I think I’d men-tioned we were now living in Berkeley at aplace on McGee Street with Mimi and TedOdza. She was a dancer, and Kathy woulddance with her troupes, and they would some-times dance at events at the California LaborSchool. It was very much a sort of a left-wingliberal, Bay Area kind of atmosphere duringthat period, which was very good. It was akind of glamorous period in which there wasa very progressive, hopeful ideological windin the . . . .

Well, even though you weren’t makingmoney . . .

[laughter] More like borrowing money,yes.

. . . and you weren’t sure where this was allgoing to lead, didn’t you have a lot of supportfrom Kathy and your circle of friends for youractivities?

Oh, yes. We had a lot of different kindsof friends, and I would say some of my olderfriends that I had been involved with when Iwas pretty much a member of the literati, it’sall scattered, but some were a little askanceat me getting involved in this way and saw itas a kind of a detraction from what I shouldbe doing. A detraction? My god, it was theattraction. But we had a lot of other friendswho were professionals, intellectuals, musi-

cians, things of that kind, who were very pro-gressive and liberal in their orientation. Andthat sort of set of people partly admired whatI was doing, but felt that how the hell was Igoing to make a living? And would I go onbeing a seaman, kind of thing, but were, nev-ertheless, very supportive of that.

Then Mimi and Ted Odza kept me afloatin a way. He was a gardener; he did odd-jobgardening and landscaping, pretty much onhis own. He was a great big strong, New Yorkkid—Jewish kid, who later became a sculp-tor, and a rather good one. (He came up tothe University of Nevada, gave an exhibi-tion.) Ted and Mimi, who were New Yorkers,were living in this house with us. We hadsort of bought it together, and they had up-stairs, and we had downstairs. And Ted wasdoing this odd-jobbing and asked me if Iwanted to go out. And now and then I’d goout with him, and we’d mow lawns and digup backyards and fix fences and cut downovergrowth. It was a few dollars but really notenough to keep us going. I was doing that offand on in between things.

But I remember Ted, because he was agreat bullshit artist from New York. He hada tremendous ability to do snow-jobs whenhe wanted to, because he had a very serious,rather dignified look when he wanted to.

I remember an old lady who had a bigold Berkeley house, a shingled house like aBernard Maybeck house, and we were prun-ing all of this wild undergrowth in her largeyard. We were pulling up in Ted’s little truckand noticed a great big vine climbing up halfthe side of her house, and we were afraid shewas going to ask us to remove it, because itwas enormous. And she came out, and says,“What is that plant? I’ve wondered for years.It’s taking over, and I don’t know what to dowith it. It really isn’t very important. I thinkI should take it down.”

549STRIKE

He said, “Oh, don’t do that. That’s atrasfurzoria.” [laughter]

And she says, “Oh? Is it?” [laughter] “Isit?”

He says, “Maybe we’ll prune it a little foryou, but I would just not touch that.” Wehad no idea in this world what it was, right?Still to this day, I don’t know. Maybe it waspassion fruit or something. “Oh,” she says,“Oh, well then we better leave it.”

From then on, whenever I worked withhim, whenever we came across a plant wedidn’t know anything about, we’d say, “That’strasfurzoria.” [laughter]

“That’s a trasfurzoria.” [laughter] I’ll neverforget trasfurzoria.

So, based on Ted, I would do some of thisby myself. I went out in my car sometimeswith a lawnmower. And one time, somebodycalled and wanted to give me a job to put ina lawn, and I remember putting in this hor-rible lawn on a slanting street. And I spentmore money putting the lawn in than I made,because I wanted to do it right. And I endedup by doing a good job, but I made nothing.In fact, I was in debt. So anyway, that was offthe sea, the shore-side aspect.

Oh yes, and then on McGee Street, I re-member Anya. There she was, three and ahalf years old, beautiful little girl, absolutelylovely creature, sweet and very demandingand very spoiled. Everybody loved her. I re-member when Kathy was at work one timeand I was staying home and taking care ofher, I was painting. In my leisure, at times Iwould do drawings and painting, and I hadthem stacked up on a chair, the ones that Ihad done. I had a stack of about twenty orthirty. And I was drawing away, and she camein, and she was dragging her wet diapers be-hind her. She had them on, actually and wassoaking wet, and I had not changed her. Andshe came in, this lovely little girl with her

wet diapers, and she sat on my paintings andsoaked them right down. [laughter] And Isaid, “Anya! Look what you’ve done to mypaintings!”

And she says, “I’m sorry, Daddy. Excuseme, Daddy.”

She got right up, and there was this mess.And you know what I thought of? ChiuraObata way back with the overflow of mybathtub on University Ave. in Berkeley, andChiura Obata’s work was all soaked and in agreat big pile. [laughter]

This was retribution. I’m getting mineback. My daughter has peed on my work.[laughter]

And now that I think about it, this isabout the same time that I took Anya overto the first May Day just before the intendedstrike in June, the first May Day after the war.Those days this was a tremendous affair,trade union and working class event in SanFrancisco. A long parade, thousands ofpeople, different unions dressed in their sortof conventional iconic attire, the seamenwith their white caps and black Frisco jeansand white shirts and all that. And I tookAnya over and have pictures that I reallycherish today, with two or three of my friendsin the union standing on Market Street withAnya between us and on Whitey Hansen’sshoulders with the parade going on behind,you know.

Those were glorious moments, and whenI say glorious I realize that this kind of nos-talgia can be very tiresome to people.Nevertheless, there was no doubt about it,those were great moments in the life of thatcity and the life of the coast when there wasa tremendous feeling . . . positive feeling.Anybody who was opposed to this kept theirbig mouth shut. I mean, nobody could denythat this was marvelous. And the newspa-pers tried to cut it down and make snide


remarks but didn’t change the fact that weprevailed.

That sense of prevailing was so impor-tant to the people that I knew on the front.They felt . . . you know, you felt power. SoI’ve always had a great—how would you callit?—a great sympathy for . . . empathy foranybody who is looking for empowerment,the sense that they are somebody, they be-long to something that has value and power,and can express it publicly before others. Likeduring the civil rights marches and things ofthat kind. You know, this is one of the fewthings that brings tears to my eyes was thatperiod. These people felt so good doing some-thing where they felt that they had made adent on history. Well, we felt that way.

And you asked about Kathy. Of courseshe was supportive. She was very supportive

but not living in a very pleasant set-up. Itwas kind of tiresome.

And maybe you’ve just hinted at this and maybeI’m over-interpreting, but it sounds like even fromthe level of your creative life, from your writingon through, that you’re still aware, in spite ofthe fact that you feel great community and senseof purpose and involvement with the seamen inthe union, you’re still aware that these . . . thisis really not you, that you’re going to end updoing something else.

I think so, but I was very confused aboutit. No, I think those were the pulls, and therewas a lot of confusion in my head about whatI was going to be doing, and it went on forquite a while.

Warren with Anya and seamen gathering at the union hall for the 1946 May Day parade in SanFrancisco.

551STRIKE

But no, I just knew that I probably wasnot going to stay there doing that kind ofwork the rest of my life, though I had timeswhen I thought I could and I might try. I justknew that it wasn’t for me, that I reallywanted to do something else, that I wantedto learn. I wanted to go to school, and Iwanted to study other things and becomeknowledgeable in a way about things that Ididn’t think that I knew well.

Well, you’ve brought up a really compelling, forme anyway, idea.

One thing that I just want to say . . . be-cause I had friends—Pat Tobin was one—who really were knowledgeable and whoreally did have a feel for that world. Andthere were two or three guys like that who Iwas fairly close to, and I had great admira-tion for them. In a sense, I tagged alongbehind them, helping out and doing things,because they knew how to do it. They knewwhat to do, and they had the feel for the orga-nizations, they had the feel for the kind ofissues that had . . . .

Kd: It was their life.

It was their life, yes, and quite a differentthing. Their life, that’s right. It was their life.That’s the thing they had, the only thing theyknew how to do, and they did it well. Theywere smart, extremely able people. Well, I

didn’t feel I could do that, that I could doanything but be a hanger-on. And yet therewas a pull in that direction. But no, I neverfelt that this was what I was going to stay at.But I have always felt I was so glad I was there,that I had done it. It was a transition pointin my life that was extremely important, butI must say, I didn’t have any idea where thingswere going or what I was going to be doing atthat point. I worried about it, but I didn’tknow.

Well, it’d be really difficult to disengage fromsomething that involving, and after-all it is “aworthy cause,” unless you had a real directionthat you were headed for. I mean, it would bereally hard . . . .

To leave. Yes.

It would be hard to leave something like that.

People that might have gone into it super-ficially because they were there and that wasthe only out they had, I didn’t have too muchrespect for. I knew some of them. Their com-mitment was . . . not their commitment,their abilities were shallow, their feel for whatthey were doing. That’s right. It’s the peoplewhose life it was and who were also brilliantthat really to me were heroic figures that Ihave a lot of respect for, and I don’t think . . .I know now I didn’t think then that I couldmeet those standards.

64LEAFLETS AND IDEOLOGY

HE POINT you made about the partyand the radical Left being a source ofinformation that was available in no

branch of the Communist Party, and whatlittle I knew about what was going on nation-ally, they were the vanguard of informationabout what was happening politically, whatwas happening in terms of economic forcesthat were impinging on workers. And I mean,there was in their organization informationyou could find out, maybe biased, maybe tosome degree distorted and from one slant;nevertheless, we didn’t get it from anyoneelse. We weren’t getting even the other viewvery clearly, see. That was one of the clearthings that I knew for sure.

I understood the term vanguard as thepeople with whom I was working who wereinterested in what was happening in a deepway, more than any other people that I knew.I knew a lot of very intelligent, brilliantpeople doing other things. But their grasp,even their interest in larger political affairsor what was going on in the world, was lazyand easy, you know, like most of us today. Ithink I’m that way a lot today because of achange in circumstances and all that, a kindof lazy view of the world, but that was engage-ment where ideas and facts were meant as

Tother way is something I hadn’t really thoughtof. And you’re saying that you wanted moreinformation beyond the world you were beingexposed to on the front.

Well, beyond that particular view of theworld, that orientation of the world. I mean,to me, the world was a hell of a lot bigger,the world of ideas was a hell of a lot bigger,and I had seen very little of it. I had the feel-ing that I was something of an ignoramus,that I was learning a lot, but I wanted also tobe self-critical and be able to be critical evenof that. I wanted to go beyond it. I didn’t knowwhat or where, but I just felt that there wassomething larger that I wanted to grasp. Andyet I felt I was expanding enormously, expo-nentially under those conditions.

And as for information, yes . . . to thisday, I go back to some of my old files of whatwas going on then, and I’ll tell you, the Left,the Communist Party of the waterfront, theseamen’s branch and the San Francisco


something to be engaged with, to do some-thing with, to try to understand.

Well, the ideas could result in real consequencesto real people on . . . .

Yes, yes. We would do something aboutit. In fact, they affected your daily life. Maybethere was . . . I guess there were intellectualcircles in the world, at large universities andelsewhere where there was a kind of analysisgoing on in which a lot of the stuff that wewere concerned about was being discussed onanother level. We didn’t have access to that.Our access to that was minimal. Our accesswas through the voices of the local left-wingvanguard.

Now the pamphlets that you were writing . . . .

[laughter] Yes. Those wonderful things.

Would the topics arise out of a kind of a commit-tee meeting, and someone would be assigned towrite, or would you write these things spontane-ously and contribute them, or how did that work?

Both. Both. There were times when we’dget together at the Maritime Bookshop, andthis would happen in the larger city, in thesection meetings of the party. It would hap-pen also on a state level and all. You know,there was a need for information to be dis-seminated, P.R. to get out on something orother issue. And either a group would gettogether and map it out, and then it wouldbe mimeographed off, and then find ways todistribute it either through the press or otherways. Or somebody would dream one up andcome in and say, “What about this on such-and-such an issue?” and it would be approvedor disapproved. And a number of my earlyones were disapproved because they were . . .

I use the word “naive.” I think they’re morethan naive. They were just plain bad. [laugh-ter]

I mean, I was obviously very abstracted,my language and the way I’d deal with things,and instead of picking out the issues that wereau courant, I tended to focus on big nebu-lous theoretical issues. I have a leaflet hereI’ll show you one of these days which is, “theworld crisis and capitalism” kind of things,you know. And of course, what you had todo was have the feel for a particular issue at agiven moment that people were concernedwith now and what kind of information youhad about it. Oh yes, we were turning outleaflets every day on something or other.

And that’s another important thing, thedissemination of information and news. Nowoutsiders and people elsewhere are going tosay, “Oh, well this is your propaganda, youknow. You’re influencing and distorting theinformation—lies to people—and leadingthem.” You don’t lead people. I mean, a lot ofpeople just ignored our leaflets and threwthem away. They had no time for them.[laughter] But some did.

And what kind of information was it? Idon’t think any of it was lies that I can re-member. It was a point of view. It was a takeon what was going on, and it was a warning.Usually a lot of these things were warningabout what the ship owners were trying todo and what a rival union was trying to do,or some bunch of finks here and what hap-pened in Seattle with a bunch of scabs goingaboard ships and information that they didn’tget in their regular press.

Empowerment, though that is a kind of afaddish word, expresses that sense of havingsome effect or import in regard to events, afeeling that one counts. And I saw that hap-pen to people who began to feel that wayunder the influence of trade union solidarity


and mobilization and having a clearly definedgoal and knowing where the resistance was.

By the way, this was happening, youknow, about the time that Churchill gave hisinfamous or famous iron curtain speech inthis country and defined the policy of con-tainment, or at least set the scene for a policyof containment of the Soviet Union anddevelopments in eastern Europe. And the be-ginnings of the Cold War really were takingplace at this time. Well, in a sense, that’s theway we felt on the waterfront, not just theparty, that we had an iron curtain around us.We could only get information by knockingdown the iron curtain that’d been builtaround us by the ship owners, by the corpo-ration-owned media, and, you know, by thatpart of the community that looked upon usas an endangerment—the “red scare,” and allthat sort of thing. We felt the Cold War wasupon us, and we used that language. As I re-member, some of the leaflets talked about,you know, “What iron curtain? You know,here it is.” [laughter] “We can see it rightaround us.”

Those things, being able to point out andpick out things like this as issues of under-standing and awareness are what I considerempowerment. That’s what empowerment isall about.

At this juncture, were you aware that to be amember of the Communist Party was a detri-ment to finding work outside the waterfront?

Good question. You know, at that time Ithink we were aware that . . . . I, by the way,never kept my membership secret. I mean, ifanybody asked, I would say, “Yes.” I was anopen communist, and that was, I think, trueof most. Later on, toward the 1950s, therewas a period that I’ll talk about later. But, forthe record, I was very much against the under-

ground movement that took place after thearrest of the communist leaders. But that’sanother matter. But, no, we were aware thatit was marginal and that it put us in a mar-ginal position and that there were situationsthat we would encounter where that mightbe a detriment to employment or things, butthat was before any loyalty oaths or things ofthat kind were forced upon us. No, I think itwas the opposite. I was kind of proud of be-ing in the party. There was the feeling thatwe were part of a revolutionary movement.

Again, the whole business of advocatingthe overthrow of the American governmentis a lot of bull. I mean, I’m sure there werecommunists who thought that way, and I’msure various kinds of other groups thoughtthat way, who had a nihilistic and anarchis-tic view. I don’t remember any communist Iknew talking about the revolution as an over-throw of the United States government aswe knew it. It was the idea of a revolution indevelopment of large-scale movements thatwould eventually bring about a more social-ist orientation in the country and theneventually socialism in the withering awayand the dying away of the present system.

Now, I thought that was pretty idealistic.I don’t know if I ever really thought it wasgoing to happen in my time, but we used tojoke about revolution in our time, you know.It was just, “When is it going to happen?Where is the revolution?” some guy wouldask, you know. [laughter] “Gee, I’ve beenwaiting, for a few years now, and I don’t seeno goddamn revolution!” [laughter] And thatwas a joke, that everybody realized that thisisn’t the way it went, that that was an ideal-istic kind of thing, that socialism was agoal—communism, in the Marxist sense,even beyond that.

And there has been no communism de-veloped as a system in the world today, and


there has been no really clearly defined andstable socialist system. And certainly theSoviet Union is an example of a failed social-ist system, though not entirely failed—failedin many ways. Same with China.

The remnants of the good parts of thosefailed systems, however, are going to be withus a long time and are seeds of new growthall through the world. The whole idea of thedeath of communism, I find really funny andironic. It ain’t dead nohow, nowhere, becauseit’s like a religion. It’s like the Rapture andthe Second Coming and all that sort of thing.From the political angle, it’s that kind of goal,that kind of long-range, idealistic notion ofthe way society ought to be ordered and themany, many forms it could take and all that.It’s a principle of human relations.

And I think most of the people I knewfelt that way. It wasn’t a matter of revolutionnow or revolution tomorrow. The idea wasof revolutionary activity, bringing abouteventual basic change in a system.

And it ain’t happened. [laughter] It ain’thappened anywhere in the world to any de-gree, which a lot of people I knew could agreewith fully.

I mean, a lot of people left the party inthe late 1940s and 1950s because they feltthat it was kind of moribund, and it was hang-ing onto a way of looking at principles andvalues that were not applicable or not real.And after the Browder experience in the1930s and early 1940s, referred to as revision-ism, bourgeois revisionism, which the Duclosletter was meant to undermine . . . . TheBrowder period idea was that capitalism, theAmerican bourgeoisie, was full of intelligentand logical people who would slowly reformtoward a more socialist orientation a laRoosevelt, et cetera, et cetera. But this waslooked upon as true revisionism. This was

ignoring the facts, ignoring the reality of his-torical development and change, which Iagree with.

Nevertheless, the party and its ideologiesgot old, they become rigid, and they lose theirflexibility. And I think that happened to theAmerican party. It certainly happened to theSoviet party even more so, in a deeply dis-turbing way. But that wasn’t socialism. Thatwas failed socialism.

It was a failed movement, and there’sfailed capitalism, too, and when capitalismfails, it’s equally disastrous if not more so. Andwhat is capitalism, you know? There are asmany kinds of capitalism as there are capi-talists, as there are . . . .

A super cynical answer to that would be, “It’shuman nature.”

Yes, well, which we don’t believe in.There is no immutable human nature likehuman biology, and that’s not entirely immu-table anymore, either.

As far as I’m concerned, most people inthe party were not Marxists. There weresome, I would say, religiously oriented social-ists and quasi-Marxists. Marxism, as such, asa movement, as an ideology, has so manyfacets and so many advocations in so manyways, that I would say that most of the peoplethat I knew, some of them were struggling tobe Marxist and knowledgeable and all that,but that most of us were not really intellec-tually Marxist.

I think even to this day I’m not. I justknow that certain principles, certain thingsthat I read in Marxist literature and in Marx,I think are brilliant and clear and true. Howthey’re applied to the real world and utilizedis a matter of hundreds of varying applica-tions.


For a while the party had that for me andfor a lot of others. And then it began to sortof chew its own tail, like many movements.Movements die out, movements wither. Thatdoes not mean that the ideas wither, youknow, or that the impulse for those ideaswither. There’s enough left in this world tomake Marxism alive in various places of theworld, that the idea of the death of commu-nism, meaning the death of Marxism, is soutterly stupid and naive that I wonder if it’snot purposely so, you know.

So we got through the strike and havebeen talking about the impact upon me. Butit was a remarkable thing, because we didmake gains, tremendous gains. And it was ajubilation, a feeling that labor unions wereon their way to helping reform the Americansystem, that we were going to have not social-ism necessarily, but we’re going to have ahighly progressive, more enlightened kind ofgovernment with more attention to workers,to the impoverished, and to minorities.

And, of course, the civil rights movementhadn’t really even begun except in the semi-nal way that it had been going on for years.Lynchings were still going on in the South.Our organizers in New Orleans and Texas andin the Gulf were getting beaten up by right-wing goons. A friend of mine was killed inTexas on a railroad track, because he had beena leader in a movement to open up shippingto blacks in the South. He was white.

This was like in 1947?

This is 1947, 1948. I don’t mention hisname, but I knew him well, and he sailed withme for a number of years. Ordinary guy outof a working-class family and a staunch tradeunionist and something of a lefty, Marxist,and became a member of the party. And he

went to the Gulf because he felt that the mainthing to be doing would be organizing theunions in the South and trying to make adent in the discriminating policies even onour ships down there. Some of our ships wouldgo down there, and the crews would shift fromblack to white. Members of the crew wouldbe taken off, and some of the patrolmen inthose areas were very right wing and wereracist themselves. So the idea was to go downand create some knowledge and information.Well, that got him killed, found out on therailroad tracks. He was dragged out andbeaten up, and I think he was shot. That wascommon. We kept hearing about it. Lynch-ings were going on. As of 1940s lynchingswere common things.

The party was one of the few organiza-tions . . . the instruments for knowledgeabout this. I mean, our papers, our leafletstalked about these things. You saw them inmainstream newspapers merely as little newssquibs—you know, somebody was lynched.But we’d go into it. Who did it? Under whatconditions? Well, of course, this wasn’t con-sidered very nice on the part of people whodisagreed with us. [laughter]

Nevertheless . . . so 1947, of course, Taft-Hartley was really beginning to hit it at thistime with a call for no political contributionsfrom unions. We were not to make any polit-ical contributions, no sympathy strikes wereto be allowed. Hiring could not be restrictedto union halls. There had to be sixty daysstrike notification, you know, all this sort ofthing. Well, this was the iron curtain. Youknow, this created the sense, “They’re clos-ing in on us. This is what they’re going todo.”

I remember about this time, too, theretwo little events. One was Anton Refregier,who was a muralist, a painter. He was quite a


guy; he was very left. And he had done themurals at the post office annex up on RinconHill in San Francisco, where during the 1935,1936 strikes there had been a confrontationwith police and strikers—the ILWU onRincon Hill—and I think some men werekilled. It was a famous event, the Rincon Hillaffair. And there was a post office on RinconHill, and later on, in the 1940s, AntonRefregier, this muralist, was commissioned todo the murals. And they were very powerfulleftist murals. And then in 1948, there was amove to cover his murals because of theircontent. And, of course, we set up picketlines, and we saved them then. I would imag-ine they’re still there. This was a period a lotof the great muralists were moving aroundthe country, and Refregier was in that move-ment.1

Then the other great thing that I’ll neverforget, because later on when I met MelvilleHerskovits, the anthropologist, this was animportant connection with him. In October,right after the strike, Paul Robeson came toSan Francisco, and we asked him to give aconcert on the waterfront.2 And I’ll tell you,I’ve got to find if anybody took pictures ofthat. Thousands—not only seamen but tradeunionists—throughout the Bay Area weregathered down at the foot of Clay Streetwhere we used to meet. And there was anold truck that we used to use, a great big,flatbed truck that we used to stand on, and ithad a microphone.

By the way, before he came to town, itwas the party that decided to protect him,because there was a lot of anti-Robeson feel-ing in the community from certain sources.You know, here’s this red, this guy who wascommitted to the Soviet Union and all thatsort of thing. And we felt that he needed pro-tection. [There had been at least one attempt

on his life and many threats by this time.] Iwas very disappointed. I didn’t get to be onthe actual group that went to guard his hotelroom and to take him around town, but I wason a committee to plan this. And so he wasgiven protection by not just the party but anumber of other trade unions took turns dayand night guarding Paul Robeson, which Ithought was kind of wonderful and beauti-ful.

And he was a great sort of lumbering guyand very dignified and low spoken, and Ididn’t get a chance really to talk to him oranything, but I’d admired him enormously.And so Robeson comes down to the water-front with our committee and is put up onthis flatbed truck with a microphone and sangfor an hour and a half to two hours.

All the old trade union songs. “WhichSide Are You On?” which he sang with suchtremendous power. And, you know, thou-sands of guys and their wives, and a lot of thewomen from the trade unions and towns-people were there. People were solemn. Itwas, you know, a great moment. And then Iremember he sang this last song; he sang aspiritual, but it had this tremendous reso-nance with the events of that time. It wascalled, “There’s a man a-going around tak-ing names. Have you ever heard thatspiritual?

No. “There’s a man going around takingnames?”

[sings] “There’s a man a-going aroundtaking names. There’s a man a-going aroundtaking names. He’s taken my father’s name,and da-da-da da-da-de. There’s a man a-goingaround taking names.” And it goes througha whole family, but then he added thingsabout “a man going around taking my


partner’s name, taking my brother’s name.”Just beautiful. People were crying. And sothat was to me one of the great moments onthe waterfront.

Years later, when I met MelvilleHerskovits at Northwestern, it turned out hehad a great admiration for Robeson. He notonly had all Robeson’s records, but he hadknown Robeson and others during theHarlem Renaissance earlier in New York. Sowhen I told him I had heard him sing on thewaterfront, that was my first connection withthis great man, whom I’d gone to study with.And I had records that he didn’t have; I hadall these 78s that were sold on the waterfrontat that time. But that was one of the greatthings that happened on the front that I re-member. It was a spiritual meeting. It’s easyto forget those things, how powerful theywere. I have to find out if there were anyphotographs of that event.

Those were the things that were goingon in 1947. Of course, Harry Bridges3 wasconstantly under attack. There were rightwing attempts to deport him back toAustralia. And so we were always out defend-ing Harry. (Sings) “The bosses they areworried; the bosses they are scared, They can’tdeport six million men, they know. We’re notgoing to let them send Harry over the sea.We’ll fight for Harry Bridges and build theCIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations].”Nevertheless, all that was going on, too.

Notes

1. Anton Refregier (1905-1979) was aRussian-born New Yorker who was commis-sioned to paint 27 panels, some depictingcontroversial subjects, including the 1934 water-front strike that lasted 82 days and paralyzedshipping on the West Coast. San Francisco policeshot 31 men, killing three. The push to coverthis and other of Refregier’s murals was led byRepublican Senator Hubert Scudder and in-volved Richard Nixon. The murals were savedand have been recently restored.

2. In the post-war years, Paul Robeson(1898-1976), a noted athlete, scholar, singer, andactivist, was blacklisted after being listed as acommunist by the House UnAmerican Activi-ties Committee. He was often refused rights toperform. A self described “anti-fascist and inde-pendent,” he continued to fight for social justicefor blacks and was selected as one of five chairsof the Wallace for President Committee. Hecampaigned throughout the south on behalf ofWallace and against the Mundt-Nixon Bill, re-quiring registration of Communist Partymembers and communist-front organizations.

3. Harry Bridges was one of the leaders ofthe 1934 strike on the waterfront, and formedthe ILWU from the Pacific Coast division of theILA. From 1939 on, his aggressive labor tacticsand alleged communist affiliations resulted inconservative efforts to have him deported toAustralia.

65CONVENTION DELEGATE

HEN THAT WAS the year in whichI was sailing on the Union Oil ships.There were six or seven Union Oil

Well, Astoria, yes, but I’m trying to thinkof the other one.

Now, was this the first time you’d been a ship’sdelegate since you’d joined the National Mari-time Union?

Good question. I guess these were my firstNMU ships. We’d go up to Seattle, toVancouver, out of Oleum on the East Baynear Crockett and Rodeo—Oleum was thatgreat big Union Oil center and dock there—then down to San Diego, Port San Luis. Madeone trip to Santa Diego Guatemala, and allthis was on oil and gas tankers. So I got to bean old tanker-hand in a short time after twoor three or more trips, and particularly on oneship.

And, of course, by then, I was anacknowledged, known, left-wing member ofthe union, and the SUP was trying to get theships and was creating all kinds of hanky-panky with the company. They wanted verymuch to control those ships for the SIU. Andin that they were coastwise, it was possible

Tships on the coast that the NMU had prettymuch control of supplying crews for. And Isailed for that whole year and part of the nextyear on the LP St. Clair. And I think oneshort trip I made on the SS Victor Kelly, laterin the year, but I became an old hand on theLP St. Clair.

I was sailing coastwise ships, because Ididn’t want to take long trips abroad. I wastrying to make that slow adjustment aboutleaving the sea, by getting back every coupleof weeks instead of every few months. Backto a home base and being able to stay overfor a trip, maybe, you know, for a week ortwo or three or four weeks at home.

But, you know, I was elected delegate; Iwas ship’s delegate for a whole year on thatdamn ship. We’d come in every two weeks,go up to Seattle, up to the Columbia River,those two little ports . . . .

Kd: Astoria.


for groups that knew each other to get onthese ships. So I had a coterie of five or sixguys. [laughter] We were all red-hot reds.

And by the way, within that year the shipgot to be known among company stiffs as the“Little Kremlin.” [laughter] And the phonies,though, as we called the right-wingers, wouldsometimes come on the ship, sent on by theright-wing faction in our union to try toundermine our position and take over theship.

This was the period when we were get-ting ready for the NMU convention in NewYork, at the end of the year, which was a veryimportant event. It was the first post-warconvention, so the issues were very sharpabout what the union’s position was going tobe. Since most of the people going to theconvention were going to be delegates fromships, the idea was to get on the ships andget elected delegate. So I knew I was goingto be, because I had been a delegate on theship. [laughter]

And the phonies would come aboard, andthey’d stay one trip, but they’d figured theycouldn’t get anywhere. They put up their lit-erature, and we had ours all over the place,and at our meetings, you know, we’d laugh atthem. We’d just call them the company stiffs,the stooges, right-wing stooges, and they werea lousy lot anyway. I mean, they were dis-gusting.

When I look back, I mean, they reallywere. It wasn’t just because of their positions.They were a scroungy bunch. Anybody whowas scroungy in our group straightened uppretty quick after a while, you know. But theywere just scroungy. Usually heavy drinkersand very right wing and anti-communist andall that.

Dow Wilson, a friend of mine, was dele-gate on the Victor Kelly. And there were twoor three other guys on ships. So the Union

Oil ships were pretty much in the hands ofthe Left, and we wanted to keep it that way,at least for the convention. And I got alongpretty good with that crew. I was a good sea-man, and I learned about tankers prettyquickly, and I’d work on the ship and also onunion business very well. And there was alot of information on the ship. I could type,and I could turn out material and type upthe meetings. I think I was accepted and likedby most of the crew.

How about officers or, I mean, the com-pany . . . ?

I don’t remember having any trouble. Infact, I remember on the LP St. Clair, they allsort of knew me, and they knew I was a redand would make jokes. But I don’t rememberhaving any altercations about things.

Did you feel you were listened to if you had beefsthat you carried forward?

They weren’t big beefs. These were fairlynew ships, and things were fairly clean, andthe crews were fairly efficient. It was our jobas left-wingers to see to it our ship was well-run, that the crew knew their job and didtheir work, so that if there was a beef, we hadsomething to work with.

Now, there’s the kind of a ship from theold Wobbly anarchistic orientation, whereyou did what you wanted. “Goddamn it, thecompany can screw themselves, or we’ll tossthings overboard, or to hell with it.”

On the Left, there was this kind of feel-ing, “You got to do a good job.” And whenyou’re in a work situation, that’s important.And the party members, the trade unionsknew that; you had to be a good worker. Youhad to do your job, or nobody’s going to lis-ten to you about anything. You’ll just be a


freeloader. “What are you doing? You can’teven do the job. Get the hell out,” you know.

So we felt it was very important that themembers of the crew that were known as theLeft did their job. We were very hard on thosethat screwed up. I would say, dictatorial, youknow. [laughter]

We had little meetings, or at the ship’smeetings, we’d just turn on guys. A lot of criti-cism; we took this idea of self-criticism veryseriously.

This antagonized a lot of regular mem-bers of the crew, and certainly the right wing,the idea of self-criticism, you know. “Now,why in the hell did you do that?” I mean,“you better apologize to the crew for the posi-tion you put us all in.” It was almost aschoolmarmish kind of an attitude. Never-theless, it worked, and we had a verywell-organized crew.

I felt it was a home. That’s a joke at sea.“He’s made the ship a home, and you can’tget him off the ship.”

And so it was called the “Little Kremlin”for all that year and into the next. And I waselected the delegate to the convention.

Kathy and I went out to New York onthe train. In those days, we took the train,and we had a great trip with three or fourother guys from the union, Pat and . . . .

Kd: It was wonderful.

Oh, you enjoyed it, really?

Kd: Oh, yes.

You never told me. You said you enjoyedgoing to New York, but you enjoyed the tripon the train?

“And I was elected the delegate to the convention.”


Kd: I don’t remember the train. [laugh-ter]

I do! [laughter] I do! for three, four days.

Kd: I remember the trip coming homevery well, because we drove, and that waswild!

You know, that’s right, we came back witha party in the car. But, no, going out there,don’t you remember us going out to the smok-ing car? You probably decided to go to bedthen. We’d stay up all night arguing politicsand trade union . . . .

Kd: I probably did. [laughter]

Now, where was Anya?

Oh, Anya was left with her grandparents.Oh, we wouldn’t have taken her out on thisparticular trip. It was wild. When was theunion meeting? Oh, it was the end ofSeptember. This was at the end of the strikewhen we pretty well . . . . No, this was theend of a strike threat, because each June 15and each September was a new period ofnegotiations, and there was always the poten-tiality of strikes at those periods. But this wasthe end of September, when we met in NewYork. And how long did that last? It was abouta month, three weeks in New York.

Kd: Oh, I don’t think . . . .

It was an enormous meeting with hun-dreds of delegates. And I think out of theseven Union Oil ships, most of them haddelegates who were politically left. Four orfive of them quit.

The crew had to elect you and give you awritten program, a set of issues that were

important to the crew. So my crew did that.I typed it; I had the typewriter. I got elected,I would say, unanimously.

Well, there was one guy, one poor guy—I’ll never forget him—who voted against me.And I was very hard on him, and then Ilearned that he couldn’t read or write. Hewas a really deprived character from a veryrural background, and he was very right-wing.He was something of a tool of the Right, ayoung guy, and he used to sit in the meetingsand sing that old song [sings], “There are go-ing to be some changes made,” a popular songat that time.

And he would sit in the back mumblingthis song, and we’d have to shut him up.[laughter] I mean, he meant it, because hewanted some changes in the structure of lead-ership.

And then I learned he couldn’t read atone meeting. I turned it over to him. I said,“Look, you’re making so much noise, here,you run the meeting and bring up anythingyou want. Here is the last resolution of thecrew.” This was during electing me to dele-gate. And he looked at it, and it was so sad. Ifelt crushed. I felt like such a bastard. He waslooking at it and making up stuff as he wentalong. He was making up what it was, andkept going down the line. The whole crewstarted to snicker, and I felt so awful. Youknow, I didn’t want to expose him or any-thing, because obviously he would die ratherthan have people know he couldn’t read.

And so I said, “That’s great, you know.Fine. Let’s have a vote,” you know. And itended up where he was running the meet-ing, that was voting for me. [laughter]

But I’ll never forget that and beinghumbled by realizing, you know, that thispoor guy was not dumb, just wrong; that hefelt so badly about it, he was making thingsup. You know, mouthing it, and it was awful.


So, anyway, aside from him, I think I wasunanimously elected. So we got a paid tripto New York.

[laughter] New York City!

New York City, across country. And whenwe got there, we could have stayed at a sortof a seamen’s hotel or whatever it was . . . .

Kd: Oh, we started out in a seamen’shotel of some kind. I can’t remember whereit was.

Oh, did I take you to the Seamen’sChurch Institute? I’ll bet you we did.

Kd: We stayed some . . . we were withall these same guys.

We stayed at the Seamen’s Church Insti-tute. It was not bad, kind of a run-down,frowsy place, but it was clean and then wehad friends . . . Kathy had some close friends.

Kd: The Goldwassers. [laughter]

Goldwassers, who we knew at Berkeley,whose parents lived in New York, and theywere in New York, and we got invited to stayat their place on Forty . . .

Kd: Central Park West. This huge apart-ment.

Overlooking Central Park. I felt reallyvery funny about this.

Kd: I just loved it.

I’m sure you did! [laughter]

I just didn’t feel it was right.

You probably had to dress in disguise when youwere leaving the apartment. [laughter]

I don’t know. I mean, the guys that I waswith were guys that would have jumped at itif they could have done it. No, it wasn’t that.I just personally felt I wanted to be downthere grubbing around, doing, you know, thetrade union thing, but I felt it meant a lot toKathy, and I have to admit it was more com-fortable. [laughter]

Kd: It was wonderful.

And they were just great people, suchnice people. Oh, and the woman . . . whatwas her name?

Kd: Annie?

No, who had been Harry Bridges’s law-yer?

Kd: Oh. Gee, what was her name? I can’tremember.

Anyway, one of the sisters of the grouphad been Harry Bridges’s lawyer.

Kd: I can’t remember her name. Anyway,she was Harry Bridges’s lawyer. [Carol WeissKing (1895-1952)] They were very liberal,leftish people. She was a very successful law-yer, and she had been a social worker. Andher statement was, “The only thing peoplein the ghettos could do is have a revolution.There’s no way anything good is going tohappen with the current . . . .” This was backin the 1940s.

Well, that was bourgeois idealism.[laughter]


Kd: Well, she was very involved.

Oh, she was quite a lady. Yes.

Kd: And she and her mother had con-tributed a great deal of money to Wiltlick,which was a very famous school in UpperState New York that took ghetto kids andtried to, you know, give them a chance inlife. And who is this? This is a very well-known black man who did very well.

So, anyway, we had this great place. ButI didn’t see much of Kathy, because I wasdown at the convention. Oh, god, they metfor ten hours and twelve hours a day if notlonger. Oh, more than that, because I was uphalf the night. Pat Tobin and I were on oneof the resolutions committees and wereassigned the foreign policy resolution, andthere were two or three resolutions. In fact,in the sixth convention report our resolutionsare there.

Pat and two or three other guys, we wouldthrow these ideas around and I was the typ-ist. So here I was typing up the resolutionsthat were presented the next day at the meet-ing.

And as far as I remember, all of our reso-lutions went through. My foreign policyresolution . . . I was very proud of it, and Idon’t remember a word of it. But I made themain contribution to that.

And so we were up half the night (andhad to be on the floor at nine in the morn-ing), many nights, writing up resolutions anddrinking at a little bar near the place, an Irishbar of the old kind, you know, where theyhad a bar lunch, with pickled herring and allsorts of big, sour pickles and lunch meats andspreads and everything, and beautiful breadsall laid out for free. [laughter] And you’d gothere and sit and eat and have a beer. So we’d

go down there in the middle of the night.But Kathy was in the lap of luxury. [laughter]

Kd: I loved it. It was great.

West Forty-second, was it?

Kd: Yes, Central Park West.

Central Park West. All I remember is thebathroom.

Kd: Huge. Like on the third floor, and itwas . . . gee, there must have been five bed-rooms, and it was a really big place.

It wasn’t so luxurious.

Kd: No, it wasn’t.

It was just grand, nice, old-style NewYork, bare apartment.

Kd: They had had five children in theirfamily, and most of the kids were grown andleft, and I was a friend of the daughter, and Ihad also met the parents. So they took us inwithout a word. And I remember it was ratherembarrassing, because a lot of these guys fromthe waterfront and from the conventionwould be calling in the middle of the night.They would come in and wake us up![laughter]

But I remember sitting . . . they had thesegreat old-fashioned windows, big panes ofglass, and you could open them and get thebreeze from Central Park. And then the greatbig, old-fashioned enamel tub in the bath-room. And you’d turn on the water, and it’dcome out like a gusher. And then you wouldlie in there looking out over Central Park.I’ll never forget that.


Kd: That was wonderful.

That was wonderful. But I saw very littleof it. The meetings were wild, and there wasa tremendous amount of contention. It wasthe beginning of the rift . . . .

How many people would you say were at thisconvention?

I’d say eight hundred who were delegates.There were a lot more people there.

Now, were you elected specifically to be a dele-gate for the convention?

Yes. Yes. I was a ship’s delegate, anyway.

Right. But in addition to that, you had to be . . . .

I had to be elected to be the conventiondelegate. You had to be very formally electedfrom a ship or from a union hall, as some-body who was working in a union hall, youhad to be formally elected by the member-ship.

So I remember this enormous hall. Iwould say there was six, seven hundred righton the floor, and then hundreds up in galler-ies and everybody probably yelling to get tothe mike. Joseph Curran, who was presidentof the union at that time, was in the middleof a great rift within the union, between theLeft and the Right. It was the beginning ofthe breakup that created a right-wing move-ment in the union, and Curran became reallythe leader of the right wing and, of course,was our enemy. He was our target.

He had the power of the right wing inthe rest of the unions, and even the AF of Lwas with him, and the press adored him. Andhe was saying, “We got to get rid of the com-munist control of this union. This union’s got

to be given back to the rank and file.” Andhe had a group . . . there was a group calledthe Rank and File Caucus, which was the pro-Curran group. And during the conventionthis began to come up, this deep split.

We had seen Curran as a moderate leaderwho was friendly to the leftists and the Right.And then we saw him emerge from that meet-ing as a voice of not only the Right, but of achanged, new policy union, where he wassupporting elements of the Taft-Hartley Bill,where he was beginning to support the SIUand Lundeberg, and calling for unity betweenthe AFL unions and the NMU and otherCIO unions, and began to work to pull ourunion out of the CMU, to destroy the Com-mittee for Maritime Unity on the coast.

So during 1947 we saw the weakening ofthe unity of the unions on the West Coast,and the NMU was no longer a strong mem-ber of that group. We were on the West Coastin San Francisco, but no longer as a reallypositive force. I mean, there was too muchdissension within the union. Every meetingthat I went to at the union hall in SanFrancisco was a melee, was a riot of pro- andanti-Curran forces.

And, of course, we were anti-Curran.And I think we realized at the time this wasthe beginning of the closing-in on the union.The anti-communist movement was reallygoing strong. Curran was heading it up—theleader of our union and of a strong union hadturned right. So that was happening at thatconvention.

And as exciting as that meeting conven-tion was, it was agonizing to see this happen.All the old leaders of the union—FerdinandSmith, Blackie Myers, and a number of left-wing leaders—were beginning to be shovedaside, and a bunch of the right-wingers werebeginning to take hold.


The membership was very confused.There was a very strong left membership inthe union, but there was a lot of confusionamong the rest of the union. And Curran hada lot of clout, and he also had, we now know,ship owner backing.

But that wasn’t suspected at the time?

It was claimed and suspected, and we feltwe knew it, but now we did know it. Not thatit was dirty work. He was right wing. It waslike becoming a Republican after being a left-wing Democrat. I mean, he shifted his view,and he always wanted to get rid of the com-munist leaders, those that he was workingwith. He began to feel they were trying toovershadow him, and they were smarter;there’s no doubt about that. They had a lotof support from the union, and he wanted toget rid of them. It was politics within theunion as well as politics outside the union.

Oh, but the New York papers were prais-ing him during the convention. We used tobring them in. And some of our people wouldget up and say, “Look at what the New YorkTimes is saying. ‘Curran bashes reds withinunion.’” I mean, “This is our president?” Hewas becoming the “golden-haired boy.”

So all this was happening. But it was avery exciting and marvelous meeting. I’dnever seen a big trade union meeting before,watching how that was organized and seeingall these characters, for god’s sakes, managingto carry out some really very complicated andmarvelous organizational things, was some-thing to see. All of our committees weremeeting, and the commitment of people, youknow, meeting at one o’clock in the morn-ing to turn out a resolution and actually beingthere and staying sober . . . . [laughter] Imean, even that, you know, was wonderful.

And, so anyway, then we came backby . . . whose car were we in?

Kd: Well, it was . . .

Somebody was driving it.

Kd: . . . Janet.

Oh, Janet Tobin.

Kd: . . . Roberts.

Oh. Oh, Phillip Tobin.

Kd: And his . . . .

Kathy, your memory is marvelous.

Kd: I don’t know whether they were mar-ried or whether they were just, you know,girlfriend at that this time—Dagmar?

Oh, and Dagmar.

Kd: Beauful?

Oh, yes.

Kd: I forget who else. Was it Ikenson,Trot?

Oh, Trot was with us?

Kd: Somebody like that.

No, Trot wouldn’t have . . . .

Kd: And Pat Tobin. It was a crowded car.

I’ll say! [laughter]


With this packed car we drove from NewYork all the way back to the West Coast.

Kd: Yes. We went through West Virginia,where I’d never been in my life. And it wasbeautiful, you know, like everything you everread about Appalachia, and really eye-open-ing for me. I loved the trip; it was marvelous.

I hardly remember . . . .

Kd: We got to see so much.

I hardly recall, but it’s just nice to knowwe did it. Oh, my god. Did Pat and Janet getalong? They fought so much.

Kd: They fought a lot.

Yes. [laughter] They were both membersof the party, and they fought over politics.They fought over everything.

Kd: She was very aggressive.

And she knew about male chauvinism,and damn it, it wasn’t going to happen toher! [laughter] This was, you know, the accu-sation of chauvinism, male chauvinism, forgod’s sakes. This is no longer just a guy notdoing right. This is a damn chauvinist, and,“You’re no goddamn Marxist,” you know.“What kind of a Marxist are you, for god’ssakes?”

Kd: All words and a lot . . . . [laughter]

Nevertheless, it was the opening way tothe whole movement. I mean, I admired that.As crazy as it was and nutty as a lot of it was,who else was doing it?

Kd: That’s true.

And this is such an eye-opener for me, because Imean, I really did think that it all started in 1960.[laughter]

No. And it was going on at least ten yearsbefore then and longer in the party—I wouldsay back to the origins of the party. But itreally began to take off in the 1930s and1940s.

Kd: Yes.

So, anyway, we came back, and there wewere. And I went back to the LP St. Clair.Oh, yes, during the convention, as I recall, Ikept getting telegrams from my ship, fromJohnny Ara and Floyd Hayes, who later gotkilled (he got killed in New Orleans, orga-nizing). Johnny Ara, a Basque kid from . . .I’m not sure, Nevada or Arizona, but he wasthe Spanish Civil War-type, you know. Tooyoung for the civil war, but he came from thatilk in the Basque community. And, of course,he and I were buddies on that ship. And Floyd

Left to right: Floyd Hayes, Johnny Ara, andWarren d’Azevedo on the LP St. Clair.


realize that I only got the mike twice thewhole time I was there. But because this allgot reported on . . . you know, anything fromships had to be reported at the convention,so the minutes of the meetings included anymessages read from ships.

Well, LP St. Clair was always there, youknow, to Whitey d’Azevedo. [laughter] Sothat was wonderful. And they really weregeared up, the whole ship. It’s amazing. Theywere doing their work but having meetings,setting meetings every couple of days aboutthe convention. What a period! I don’t thinkanybody does that anymore.

Kd: Probably not.

Well, one of the things that I think was happen-ing was that the labor movement also created thisidentity and pride of association. But I think partof the myth that we perpetuate now is that labor,

“And so I’d get these telegrams almost every day.” Telegram sent to delegate d’Azevedo at the NMUconvention.

Hayes was a great big lunk of a guy, very, veryleft—trade union left. He was in the party,but he didn’t give a damn about party policyor ideology. He just believed that, “Workingguys stick together, and you got to stick it tothe ship owners in their ass. To hell withthem.” It was that kind of thing. But he wasloyal. [laughter] Loyal and committed.

Johnny and Floyd were left to be in chargeof the ship, I mean from the union point ofview. We weren’t “in charge” of anything. I’mtalking as though we owned the ship—wepractically did. And the rest of the crew wasin very good shape; good steward’s depart-ment, all for us, and all that.

And so I’d get these telegrams almostevery day from the LP St. Clair. I felt won-derful. You know, “Keep up the good work,Whitey! Hey! Hey, Whitey, give them hell.Don’t let them do this.” And sometimespolicy statements too, you know. They didn’t


that kind of labor, is merely a step that immi-grants have to go through on their way to becomesomething else.

Right.

And that the land of opportunity will automat-ically enable people to leave that life. But fromwhat I’m getting here, is that there were peoplewho . . . .

That was their life.

And it was a sense of pride.

To many. Not everybody. Some peoplewere just doing their job or their work. Butthere was always a contingent in there, prettysizable, at least during that period of the Left,that felt emotionally, and in some basic waycommitted to that work and to that domainof life—working-class struggles kind of thing,trade unions, and seamanshipness.

Well, it’s different if you perceive that as some-thing of a stage or a phase that people are forcedto go through. It’s different than if you perceiveit as a life that people will stay in.

Well, there are a lot of people who wantto do something else, who wanted to stayashore, get jobs and all that, but didn’t feelthey could.

And probably, if they’d had a choice, wantedmore for their children. Is that part of the . . . ?

Oh, yes. Well, there weren’t many . . .those were the days in which you didn’t heartoo much about bringing up children. I had.I heard about it because Kathy was a mainpurveyor . . .

Kd: It was very important.

. . . [laughter] purveyor and propagan-dist of that area. But, yes, you know, I wouldsay not everybody felt the same way aboutthat. There were a lot of seamen, at least,whose families were somewhat at a distance,or they saw occasionally. They’d think aboutthem, worry about them and all that.

Kd: They led very separate lives, I think.

Yes, there was a little difference betweenthe seamen and the ILWU that workedashore. The ILWU had families, had homes,they were a settled group of men whose fami-lies were there and whose women wereinvolved in the union. There were women’sauxiliaries and all kinds of activities forwomen in the union. And a lot of talk aboutwomen’s rights and giving positions towomen and women’s struggles and things ofthat kind, at least on the Left. But seamen, Idon’t know how much that’s changed. Imean, I don’t know if anybody’s done a studyof seamen these days. There used to be someold ones. But that would be a wonderfulthing.

It would.

I might do that in my old age, which isnot far away. [laughter] That NMU conven-tion, the Sixth National Convention inSeptember and October, was a real turningpoint in the history of the union, at least as Iknew it, in the time that I had been familiarwith it. It had been a rather staunchly pro-gressive union under progressive and leftleadership all during the war and up until the1946 strike. But then along with a very largemovement in the country, which is part of


the whole building up of the Cold War ori-entation, there seemed to be a concertedmove against trade unions generally.

Employers and the government were us-ing the Taft-Hartley Bill in every way thatthey could to not only discourage unionmembership but to undermine the hiring hallpractices of the union and to build up resis-tance to any kind of a strike action andcooperation among unions with regard tostrike action. And even the Smith Act wascoming into effect. Now the propaganda wasthat the trade unions were run by commu-nists who were out to undermine thegovernment and doing everything they couldto foment dissent against the government.

There was the beginning of a real setbackin the unity and solidarity of the maritimetrade unions and with regard to other tradeunions in the country. The issues at the 1947NMU convention were clear but extremelycomplicated with regard to factions that hadbegun to develop within the union. Therewas what we began to think of as the JosephCurran faction. He had been the head of theNMU for a number years and had the sup-port of the Left and was to considerabledegree cooperative with the most progressiveforces in the union. But with the conven-tion it became clear that he had anotheragenda.

It was apparent that we were now enter-ing an entirely different period. Here we’dhad a successful strike, and the Committeefor Maritime Unity, at least on the WestCoast, was in the process of developing aneven stronger unity with other unions in thearea.

Among the moves that they were mak-ing, this right-wing caucus . . . in the firstplace, they not only took these disruptivepositions at the meetings, but they were orga-nizing alternate meetings before and during

the convention in which they were layingout a program for developing control of eachof the sessions, placing people throughout thehall who could be called upon by signals toraise objections or to boo certain of the speak-ers. Also, they actually kept certain of thepeople who had come to the other meetingsthat they had called, actually kept a lot ofthe delegates out. A few of them weredumped and roughed up. It was the begin-ning of goonism in the union in a way thatwe had not seen before.

Did you have any anticipation that this was go-ing to happen before you went?

Yes, there was some feeling that there wasa growing right-wing organization. The cau-cus had already formed. But we didn’t realizethat Curran had gone as far in being part ofthis kind of movement until he got to theconvention. The convention really gave himthe opportunity to expose this whole new setof tactics that he was getting for his ownpower, to get rid of the Left, because he feltthat they were interfering with his maneu-verability.

For example, he began to talk about pull-ing out of the Committee for Maritime Unity,that the NMU was being compromised bybeing part of the CMU on the West Coastand even on the East Coast. It became veryclear.

When I say “he,” I’m referring to Curran,but nevertheless, it wasn’t just Curran. It wasa fairly sizable but relatively small groupwithin the union, a very effective group, car-rying on this program.

The other aspect of it—they were care-ful on this—was to actually oppose anymovement to support foreign seamen, todevelop any kind of cooperative role with for-eign seamen’s unions. Even with the Puerto


Rican and the Mexican members of theunion who had been there all during the pastfew years, there was on Curran’s part, really,a movement to diminish the number of non-citizen people in the union, which meant,really, minorities. They did everything theycould at that convention to minimize or slowdown any kind of resolutions with regard toblacks in the labor movement and for blacksin the union to have any particular support.

For example, there was really a terriblething going on in New Orleans and through-out the South, and even in our own union.There were real discriminatory and racistpolicies. And they disrupted any attempt todiscuss this or bring it forward. Everybody wasvery concerned about the New Orleans case,where one of the local union officials wasopenly going along with the Southern pro-gram of maintaining separate crews—blackcrews and white crews—or discriminatingagainst blacks. And we had a number of orga-nizers down there trying to do somethingabout that. In fact, that’s one of the placeswhere a friend of mine got dumped and killedfor taking part in organization.

It was very hard to develop a program onthese things because of the disruption andresistance to doing so on the part of Curran’sgroup. They even talked about compromis-ing our position on the Taft-Hartley Bill, ofgoing along at least with the letter of the lawon the hiring hall aspect, mainly because theysaw it as a way of doing the job they wantedto do, to get rid of the communists and theLeft. Curran’s group saw this as a way of weak-ening their position by compromising on theTaft-Hartley Bill.

All this was going on at that convention.I got elected to the resolutions and educa-tion committee of the convention, and wesaw this going on. There were one or twomembers of the caucus there, and in every

way they tried to slow down the work thatwe were doing or to change our focus to ei-ther a useless generalization or to take awayany of the gains.

So it was real sabotage.

Well, it’s hard to call it sabotage. It was adifferent program. I suppose it’s what anygroup does that’s a minority and has a strongagenda. They do try to interfere with anddiscredit and disrupt the work of the groupthey’re opposed to. I can’t call it sabotage. Imean, I guess in a way it was, but that’s notthe way I look at it. It was a warfare of ide-ologies, of ways of looking at things.

Was there one particular spokesperson for theLeft that was a focal point for Curran’s . . . ?

Oh, we had a number of them: FerdinandSmith, who was a black member of the NMUcentral committee; Blackie Myers, a longtime member of the union and a highly ad-mired seaman and leader during all the earlierstrikes and a very clear spokesman for the Leftat the meetings; and oh, a number of otherpeople. Because actually, there was a verystrong progressive group within the unionand in the leadership.

So this was Curran’s attempt to under-mine that control so that he and his groupwould have more power, that he himselfwould have more leeway. And we suspectedhim of all kinds of secret deals with the AFof L, unions, with the ship owners, with thepoliticians. A lot of that, I think, was possi-bly true, because in his view, he was savingthe union from the communists. You know,this is just a whole different agenda.

And the degree to which he was doingthis at the meeting . . . I think this discon-certed us. We weren’t expecting that quick a


shift on his part. We found ourselves fight-ing it at the convention, which had nothappened before. We found ourselves defend-ing ourselves against his moves and his group’smoves and struggling to get our positionacross.

So I was helping to write the foreignpolicy resolution, the resolution on educa-tion, the resolution on a Third Party. That’swhere I began to get very interested in theThird Party, because we were pressing for theThird Party.

Now we had two different oppositions inthere. First, the caucus people looked uponthe Third Party as a loser anyway; why wastethe energy of labor on this? If anything, youknow, we should be presenting our own can-didates, and who’s going to beat theRepublicans and Democrats anyway? Thenthere was another position from theTrotskyists. And here’s where I saw them atwork. The position that the few that we knewof were taking and disseminating within theCurran caucus was essentially the idea, “No,we can’t support Wallace and people like thatwho are petty bourgeois Social Democrats.We should be pushing for socialism, weshould be pushing for a labor candidate forpresident, not these representatives of theSocial Democrats in American life, et cetera,et cetera.” This, to me, was typical of theTrotskyists’ position. You raise impossible ide-alistic ends that seem almost to be plannedto disrupt any kind of effective tactics in apolitical movement.

And, of course, our view was that theDemocrats and Republicans are both anti-labor, doing a hell of a job on us. Look what’shappening with the Taft-Hartley Bill and thenew Marshall Plan coming up. The fact that60,000 seamen’s have gone down the drainand 1,000 ships are going into mothballs, for

which the ship owners are getting money forevery ship that goes into mothballs.

Every ship that was sunk in the war, theygot insurance coverage. They made billions.The figure that we were tossing around waseight to fifteen billion dollars of tax payer’smoney went to the ship owners during andat the end of the war, and they were the onesresisting even a dollar an hour raise, youknow, for seamen. And they had this greatpool of looted dough they had gathered dur-ing the war. So that was our position.

Truman and the Democrats, except for afew . . . I mean, there were people likeWallace and a number of other congressmenand senators who had a fairly good position,but they were swamped by the political strat-egy that Democrats were using at thebeginning of the Cold War, which was, “Yougotta suppress these left-wing unions that areinterfering with the development of our poli-cies internationally.” And that’s why foreignflagships were encouraged. Panama had atone point more ships in their merchantmarine than the United States. [laughter] Imean, these were American ship owners fly-ing Panamanian flags. God, what were someof the other countries? Argentina, Honduras,later Liberian flags.

How about Greece? Was Greece a big player?

And Greece. Greece, of course, was undera terribly despotic regime at that point. Andthe Democratic Party was developing thestrategy with the European aid program [theMarshall Plan] to send a great deal of moneyto the governments of Greece and to Turkey.Turkey had been neutral during the war, andGreece had strong fascist elements.

And you know, the whole plan was tosupport the very countries that we had been


fighting. Germany and Japan were to get thelion’s share of the aid. Why? So that we couldtake over the industries that they had andmake use of their expertise in production andbusiness, that we would control by givingmoney. And the countries that had workedwith us—not necessarily European countries,but all the little countries of the world thathad been part of the anti-fascist movement—we weren’t giving anything to.

And you know, all this kind of thing cameout in discussions during the convention, sothat our view was that a Third Party was avery likely thing for us to be supporting, andHenry Wallace had been in the Rooseveltadministration and probably one of the mosteloquent spokesmen for the Roosevelt posi-tion and very pro-labor. Even though he wasbeing called a communist in the press or adupe of the communists and supported bycommunist fronts throughout the country,nevertheless, he had made it very clear thathe was not a communist. Nevertheless, who-ever supported the program [includingcommunists] as he saw it, they would beacceptable within the Third Party. In fact, Ithink he made a remark at one speech thathe could expect by polls that had been done,at least one million or two million votes rightoff the bat from American voting, and thatif he would denounce the communists, hecould get four or five million more. [laugh-ter] He said he wasn’t going to do that. Well,of course this really went over great with theLeft.

The idea was that this would at least dem-onstrate the feelings of the American people,to support a Third Party under these particu-lar conditions. So I wrote a couple of theresolutions about the Third Party, that weshould be supporting it, that got accepted bythe convention. But that doesn’t necessarilymean anything under these conditions, be-

cause you could get resolutions accepted andthen undermined, and then nobody pays anyattention to them.

And then while this was going on, I hada very effective and good connection withmy ship, the LP St. Clair on the West Coast.Oh, here’s the crew: Johnny Ara, FloydHayes, Ron Elon, a number of other guys sail-ing up and down the coast sending me dailydispatches and suggestions for resolutions.[laughter] It was just marvelous. And everyday, I’d get this little packet from the LP St.Clair, “Whitey, we’ve had a meeting, and wewant you to raise . . . .”

They didn’t realize that I got the mikethree times during that three weeks and that,you know, it was almost impossible to getanything said on the floor. The only way Ihad was to use the resolutions committee toget some of these things through, or in ThePilot, which was coming out, the union paper,in which some of the letters and resolutionsfrom ships appeared. Well, our ship had moreresolutions and more letters in The Pilot thanany others. They were just wonderful. Theseguys were really working!

And I feel so badly as I look back on allthat energy these guys had developed, andthey had this crew solemnly behind them,and they were also getting the other ships inthe Union Oil fleet to send in resolutions.They were writing resolutions for them tosign and send in. And I was sending themstatements, asking the ship to sign them andsend it back to me, so that I could get it be-fore the resolutions committee. And so thatwas a very exciting part of that and to me,very endearing as I remember back, whathappens with a group of men under theseconditions when they feel something canhappen.

Of course, I kept them informed aboutwhat the Curran caucus was doing back there,


and they would send telegrams. They didn’thave any money, but they’d take up a collec-tion and send a telegram denouncingCurran’s position on this or that or the otherthing, and then letting me know that therewere moves on the West Coast ships on thepart of Lundeberg and others to take over theships.

There was one ship, the Victor Kelly, andthey were getting very worried about the crewon that ship that was a caucus ship and wasdisagreeing with almost every one of theprograms that we were developing in the leftagenda. And so they were letting me know. Ifortunately have saved some of those, andthere were wonderful dispatches back andforth that we had.

And I was amazed that they could do it.These guys were working every day full-time,

you know, three watches, going up and downthe coast, hooking up for oil at the variousports on the coast, and then somehow orother they managed to get these damn tele-grams and dispatches off. And that was awonderful sign of what can happen in anopen, democratic, progressive union.

It just didn’t have a chance to go any-where. I mean, when I look back, this tellsyou what happens at moments of greatresurgence in movements like the labormovement. There are moments in whichpeople coalesce, are able to cooperate in waysthat they don’t at any other time, and thatthey feel they’re doing something important.So that, to me, was something of value.

66EDUCATING UNION MEMBERS

HERE WAS SO MUCH going on atthat time that had its roots in all theissues taking place in American life.

United Nations, and of course, some of theseothers were against having anything to dowith the United Nations. You know, the oldline, “America must solve its own problems.We can’t let ourselves be led by these foreignagents, some of them which we were at warwith.”

There was this absolute chaos of ideaswith some sort of central major momentumbased on an enlightened view of the world.And I think of that ship, the LP St. Clair.You know, these guys were reading everything.They were reading international affairs. A lotof it was left-wing literature that was beingsent to them or that they had picked up, buta lot of it was just the regular press. And theywere reading all this stuff and beginning toget ideas about it.

And so on the education committee Iwrote a resolution—and there were two otherresolutions—on developing an NMU or aseamen’s education committee on a nationallevel in which all new members of unionswould have to go through an education pro-cess about the history of the labor movement,about the role of their own union in the labor

TPeople were very aware and alert to what wasgoing on, and internationally—not only thecrew on the St. Clair, but all over. Progressivecrews—I keep using the word progressive, andI mean left-wing oriented crews—were send-ing telegrams to us in support of theHonduran seamen, the French workers whowere on strike and the seamen who had aparticular strike during 1947 or 1948, supportfor these international unions, denouncingour policy in Chile and Guatemala and U.S.support of fascist regimes in South Americaand in Europe. A lot of awareness that, youknow, you just don’t find so much todayamong people, because there’s not this kindof excitement and hope that organization getssomewhere, and the labor movement had itat that time.

It had the momentum of the 1930s and1940s and the short-lived post-war excite-ment about how things can change, the worldcan change. The UN was having its sessions.We also had resolutions in support of the


movement, that most of these guys didn’tknow, that they got by osmosis. And foreignseamen or non-citizen seamen or seamenwithout much education in our country orthe language would be given English instruc-tion, would be given instruction in how touse libraries, and all this kind of . . . .

So, you know, it was an exciting time.And there was a lot of really strong supportbehind us for this kind of . . . . So those weretwo resolutions which had gotten throughand were accepted, you know, sounded good,“Fine, let’s do that.” But my view was, and Ithink there were many others that felt that,each local hall should have an educationcommittee in which there would be theseclasses available to seamen ashore.

And the California Labor School, ofcourse, was a perfect place for that. It wasalready set up, and so there was a lot of thiskind of education already going on. I eventaught some of those classes.

I did it at the union hall on black history,Afro-American history. That’s where I beganto get interested in it after reading DuBoisand Herskovits and all that. I don’t think Iwas very expert, but, you know, I was bring-ing out this kind of material.

Was the idea that it was mainly for African-American people to learn about their . . . ?

No. The idea was all seamen should knowthis history and a kind of a left history of theUnited States—Herbert Aptheker’s work,and even some of the communist literature,like William Z. Foster, people like that, whohad written on American history from a leftperspective. There was a lot of literature ofthis kind around, and we were feeding thatkind of literature out. No, not just for blackseamen. No, mainly for whites, because theposition of the Communist Party was you

don’t go out and teach blacks about discrimi-nation, you work on white chauvinists, youwork on whites. In fact, any black memberof the union would tell us that forthrightly.

I can remember very well on a Union Oilship I was on, in which there were two blackmembers of the deck gang, and I would . . . Ithink the left-wingers on the ship and thecrew were competing with each other howmuch they could talk to these guys and preachto them about party policy and to recruitthem. [laughter]

There was this sort of recruiting frenzygoing on, and it was kind of silly, as we weretold in no uncertain terms. I remember thisone young guy who I liked very much. Hewas a very bright, eager, open young guyfrom—where was he from?—Louisiana orsomething. He’d had a very rough life, buthe had some education, and he was verybright, read a lot. And I used to go in andtalk to him, you know, on the ship when hewas off of watch and where I was. And I’dtalk to him about my opinions and what heshould read and things like that, and he saidto me, “Will you shut up?” [laughter]

He said, “I don’t give a goddamn aboutall that.” [laughter] “What are you talking tome for? Leave me alone about that. If youhaven’t got anything else to talk about, if youcan’t . . . . I mean, you know, this is no wayto talk to people. Haven’t you got anythingabout your own life and just daily things go-ing on and what’s going on? I’m tired oflistening to that crap,” and “Leave me aloneif that’s all you’ve got. “ [laughter]

Boy, I tell you, that hit me hard.

Oh, I bet.

Oh, and I realized the truth of what I’vealways known, you know. You don’t try totell people who have experienced what’s


going on in the world about discriminationand inequality and all that. You talk to theones that are hardest to talk to, those damnredneck bastards that are also on the ship.He says, “Go tell what’s-his-name! Go tellwhat’s-his-name what you’ve been talking tome about. He needs it. Leave me out of it.”

So we got trained in no uncertain termsabout that sort of thing. I had that happen tome a number of times.

What was the general atmosphere at . . . ? Thisis a very general question, but did you have anysense that there was a kind of a reactionary move-ment in the university system? I mean, as far aseducation was concerned, was there already amove to sort of close down on the Left?

You mean at that time?

Yes.

Yes, well, there was. That was the begin-ning of the anti-communist movement. Notthe beginning. I mean, the emergence of avery strong reaction.

Well, the picture you’ve painted, the CaliforniaLabor School is kind of this hotbed of leftist . . . .

It was a hotbed, and it was denounced asa hotbed. But the California Labor School isdifferent than, let’s say, the university, rightacross the bay, or San Francisco StateCollege.

Well, I just wondered if you were aware simul-taneously what was going on . . . ?

Oh, yes, but I wasn’t that involved. I cer-tainly knew that there were movements onthat campus against the Left—quiet though,because universities were very progressive at

that time and to have right-wing positionswas a little difficult. However, it was there,and it was expressed in all sorts of ways andin policy. Later, I knew more about that thanI knew at the time, but certainly it was there.

But I think the university was the bul-wark of defense of the progressives. I mean,they were resisting the loyalty oaths andthings of that sort at that time. The begin-ning of loyalty oaths, the beginning ofscrutiny of people for their political opinionsand all that was just beginning, but it wasstrong and it developed much more later. ButI wasn’t involved at that time. I was involvedreally with the trade union set-up on thefront.

And before we move from that topic, I just won-dered, was there any reaction to opinion aboutthe G.I. Bill and the fact that the merchant sea-men were left out?

Oh, of course. Oh, it was one of thosebitter things that was mentioned all the time.You know, the Seaman’s Bill of Rights justsort of hung around for a couple of years un-til finally it just got the ax. The Case bill . . .I forget what year that came out. I don’t evenknow his full name. Senator Case, who de-nounced the seamen, “We can’t put them inthe same category as the loyal men who riskedtheir lives in the military, because they couldturn the guns of the ships upon the UnitedStates,” you know.

Well, you know, the reason I’m asking—and thisis kind of leaping ahead a little bit, but it reallystruck me while you were talking about your in-volvement in the education committee—that thiswould also offer a counterpart to the kind of edu-cation that the G.I.’s were getting under the G.I.Bill. And I just wondered if that incredible fluxof returning soldiers from the war created a dif-


ferent political atmosphere on campuses where itwould be harder to be critical of the government.

I think it did. But, you know, in the biguniversities that I’m aware of, that was clearlydefined as a change in orientation among thestudent body, but not that much. There wasstill . . . I mean, the 1960s were coming up.The universities were still fighting aboutwhether ROTC should have rights on thecampus and all that sort of thing. Universi-ties were also being denounced as hotbeds ofred propaganda. I suppose that a reactionaryatmosphere was there, but I don’t . . . I knowit was there, but not enough to do anythingbut exacerbate the . . .

Oh, the polarities, maybe.

. . . the polarity of the debate. And bythe time the 1960s rolled along, it was hardlya debate anymore. There was a lot of anti-war feeling, a lot of strong anti-fascist feeling,moves against anti-Semitism and all thatwere still very important in the intellectuallife of campuses.

We had some connection on the frontwith universities. There were student actioncommittees. For instance, there was a “Stu-dents for Wallace” committee that I hadconnection with the following year when Icame back. During the strikes, we would getdelegations of students from the various col-leges and universities who at times wouldcome down, help out on the picket line, takeup picket signs, express their support at meet-ings. There was a lot of that kind of thing. Idon’t think they necessarily represented themajority of students on these campuses, butthey were the left students. And yes, we wereaware of their presence. And the Third Partymovement, we had a lot of connection withthem.

The California Labor School was a kindof an intermediary with them. There were alot of intellectuals there and a lot of peoplefrom the universities and colleges. It was avery exciting kind of renaissance atmospherearound the labor school. Lots of great thingswere happening in classes, in lectures, in per-formances, various kind of theaters.

And what was the affiliation? I mean, who waspaying the teachers’ salaries?

This came from donations to the schoolfrom trade unions and others. There were alot of private donations.

Is the school still in existence?

You know, I am not sure. I don’t thinkso. I doubt very much. Right now I couldn’tpinpoint it, but I don’t think so.

It’s really an interesting phenomena.

It was a very exciting little center for yearsaround San Francisco. David Jenkens headedit up during that time, and he was a very ableguy, had done a lot of good work. And it alsowas a center for the Third Party organization,later on; and it was a meeting place where wecould go for our usual meetings, you know, ofinter-union meetings—that’s where the writ-ers’ group met, all that sort of thing. Andpeople that I knew were teaching there.

Were you doing anything with your writing inthe writers’ group at this point, or were you com-pletely caught up in . . . ?

Not at this point, no. I was going to thewriters’ group occasionally, but I wasn’t writ-ing fiction at the time, no. No, I had a full


plate, and I was very glad to be involved theway I was.

And were you teaching when you were on thiseducation committee?

Every now and then. Yes, when I was inport and particularly, you know, during thestrike. And then later on during the ThirdParty movement in 1948, I had regular classeswho were mostly Latin American, Hispanicseamen. A few blacks would turn out, but asI have said, they had their own places to go.

So were you teaching black history?

Black history and then also labor historyand then English, which I’m not very goodat—I guess maybe not as a second language,but you know, the rudiments of reading andwriting and writing essays and things of thatkind. It wasn’t very developed; it wasn’t a veryexpert kind of thing, and I wasn’t the onlyone doing it. There were others doing it too.

We had a joke about one guy—what washis name? He was a “true intellectual.” Butanyway, we used to joke about a course thathe was teaching at the labor school on his-tory of socialism—from the amoeba tosocialism [laughter]—in which he dealt withthe whole history of the universe. And peopleused to go because it was so funny.

[laughter] Oh, that’s wonderful.

Oh, what was his name? I forget it now.But you know, there were all kinds of thingsgoing on. And there were also classes thatpeople were giving on how to make out forms,how to apply for unemployment insurance,how to raise an appeal, all this kind of thing.

Did journalism ever interest you at all? I think Iasked you that once before, but it just seems likethe writing on current issues . . . .

No, first place, the opportunity didn’tpresent itself, and I don’t think I ever hadany desire to do that. No, I didn’t. It’s an inter-esting question. I don’t know why, but“journalism” is something that doesn’t appealto me, although I have written things thathave a journalistic ring to them.

Well, it’s just, you know, the whole concept ofthe power of the press, and if you’re involved ina political movement . . . .

Well, I wrote a lot of leaflets, and I wouldsend short articles to the left press and thingsof that kind.

And we don’t really have an equivalent. I mean,leaflet writing is not . . . .

Well, I did it just because it had to bedone and learned how to do it. God, at theconvention, I was writing a lot of leaflets.And later on, I think I wrote a good part ofthe leaflets for the Third Party movement outon the waterfront, you know. But that’sanother thing. I never thought of that as jour-nalism. It was propaganda—pure propaganda.[laughter]

So anyway, about teaching: I think else-where in that piece that I showed you thatI’d done on Herskovits and going to North-western, I mentioned a class I held at theNMU hall, and I was using Herskovits’s bookThe Myth of the Negro Past as a text. It hadjust come out . . . no, it had not just comeout, but it was available at the MaritimeBookshop. And myself and an African-American guy that I knew who was a member


of the union, we both gave the class. And hegot so engrossed in that book that he couldhardly take part in the class.

The class, there were eight, ten, fifteenseamen sitting there wondering why theywere there, and he would over and over againread the section on remarks of people inGuyana about white men. And he loved it,he’d repeat it over and over again, and I said,“You know, you’ve got to get on to the rest ofthe book.” [laughter]

One more question about the labor school. Theseclasses that you would teach, would this be likefor a week or two weeks or drop-in classes forseamen when they were on shore or . . . ?

They would be announced, and theywould go on as long as there was anybodyaround to talk to. And you know, seamenwould come and go and there would be dif-ferent people lots of the time at almost everymeeting, but there were a few that would sortof stick through. And there were no exams,nothing like that. It was really discussions—lectures and discussions and reading.

Right. So this was a real focal point for seamento gather and something for them to do and learn.

If they wanted to do it. And you know,very few took advantage of this, even whenwe had rules that everybody had to do this.There was one class we had on the history ofthe NMU and the waterfront unions, and itpassed as a motion at one of our meetingsthat every member on shore had to sit in onthese classes and take part in them and showhe had attended. Well, you couldn’t enforceit. There was no way to enforce somethinglike that. But we just did it, you know, when-ever there was time to do it, whenever wecould. It would just be posted on the bulletin

board, and then certain times of the day oron certain nights of the week, we would dothat. But there were so many other thingsgoing on, this was not a major thing.

But at the convention, myself and othershad written resolutions pointing out the needfor the union to do this in every port, andwhere every ship should have an educationcommittee. In fact, our LP St. Clair had aship’s education committee and all that sortof thing, as did most of the ships in the UnionOil fleet in 1947, 1948.

OK, so that was the climate of that pe-riod, which was extremely—what would youcall it?—invigorating and absorbing. I mean,I remember that everybody I knew was to-tally absorbed in these issues and events, andthat somehow everything was focused on thatactivity: the convention, going back to theports and carrying the message of the con-vention and running off the resolutions asleaflets and getting them on ships and main-taining this network, this connection.

But then in the midst of this was thisgrowing right-wing, I would say at that point,a highly disruptive group within the union.And I’m just trying to think if there was any-thing positive about what that group stoodfor, and I can’t, because I’m too left-wing inmy mind to think anything that came out ofthat whole trend within the union as posi-tive. [laughter] The only thing was, I think,it forced the Left to reevaluate its position ofleadership—that there were a lot of infrac-tions, there were a lot of people who weresomewhat corrupt and who had done thingsthat shouldn’t be done and that deserved tobe exposed. And maybe that was the onlygood thing that came out, but it was a littletoo late, because the movement now was theother way. And I suppose the tendency wasto support anybody who had a left-wing back-ground, because it was getting to be a matter


of trenches now . . . I mean, defending theLeft, which was getting hit from all sides. Andthe worst was yet to come.

So that had changed the mood, in a way,from a feeling really of going some place, of aunited union with a united agenda that hadbeen going on for years from the 1930s, tothe beginning of effective attacks from out-side and from within.

What was the opportunity to actually change theleadership or to depose Curran? I mean, wasthere any talk of that?

Oh yes, we had an election. Was it thatyear? They had annual elections.

Oh, every year?

Every two years. I can’t remember now.But an election was coming up. And ofcourse, then, we were opposed to Curran.And he and his people were accused withinterfering with the election and all that, justas our people were—point, counterpoint.

But he managed to slip through, becausehe had been a leader with a long history ofconnections to the unions. So there were alot of members of the union who were con-fused about that.

Curran was losing the support that heonce had, but watching him on his feet, hewas a very wily and eloquent guy, and he hadbeen a very hard-hitting, militant labor manin the early period of the union. He had arecord behind him as good as any of the left-wing people, you know, Blackie Myers andothers. And they were as shocked as anybodyat what was happening to this guy.

But it had gotten to the point where Iremember that although it wasn’t easy to de-nounce the people on your side who you feltwere ineffective or weren’t doing their jobproperly, it was getting now to the point ofdefending what there was of the progressiveLeft. And it was a very confused period inthat sense.

So anyway, we get back to San Franciscoon that trip that I talked about, all of uspacked in that car. [laughter]

That was a lot of people. [laughter]

I’ll tell you, it was something. Exhaust-ing, but we were young. Even Kathy likedit—survived it. And so we headed back fromthe convention.

67AFTER THE CONVENTION

Y THIS TIME we had moved fromMcGee Street with Ted and MimiOdza in Berkeley, into another place,

every union meeting was a shouting matchbetween groups. It was debilitating. It was notgood for the union.

So this is on the home front also.

This was in San Francisco, my homefront, yes, and I’m sure it was true in everyport to some degree.

We were trying to fight the Taft-HartleyBill and refused to accept the inroads on thehiring halls. And Curran’s group was mak-ing compromises. We felt that the SIU in theeast and the SUP on the coast, the AFLunions, were now really making a move, see-ing an opportunity, because of the disruptionin our union, to raid our ships, which even-tually happened.

So my job when I got back was to getright onto a ship. And I got back on the LPSt. Clair. It was wonderful. I can remembergoing back to that ship, and I had a recep-tion committee, when I finally went aboard.I went with my sea bag and I had a bunch ofliterature and all that. And the guys were allwaiting for me at the gang plank, and what

Ba place of our own. Gosh, when I think ofhousing at that time, we had to borrow moneyto pay $8,000 for a house. I don’t know howwe did it. We borrowed $2,000 and had a loanor something like that. But imagine, this is ahouse I wish I had now, a little place onFrancisco Street, a house of our own.

Now where was it? In Oakland?

In Berkeley. And we had that for a num-ber of years. When I finally got throughNorthwestern and fieldwork and came backand taught at Cal, we still had that house.But we couldn’t maintain it. We weren’tmaking anything. Even when I was teachingI was making nothing, you know. [laughter]But anyway, we managed in that.

So I get back, and of course what wasfacing us then was disseminating all theinformation from the convention and thendeveloping our strategy—the Left—to com-bat this right-wing move in the union. And


did they sing? They did sing. I wish they hadsung the “International.” [laughter]

They sang some labor song—I forget whatit was—and I came aboard, and Johnny Aracame forward, and he says, “Why, we got agift for you.” And somebody had made amonkey fist, a beautifully intricate knot.

Oh, it’s a knot. That’s right.

Well, it’s a very complicated knot around,usually, a bolt of some kind, and so it’s veryheavy, and it has a loop on it, to be tied tothe lanyard that you use when you’re com-ing toward a dock. When you get closeenough, and everybody’s always watchingwho can do a good job on this—I got prettygood at it—you toss this monkey fist withthe lanyard behind it onto the dock so thatthe dock crew could pull in the mooring lines.So here they had a fancy one dipped in redpaint. [laughter]

And “From the crew of the LP St. Clair,in honor of Whitey d’Azevedo, who has donea good job at the convention,” and all that.

By the way, when you asked last timeabout the officers of these ships and their viewof our crews, it was very mixed. Because Iremember one officer telling one of the right-wing members of the crew that Union Oilwas going to take care of us. They werealready making deals with other unions. And,“Just put up with them for now. Don’t evencomplain, because we’re going to deal withthem.” But there was no open hostility. Theywere very careful with us. In the first place,these crews were well-organized and goodcrews. They did their job. But they also madedemands, and you know, mainly about pay-ment.

Well, you did make the point very explicitly thatthese people did recognize that they had to do a

really good job, so that they couldn’t be faultedfor not doing a good job.

Well, we saw to it. We saw to it. When aguy would come aboard after getting a jobout of the union hall, we let him know,“Look, you’re on a ship now where everybodyreally has to do a job. And we’re not going tolet the company have any cause for real com-plaint against our efficiency and our job asseamen. But at the same time, we expect fullcooperation and support on any beefs we goton the ship, you know. And we got a beefthat might be a good one, and we want unani-mous support from this end, and anybody whodoesn’t like that, then get off and get onanother ship.” And we got pretty ruthless onit. We got dictatorial. And when I come tothink of it, it wasn’t very democratic.[laughter]

Yes, it was, because this was a majority ofthe crew voting at ship’s meetings to do thesethings. But you know, there was a lot of pres-sure. Some of the guys that came aboardhated us and couldn’t stand it and would getoff and report the goddamn Kremlin ideol-ogy dictatorship . . . . [laughter]

[laughter] The Kremlin?

“That guy’s sailing that goddamn redship,” and all that. But not much. We didn’thave much of that.

But our beefs at that time on the shipshad to do with Union Oil tanker practices.We’d be sent sometimes out to do spray paint-ing in enclosed places, in the ship’spassageways and things like that. So we wouldlet a patrolman know, “We’re going to putthis up as a beef, and we’re not going to doit.” And we’d usually win these, you know.Or if it was necessary, then we’d get over-


time, you know, that sort of thing—overtime,we were doing dangerous jobs.

I can remember going to sea on tankersbefore that, where nobody would even dreamof complaining about going down in thetanks and breathing the goddamn fumes forhours at a time or spray-painting. But by thistime after the war, we were able to complainabout it.

There were all sorts of beefs mainly aboutovertime. What was overtime? What did youget overtime for? Did a mate have a right tocall the men off-watch after two hours, putthem on deck for two hours, and then putthem back in the sack and then bring themout again? Does he just pay them for the timethat they’re out, or does he have to pay con-tinuously when he’s interrupted their sleepand free time?

So we had beefs of that kind. And oh,port leave: These ships were at anchor a lot,so how did you get ashore? And if there wereno launches ordered from ashore, the crewwas stuck, didn’t have a chance to get shoreleave. Well, we had beefs about shore-leave,beefs about did you get overtime if the com-pany didn’t get you a launch and you werestuck on the ship during a time when youcould be ashore. [laughter] You know, con-tinuous beefs of this kind.

But I must say at that point Union Oilwas not intimidated by us, certainly not, butthe crews of these ships they realized were apowder keg, that they could strike. And theywould and be fairly unanimous. Out of theseven ships, at least six would have struck.The trouble is, we weren’t getting the sup-port from the union that we had before, thesame kind of support. There was too muchdivision in the union. But in San Pedro, wecould have done it; we could have tied upevery ship that came into San Pedro, because

there was a good, strong hall and dispatcherdown there and official on the port. [laughter]

But anyway, this went on, see, throughearly 1948, and I stayed on the LP St. Clairoff and on. I’d come home for two or threeweeks. I’d get off and I’d have time ashore,and Kathy and I could be a family for a pe-riod of time. Kathy was working. She wasn’thappy with this kind of life, and I was onlyhappy when I didn’t think about it. BecauseI was pretty pissy. And so this went on dur-ing the first part of the year [1948].

Oh, and also during this period of time—at the convention, there had beenresolutions—I helped to write a leaflet onwhite chauvinism and the Negro in theunion, which was very critical of even theLeft: that the union wasn’t doing enough ofthe job within itself to educate white seamenabout chauvinism and to press for full equal-ity of blacks in the unions; the fact that wehad been much too lazy about taking on someof the unions like SUP, who were completelylily-white or even in our own union in cer-tain ports in certain parts of the countrywhere real discrimination was still takingplace; and that that had to be a real move-ment within the union.

Well, this was a period in which theCommunist Party was doing a tremendousamount of work on this, and there was proba-bly as much literature [as on any other topic]on what was called the Negro question at thattime and even on the so-called womanquestion, and black women and the discrimi-nation against them. A tremendous amountof internal education was in the CommunistParty about this and also having to do withthe shift from the Browder period in the1930s and early 1940s in which the party hadrealized, after that famous Duclos letter, andbegun to examine itself and realize that it had


taken an extremely almost reactionary posi-tion in the first place, during the war sayingthat we must not bring up these issues duringthe war. Everything is for the war effort, wemust not pursue . . . . We had a no-strikeagreement, which I don’t think anybodyreally complained about then, but also thatwe wouldn’t raise issues like discrimination,et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That wasn’t said,but it was in effect.

None of these things were carried forwardafter the war, and the Browder position wassomehow or other that capitalism after itssuccess over fascism was going to be a muchmore tolerant and much more benign capi-talism than it had been in the past, and allthat sort of thing, which of course was a lotof bull. And it took the party a real hard turn-about to begin to criticize itself and to developa new program. Then also, among Americanblacks, there were all kinds of new move-ments—the Muslim movement, self-determi-nation, the Negro Nation. These werepost-Garveyite kinds of things going on andsome of them were very strong. There werealso strong neighborhood organizationsamong blacks around fair employmentpractices.

All that sort of thing was happening, andthe party felt that it wasn’t getting sufficientleadership or wasn’t taking sufficient part.Although ideologically it was involved, it wasnot actually doing it. So there was a big pushfor us to get out in the community and dothese things, which we were doing, as I saidbefore. Not only during the strike period, butin-between we had sort of educational squadsthat would go out and visit white and blackfamilies and offer support on fair employmentpractices, or support in any kind of issue tak-ing place in the neighborhoods in SanFrancisco over housing or employment, et

cetera, et cetera. So there was this move toget involved again, to do more about this.

You were living in Berkeley, though, and wereyou going over to San Francisco every day?

Commuting every day, yes.

How? Driving, or . . . ?

We had a little old—what was it?—aChevy, the kind that still had the blinds thatpull up and down. [laughter] It was probablya 1930s or 1940s Chevy. We got it second-hand for fifty dollars or something like that.

But you’d pretty much go to San Francisco everyday?

Yes, well, every day that I had somethingto do over there. I spent a lot of time there.Yes, I was involved with the union.

Right. And were there Communist Party meet-ings there too?

Yes, and also on the East Bay, but becauseI was a seaman, I attended those in SanFrancisco. Oh yes, the party meetings werethere.

I was just trying to get a picture if Berkeley andSan Francisco were really this collective . . . .

It was about fifteen, twenty minutes inmy car. And there were buses. I mean, youcould take buses over, and public transporta-tion was very good at the time, street carsand buses. But that little car, that little flivver,it was great. They used to call themflivvers . . . [laughter] old flivvers. Model TFords and flivvers. But that one was a joy. It


had the tassels on the blinds that went upand down. [laughter]

It was built square, up and down, andlittle narrow tires. But that was very com-mon in those days. That was the second-handcar that most people had.

68THE THIRD PARTY

O ANYWAY, I’d go back and forthbetween Berkeley and San Francisco.And then the Third Party movement

maritime unions. But that’s where most ofour activities were. But nevertheless, I usedto go to Third Party meetings there that wereSan Francisco-wide or Bay Area-wide.

And of course, then, the C.P., theCommunist Party, had a lot of meetings aboutthe Third Party, which was very interesting,because they had a mixed position on that.First place, they saw Wallace as the best pos-sible nominee of a Third Party.

You’d made the point before that during this timepeople truly believed change was possible. And Ihad wanted to ask you that with all this workyou were doing for the Third Party, if you hadany expectation that Wallace would actually beelected or not.

No, I can’t say that any of us were quitethat naive. The thing is, though, that we didthink that it was possible for there to be alarge movement in the country—a very large,effective movement that would express a newprogram, a more progressive program. And Idon’t think that I felt there was a chance thatWallace would be elected, but I thought thathe would be elevated to an important posi-

Sreally got underway, and I got elected to the“San Francisco Maritime Workers forWallace” as chairman of that committee forthe joint unions. I had already been electedin the NMU, the local hall, as a chairmanfor the Third Party organization.

For all the maritime unions.

For all the maritime unions, I got electedchair. So I was pretty busy with that.

And I was writing a lot of literature andleaflets. I think I wrote most—I still havesome of those of the literature for the Wallacecampaign. But I was involved in educationalactivities, going around and having meetingsin neighborhoods and other unions and thereand now the occasional waterfront rally.

Was this very much concentrated on the mari-time community, or did you have links with . . . ?

No, we had links with others. At leastthe Third Party thing was broader than the


tion in American life as a spokesman for amovement, which he was allowing himselfto be, and he was a very eloquent spokesmanof that position.

I heard him once or twice; others that Iknew heard him. And I don’t think he wasbeing wily or duplicitous. I think he reallymeant what he said, you know, that he repre-sented the most progressive aspect of theRoosevelt period, and he was staunchly pro-labor. And he supported our strike. He didnot red-bait, he didn’t denounce the com-munists. And we felt, the far Left felt, thathere was a guy who would give expression tothe feelings we had, that most people hadabout what was wrong with the DemocraticParty and the Republican Party at that time.We didn’t think we could vote for anybodyin either, you know.

It was really one of those situations wherethe Democratic Party was behaving in a waythat made it a very dangerous kind of partyfor labor in this country, so that really ourfeeling was to get up the biggest vote pos-sible as a demonstration of Americanopinion. I think some of us had overblownviews about how big it would be and howmuch of a movement it would be, but therewere reasons to feel it would be sizable. Andit was worth working for.

Now, of course, there were elements notonly within the union, but in the local com-munity, the left Left . . . . What was the wordwe used to use for those? There was a wordfor the left Left beyond comprehension, theTrotskyites being among them, who were say-ing, “How can you set up a social Democratwho is a tool of the imperialists, like Wallaceet cetera, et cetera. Let’s run a labor person,”you know, who would get ten votes in thewhole country. You know, that kind of . . . .And there were those who were then

denouncing Wallace as a red, as a tool of thecommunist front.

A dupe, like you said.

Dupe. And he wasn’t a dupe, but he cer-tainly was supported by every left-wingorganization in the country. Who else didthey have?

Was the fact he was a Quaker make him a tar-get, or was it a non-issue at that time?

A target for whom?

I mean, was that a point of criticism, that hewas part of a minority religion?

I don’t recall.

Well, maybe it wasn’t even an issue.

I don’t recall that being an issue. Thatdoesn’t mean it wasn’t. I don’t think that thematter of him being a Quaker came up ex-cept maybe positively. You know, the Quakerswere an admirable sort, honest and hard-working and all that.

Right. But they might have tendencies towardnaive leanings toward the Left. That’s all Iwas . . . .

[laughter] That could be.

I’m just wondering. You had been talking aboutthe uneasy relationship that the Communist Partyhad, the position that the party took with Wallaceas being an acceptable . . . .

Well, at the beginning, because the ideawas we have to be careful here, because we

593THE THIRD PARTY

don’t know what Wallace would do with thekind of pressures that were . . . you know, itwould be embarrassing to have him shift posi-tions and select Joe Curran or something likethat. Also that, you know, he may have beena progressive, but that doesn’t mean that hewould agree with us on a lot of basic issues,and he certainly didn’t, but enough so thatwe felt confident on it.

Also, this whole issue about whether ornot it was the time to support a Third Party,whether that wouldn’t be a waste of effortand maybe a disillusionment to a lot of peoplewho would get all involved and then bedeeply disappointed and all that sort of thing,whether or not we weren’t doing a disserviceto . . . . There were different kinds of opin-ions expressed within the party at that time.

In fact, I even have some of them herewhere I remember giving . . . oh, in an EastBay section of the party, I was asked to speakon the Third Party. And I remember goingthrough two or three of the different opin-ions within the party about it, and that thesewere things that we had to resolve in someway. And my own view—and that of a greatmany people—was that this was an opportu-nity to make a statement within Americanlife about where Americans wanted to go,what they wanted to do after the war. And ifwe couldn’t get everything we wanted accom-plished, we could at least . . . it was aprogressive position.

So this progressivism after the problemof Browderism . . . there were a number ofmembers of the party that were very suspi-cious of and wary of anything that smackedof that kind of Browderist revisionism sup-porting somebody who represents a sort of asocial Democratic position that could goeither way. But I think the position prevailedthat what else was there? What were we go-ing to do? Sit out the election or call for the

impossible people to be elected or developlittle tiny groups throughout the country thatwould have no impact at all?

The Socialist Party was out of the ques-tion, because they had now becomeTrotskyists and were denouncing commu-nism. [laughter] I had once felt very positiveabout Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party whenI was much younger, but I began to see thatit had been taken over, really, by a strongreactionary anti-communist position. So theywere running candidates, but they were no-body to support. And there was the LaborParty in the East Coast that was trying to getformed, and later on the West Coast.

But here was a major American figurewho had a good position, and there was astrong feeling about the Democratic andRepublican Party, and our feeling was weshould support this and go along with it andgive it everything we’ve got. And so I remem-ber as a party member and a chairman of theSeamen for Wallace and Maritime Commit-tee for Wallace that I felt that the mostimportant work of the party, at that time,would be to support a Third Party movementand do everything they could for it.

So of course the counter to that is that,in doing so, the Third Party became the tar-get of every kind of anti-communistred-baiting propaganda in the country. Oh,all the press at that time—I even have someexamples here, you know—that Wallace wassurrounded by, was captive of the commu-nists, and how could he let himself get intosuch a position, and he must be a very naiveperson to think that the country isn’t awarethat it’s a communist movement and on andon. The press was just loaded with this stuff.We were used to that sort of thing, but wewere worried too about its effect upon devel-opment of a Third Party.


And so anyway, my job, as well as a num-ber of others who were working on it, was togo out to campus communities, and also setup little neighborhood meetings in mainlyworking-class neighborhoods. Not just tradeunion things. We’d go out and announce thatwe were going to meet at somebody’s housefor coffee and cake, and talk about the ThirdParty.

And I think that was fairly effective. Wereached a lot of African-Americans that wayand a lot of Hispanic people, some in theunions and some non-union. And it had agood effect, a positive effect, and it gave us afeeling of being connected with the commu-nity.

And there were meetings that we orga-nized at the universities. I didn’t go to thosein the East Bay, but I mean San FranciscoState and others, we’d have little socials, thatstudents would hold or something like that.And we’d go and speak our piece as tradeunion representatives of the Third Partymovement. And now and then we’d speakon the radio. We’d be interviewed alwayshostilely. [laughter]

Oh, really? Always hostilely?

Well, I can’t remember if they . . . . Well,I mean, there was always the undercurrent ofedgy, you know, “What are you people do-ing, and who do you really represent?” Butwe were able sometimes to get our positionacross. The newspapers, of course, they mightinterview people. I was interviewed by theSan Francisco News, I think, one time, andof course it just came out in a garbled hor-rible fashion, and I was embarrassed. I neverdid it again.

But then there was our own press, ThePeople’s News and others, and our positions

were presented there. And we saw to it thatthat paper got around everywhere and wasdistributed, almost like a leaflet.

So that was very time-consuming andinvolving as well. And then getting on theLP St. Clair every time I could get on. WhenI was ashore, I would be doing this, and thenI’d be trying to maintain some kind of con-nection with my family.

So you’d be on board ship, say, like a week at atime?

Oh, no.

A few days, or . . . ?

Well, you might be signed up for a coupleof months, but you’d come back to port andyou’d have time off, you see.

OK, I was just trying to get a feel for how longyou were at sea now.

I’d be signed on a ship for a period of amonth or two, like the LP on one of its runs,and then you were sort of committed to beon it during that period, but then you’d comeback to San Francisco or Oleum on theOakland side, and you’d have a week, threeor four days while it’s loading.

I see.

And I could get home and have to getback on the ship when it was ready to makeits run. But I’d be back, sometimes, every fewdays or a week, depending on what the runof the ship was for a few days at a time. Or atthe end of the run, then I’d get off in a properfashion and wait to get hired again. Depend-ing on what I had to do ashore, I might be

595THE THIRD PARTY

home near a month or more. So I made tworuns on the LP in 1948 when all this wasgoing on.

But then all this time, Kathy was preg-nant with Erik. And the time was loomingin September 1948, which was a rugged time.Everything was happening. And Kathy wasdoing very well. She was very healthy andvery active.

Now she was active in working in the [children’s]nursery?

Yes, to a considerable degree, but she wasdoing other things as well and taking care ofAnya and busy with a circle of friends andall that, and her family.

As the time loomed, I began more andmore feeling that, “My god, what am I do-ing? Here Kathy is about to have anotherbaby, and what am I doing? I’m not around.I’ve got to get to her.” And I would go overand stay for a few days.

And then finally time came where shehad to go to the hospital, and I remember,you know, just dropping everything on thefront that I was doing and going to KeizerHospital and sitting there. And I wanted togo in, I remember wanting to go in to seeher. In those days, when I look back . . . .

So barbaric.

Well, barbaric . . . it was just so differ-ent. “Oh, no sir. You can’t go in. That is justnot allowed. It isn’t the thing to do. And,she is resting, and she needs to be left alone,”and all that. She was asking to see me. I didget in to see her a couple of times, but Icouldn’t get in there as things began todevelop. And she did take a long time.

So I remember the nurses coming, andeven the doctor one time, saying, “Look, why

don’t you go home? You know, go someplace.”

I said, “Well I want to be here when ithappens.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen for a while.It’s going to be two or three days. She’s soslow, and she’s slowly working up to it. Sheneeds her rest, and she doesn’t need . . . . Youcan’t do anything now.” Imagine that. WhenI look back on that I just get furious. I wish Icould go back and raise hell, you know.

So I went over to the front and spent acouple of days. I came back, and I’d go to thehospital and I’d see Kathy briefly, but then Ihad to leave. They wouldn’t let me stay. Andthen I would go back to the front. And I wasat the Maritime Bookshop one afternoon,and I had been up at the hall running thisoffice for the Third Party. [laughter] And Iwas down at the Maritime Bookshop, andthere were a number of guys hanging around,and a call came to the Maritime Bookshop. Iguess I had left my number.

[laughter] What a wonderful place!

Right. And Alex Treskin, who got thephone, he says, “You’re a father! A bouncingbaby boy!” And everybody cheered. Oh, andI was terrified. I felt awful I wasn’t there. AndI jumped in our flivver, and I headed acrossthe Bay and got to Keizer Hospital. And Erikhad been born, I don’t know, an hour beforethat. I was furious. I said to those people, “Youknow, you told me it wasn’t going to happenfor another day or two. You also said youwould call before it happened.”

“Oh, isn’t it better this way?” You know,“Everything went wonderfully,” and all that.So I went in and saw this little glob of fleshwhich was there. [laughter]

And I felt absolutely elated. I felt just sowonderful. It just was great. I remember, still,


coming across the bay on the bridge—thebridge had been built by then, you know—in the little flivver. I almost felt like I wasflying, you know. And Kathy was doing fine,though I think she was a little depressed be-cause it had taken so long. But she was doingall right. So Erik was born, and I told him hisfather was told at the Maritime Bookshop inSan Francisco, and it was announced andcheered. [laughter]

So anyway, September was terribly busythat way, and we got Erik home, and I stayedfor a few days and all that. But I had to keepgoing back now and then, because I was chair-man of this damn committee, and things wereheating up.

Was the election that November? Of 1948?

Yes, the 1948 November elections, yes.And this was a period in which the CMU—Committee for Maritime Unity—wasdissolved. In fact, at that time, toward theend of that year, Curran had done his job andwe could see . . . or I could see the hand-writing on the wall. Things were beginningto really look tough for the progressive unionsand the progressives in the union. I remem-ber the unions on the West Coast formed acommittee to take the place of the CMU.

But that was just the West Coast?

No, I think it was a national thing wherethe CIO came out and helped organize aunity committee in a sense, really to replacethe Committee for Maritime Unity, andCurran had effectively disrupted it.

And the SUP, the Sailors Union of thePacific, the AFL was beginning really to pushon the ships. And this was happening on theUnion Oil ships. In fact, the SUP actuallygot the crew off the USS Ruble, one of theunion oil ships. Fought their way aboard theship, and took over with the company’sapproval.

Really?

Yes. So we had a split. This happened inlate 1948. And then Lundeberg announcedthat the SUP was going to be taking overthe Union Oil ships. I knew, and those of usthat had worked on it knew, that this wasthe plan of the company too.

And so, after getting approval from thecurrent hall in New York, we formed flyingsquads all up and down the coast. And also Ithink this was done in the Gulf too, becausethere were all kinds of moves at that time totake over NMU ships. You know, the uniongets weak, this is just like a weak animal. Imean the vultures come in.

And so I had to drop some of the ThirdParty work and get back to sea.

69FLYING SQUADS

GOT ONTO THE Victor Kelly, whichwas a “weak ship,” as we called it, becausethe left leadership had left, and it was

only the union, but for the Left. And I wasvery quickly elected delegate, because I was,again, somebody who could talk a little,[laughter] I was a “sea lawyer,” and there werestill a few progressive guys aboard the shipwho were happy to see me. And within acouple of weeks or so, we got most of thoseguys off the ship, the ones that were . . . youknow, “What are you here for? Get off andget another ship. You guys are just going tolose this ship.” So anyway, we got it back as astaunch NMU ship.

Then I became part of the group that wasdeveloping flying squads, at least in the BayArea. And this was happening in San Pedro,it was happening in Seattle, and elsewhere.

Is that sort of like a vigilante . . . ? Tell me whatthat is.

Flying squads, three or four guys wouldgo out together to defend ships when weheard that SUP goons or company goonswere going to try to take over a ship.

Now are you talking physical confrontation,or . . . ?

Igetting to be under the control of the right-wing. So I went aboard, in fact, I was sentaboard by the people I knew . . . .

Now this is still the Union Oil ships, though?

Yes, it was. Yes.

So they hadn’t taken over all the Union Oil shipsyet.

No, it was just that one ship. And I for-get whether they kept that ship, or whetherit was back and forth, but it was a contestedship.

And the company was beginning to saythat we were unable to service the ships prop-erly. We couldn’t get enough men aboard andall that sort of things. This was partly true,because jobs were not only scarce but shipswere scarce, and seamen were going else-where for jobs.

And so I went aboard the Kelly, really, toget it back into shape, to shape it up for not


If necessary. Yes. We would stand guard.It’s like a picket line, but we were ready tofight if necessary. In fact, we had to once.

So the flying squads were basically guardingthe . . . .

Guarding, particularly when a ship wouldcome in, the crew would leave to go ashoreon leave.

Oh, I see. Sure.

And then, you know, there were usuallystand-by people aboard, but it was unde-fended, and another crew could just come onand say, you know, “You guys leave. We’retaking over.” And that was what had hap-pened to the Ruble. We were . . . .

And of course that couldn’t have happened with-out collusion from the company.

Oh, the company was delighted![laughter] Oh, they wanted it. They wantedLundeberg’s union, which was compliantand . . .

Yes, but they were more expensive, because theywere getting more money.

No, no, no, because we had gottenmore . . . the second strike got ours up . . .

. . . achieved equity?

. . . to be equal, got to parity. Yes. But,you know, they were prepared to do thingslike that, anything for any union but ours,because ours was, like the ILWU, a troublemaking union. We demanded things, and wehad blacks, and we had Hispanics, and wehad meetings on board denouncing the

officers for racism and all that sort of uncom-fortable business that they didn’t like. Itinterfered with commerce, for Christ’s sake.[laughter] The SUP never did things likethat.

So anyway, one example involved the St.Clair. I had gotten off the Victor Kelly afterthings had straightened out. And so I cameback ashore in San Francisco and then heardthat the LP St. Clair out in Oleum outside ofBerkeley, at the Union Oil docks, was sittingthere with just a small skeleton crew, andthere were rumors that the SUP was going tomove on it. So I get a flying squad together,and about six or seven of us get in a car andzip out to Oleum late one night around eightor nine o’clock. And . . . have you ever seenthat dock?

No, no.

It’s a long, long dock, it’s got to be a quar-ter of a mile, half mile from the companybuildings and offices and tanks down a long,long ramp to a dock where the ship loads up.The oil lines go down this long dock, andyou walk along this narrow dock out to theship. It’s a long way if you’re carrying a seabag. You get pretty tired by the time you getout there. But there’s a dock office before youtake this long ramp out to the ship. And that’swhere there was a company guard and all.

And so we took our guys, and we parkedup at the company parking lot, and we walkeddown to this office, and there was nobodythere! And we immediately smelled trouble.I mean, the company guard would be in there;maybe he was purposely not there to . . . . Wewere conspiratorial as hell at that time. Youknow, it was all planned and all that.

And so we got in there, inside the littleshed, and I remember we had bats and chainsand all kinds of things with us. [laughter] We

599FLYING SQUADS

had monkey wrenches and . . . oh, oh, oh,yes! I had a dangerous weapon. I had my cargohook. I always had that around if I could. Sowe sat there for about an hour. You know, itwas dark and quiet. And we couldn’t sendanybody out to check the ship, because, youknow, a member or two of the crew mightstill be aboard, because—I don’t know—itwas against the law or something for us toget out there; we weren’t cleared to get onthe ship, but anyway, we could guard theentrance.

And while we were sitting there just talk-ing, we heard clumping coming down the . . .“clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk,” and boy, weknew now is the time. And we could see inthe shadow way up, we could see about adozen people coming down. And, “Oh boy,we’ve got it now.”

And we got ourselves ready, you know,hiding in the shack. And this gang camedown—“clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp”—these dark shadows. I’ll never forget thatnight. And we were all ready standing by thedoor, and I remember holding my hook up,and this guy with a wrench. [laughter]

About four or five of us, and these guysgot closer and closer, and finally they wereright down upon us, and they stopped, andthey looked around, and they sort of scatteredto look around to check things, and then twoor three guys came toward the door andpushed the door open and looked in. And Ilooked, and it was the most wonderfulthing—Sharkey! [laughter] A guy I knew.Sharkey, the same guy who had held my wal-let for me when I was dumped by the SUP!!He was now an oil worker and . . . .

My word!

He was one of the oil workers on strike.And they had come down to check the ship

too, to see that nobody was taking over theirjobs. And oh, what a moment, you know, wehad a gang there and everything. And I hadalmost clobbered him, and he had a club . . . .[laughter] It was just a moment, a second, andwe would have clobbered each other.

That’s incredible! [laughter]

It was incredible. And so we had this get-together on the dock. It’s about almostmidnight at this time. And so we left a groupfor the rest of the night, and apparently noth-ing did happen. So we saved the ship thatnight, and the crew came back in a day ortwo from leave, and the ship took off.

But we had squads like that going all over.And a couple of instances, they had real con-frontations with scabs . . . finks that werecoming aboard, and some nasty ones. I thinkour guys did some bad work too. I mean, itwasn’t nice.

Well, when I think of what was happen-ing to me there. I mean, I was ready to kill.You’re scared to death. You’re tense, you’reworried, and you’re defending your ship, youknow. All kinds of things could happen. ButI’ll never forget that. Sharkey, whom I hadn’tseen for—what—this was 1948—four yearsor something.

That’s incredible.

And he’s the guy, the only one who stuckwith me down the stairway when I got beatup down below and took my wallet and gaveit to me later. So that was wonderful, oldSharkey. He said, yes, he couldn’t stay in thatgoddamn phony union. He was in the oilworkers union.

Nineteen forty-eight was one of the full-est and most complicated years that I canremember during that period. Everything


seemed to have been going on. The incidentabout the flying squads and the Union Oildock, out at Rodeo or Oleum, that was justthe beginning. This was the beginning of thebreak-up of our control and contract with theUnion Oil ships, which for the NMU on theWest Coast was a serious matter. That sevenships was a lot of jobs, and the only othertanker company that came regularly, at leastto southern California, was Keystone.

And it was quite apparent to us, at leastthe Left in the NMU, the seamen, that therewas something going on nationally about therelation of the east and the West Coast. Andwe had every good indication in our view thatwhat was happening was that Joseph Curranand the right-wing of the NMU in New York,at least . . . and then with their little infor-mal organization called the Rank and FileCaucus of the right-wing group in the union,that there was an understanding withLundeberg that the NMU would relinquishthe West Coast to him, and that then theNMU could consolidate its position in theEast Coast and on the Gulf, getting rid ofthis very, very difficult, in their view, ram-bunctious group of progressives on the WestCoast and disperse them. Because actually,with the ILWU’s headquarters in SanFrancisco, the international longshoremen,this very strong maritime union and the twoor three other unions that had formed theCommittee for Maritime Unity during the1936 strike, it was very clear, I think, to theright-wingers that if there was any segmentof the maritime unions that needed to be con-tained and, if possible, disrupted, it was theWest Coast maritime group. And all through,I would say, 1947 and then especially at theNMU convention in New York in 1947, itwas quite clear that Curran and his groupwere determined in some way or another tolimit the activities and the influence of the

West Coast unions in negotiations with theship owners and in terms of the image of theNMU in the country. And Curran was beinglauded and praised in the press for putting upa fight against the so-called commies. Andcertainly in the San Francisco papers this wasa constant theme—the struggle in the NMUbetween the Left and the Right.

So in our view, we saw the Union Oilships as a part of our bulwarks on the WestCoast. These were a large number of jobs,steady, coast-wide ships. After the war, withdiminished shipping of the U.S. MerchantMarine and the real crisis in unemploymentamong maritime workers, this was an ex-tremely important thing. So from the end of1947 on, this was very much on our minds,at least the seamen that I worked with in SanFrancisco. The defense of the contract be-tween Union Oil the NMU was veryimportant.

And it was very clear that the SUP andLundeberg had their eyes on those ships.They felt that they rightly should have thoseships, because they were an old West Coastunion, and they felt they had certain prior-ity on the West Coast. In some way oranother, the right-wing of the NMU to aconsiderable degree must have agreed withthis orientation, that Lundeberg would begiven some of the shipping on the WestCoast—Union Oil being one of them—andin return for that, there would be morecooperation.

Because Curran’s group was constantlyreiterating through this period in late 1947and through 1948 that the Left in theunion—and particularly the San Franciscoor California and West Coast NMU hiringhalls—were being too hard on Lundeberg,that we were refusing to cooperate; we didn’tsend letters to him when we had meetings.This was just not so. The NMU on the West

601FLYING SQUADS

Coast would constantly try to get Lundeberg’sgroup in with us on the CMU, on variouskinds of other organizational policies or posi-tions, and always would either get ignored ortold that we were politicalizing a trade unionmatter. The idea was that the commies werepoliticalizing the issues on the West Coastand elsewhere in the union.

So this was a very deep split within theNMU and the beginning of a breakdownwhich had tragic consequences as far as I andmany others were concerned. But all during1948, there was this deep dissension withinthe union where every attempt was beingmade to get rid of some of the progressivepatrolmen and officers in the halls on theWest Coast. And the group called the Rankand File Caucus, the Curran group, was dis-rupting meetings whenever they could. Therewere even fights on ships in the ports betweenfactions within the crews.

And that’s why the role of some of us onthe Union Oil ships was considered by us tobe extremely important. We were, in a sense,holding those ships against takeover by theSailors’ Union of the Pacific, the AF of Lunion. And we had the support in this fromthe black seamen, the few that were existingat that time in our union, because there wereso few jobs and they had been newcomers onthe West Coast in the unions. And some ofthem would take off and join the ILWU orwork as longshoremen because there were sofew jobs at the end of the war. Nevertheless,those that were there were in full support ofour position, because they knew that if thoseships went over to the SUP, there would beno black seamen.

Were there people in the CMU whose job it wasto support you in any way, or was the CMUjust comprised of members?

The CMU was a coalition of maritimeunions.

So there wasn’t leadership in the CMU that couldhave stepped in.

Well, oh, it did. Oh, yes. I haven’t reallymade that distinction, because at least theprogressives in the NMU . . . or I would saythe NMU, even officially, had been a mem-ber of the Committee for Maritime Unity sothat we were in a sense closely allied withthe other unions. We met with their leader-ship, we had constant meetings certainlyduring the strikes. In 1947 and then through1948, there was a constant cooperationamong these unions.

However, there were these infiltrationsnow with the rising of anti-left feeling forti-fied by AF of L propaganda and the break-upof unity within the NMU itself, with theCurran factions, et cetera. Curran actuallyengineered a pull-out from the Committeefor Maritime Unity. I’d say the move of hispeople pretty well brought the CMU to anend later-on in 1948. But no, until then therewas intense cooperation all during thatperiod. And when I was a member of theNMU, we were working with the Commit-tee for Maritime Unity.

Were there specific meetings? Were there meet-ings of the Committee that met to discuss all ofthese . . . ?

Oh, there were always meetings of dele-gates. Representatives of the various unionswould meet and try to iron out commonpolicy, positions on demands, and what kindof demands we were going to make—strikepolicy. As a chairman of the housing and foodcommittee during the strike, I was always


going to CMU meetings to share informa-tion and to work out common policy withother unions that were on strike with us. Sure,that was a very close coordinated kind ofeffort that, by the way, really bothered theright-wing. It certainly bothered the Sailors’Union of the Pacific, at least the leadership.Then every attempt was made to break itdown. Was that your question?

Yes.

Yes. Oh, no. I guess we considered our-selves during that period as much membersof the Committee for Maritime Unity as ourown unions. This was a very meaningful coa-lition.

Was there a strong figure that emerged duringthis time to sort of counter Curran’s . . . therank and file position within the union?

Yes, there were two or three—people likeBlackie Myers, people like Ferdinand Smithwho were left-wingers, called commies andall that sort of thing.

And they were all West Coast people?

This was the East Coast nationalconsul . . . .

Oh, OK.

And on the West Coast? Yes, I will saymy friend Pat Tobin in San Francisco wasprobably . . . . He and Walter Stack. Therewere a number of other important figures onthe west, in San Francisco, for other unions:Bill Bailey and well, Walter Stack—WalterStack was a member of the MFOW—yes.And members of the Marine Cooks andStewards had some very strong figures at that

time. Hugh Bryson in Marine Cooks andStewards.

But in our particular local, it was peoplelike Alex Treskin and Pat Tobin, whom Iconsidered . . . . Well, he was, in a sense, akind of a mentor. He was about my age, butnevertheless he had had a lot of experienceand had been a very active, very clear for-mulator of policy. So yes, there was . . . andin San Pedro, there were Tony Lucio and NeilCronin and a number of others. Yes, therewere some strong figures, but they’re only asstrong as they can be with other conditionsbeing equal.

As these politics were getting more polarized,were there people within the SUP that were sym-pathetic with a more liberal stance that mighthave . . . ?

Oh, yes. Oh, I would say that during ourstrikes when Lundeberg . . . well, I alwaysuse Lundeberg as kind of the icon of the AFof L right-wing unions. Nevertheless, therank and file of that union were often in sym-pathy with what we were doing andsometimes would recognize our picket lines.But they had a much tighter control in theirunion. I mean, I got dumped for asking a ques-tion, you know.

There were a lot of old timers in thatunion, and it was a union that I had respectfor because there were so many old time sea-men in it, but they were guys that just wantedto work. I mean, it was sort of an apoliticalunion. And here I had moved into an ex-tremely politicalized union, which I foundvery congenial, because I felt that’s whatunions ought to be. And as I remember a littlelater in the Communist Party, certainlypoliticalization of one’s demands, of one’sactions was an important part of our policy.

603FLYING SQUADS

And of course this was the target of theright-wing: “These commies, they politicalizeeverything.” To some extent, that’s true, that’show communists look at trade union move-ments, as a working class movement in whichtrade unions are the spearhead of defenseagainst employers and against the worst illsof capitalism and the eventual tools for thedevelopment of socialism and all that sort ofthing. I feel it was a very legitimate politicalaspect of trade unionism. It still is, by the way,wherever it rears its “ugly head,” as far as theRight is concerned.

Well, look at now what’s going on interms of whether unions can make directcontributions to political candidates. “Oh,no! They should not!” say the Right, be-cause—it’s [laughter] as good a strategy asany—“each individual must have to signapproval. Here they’ve elected leadership,and they’ve elected PAC committees whomake the decisions about this person or thethat. Oh, no, they can’t do that.” Like cor-porations do with stockholders. Corporationsgive a great deal of money to campaigns with-out asking each and every stockholder whatthey’re going to do.

By the way, that seems to be one of themoods going on right now. There are peoplesaying that if the trade unions are limitedfrom making contributions directly to politi-cal campaigns, then we should demand thatcorporations have to get the approval of eachand every stockholder. [laughter] I mean, theroots of this go way back to that period, yousee.

So yes, the so-called non-politicalizedunions like the SUP were very political upon top. Lundeberg made political deals andhad political agendas all the time. But themembership was the old trade-union kind ofmembership that as long as the pork chopmatters were taken care of—that is, as long

as the conditions on the ships were taken careof, and their unions seemed to be strugglingfor that and getting them good contracts—that was enough, because this was a sea-goingcareer. And I respected that.

And I respected the old syndicalists whenI was on the SUP ships, the old guys whowere Wobblies and Luddites of the most ad-vanced stripe. I respected those guys aselements of the American working class his-tory, that were part of the development ofany working class movement in this country.However, when it came to a confrontationat this particular point in history between aunion made up of that kind of membershipand with that kind of leadership—really dic-tatorial . . . . And they kept talking abouthow democratic they were as against unionslike the NMU, which really did have a tre-mendous amount of input from themembership and constant, in national con-ventions and in local conventions, and in thediscussions in their union halls. I rememberdiscussions in the union halls in the NMUthat could never have been possible in theSUP when there were highly regulated andcontrolled meetings. Nobody ever dreamedof standing up and saying anything, exceptstupid characters like me, you know, and thenlearning what that meant. [laughter]

So those were the issues, and of course,the SUP was a completely lily-white union,except where they had stewards departmentsinside some of their ships that were mostlyblack. That was a totally different matter.

On an individual basis, were there cordial rela-tions between individuals from the SUP andindividuals from the NMU?

Off and on, but during heated times likestrikes where our policies were different, itwas careful.


Right. Were there specific hangouts and bars andplaces that you didn’t go to?

Yes. Well, yes. And then there were somewhere people overlapped, and you were quitewary. I remember going down to this littlebar that was right on the front itself on ClayStreet near the bookstore and the SUP hallwhere every now and then while . . . . I wishI could remember the name of this little tav-ern, it was for coffee and beer and sandwichesand things. And I remember going in thereone time with a friend of mine from theNMU after I joined the NMU, and herewas—I won’t name him—but here was oneof the leaders of the SUP local hall, sittingnext to me having coffee. And we bothlooked at each other and didn’t say . . . .

I just said, “Hello?” And didn’t say a wordabout . . . .

In fact, I remember that he was ratherfriendly to me, and that he saw me as some-body who stood up and made a point, whicha lot of the members felt. On the other hand,they let their leadership do what they wanted.But we didn’t feel we could carry on a con-versation, or I didn’t feel that. I wanted tostay clear of those guys. [laughter]

Well, yes. I mean, I can see from your mostrecent . . . .

But I knew that there were a lot . . . Imean, like Sharkey, who I have talked about.There were a lot of guys like him whocouldn’t figure out why their union was do-ing what it was doing and who weresometimes misled by the position of the unionand all that. And I understood that, but itwas a different kind of union. It was a essen-tially a craft union, an old time craft union,which I had nothing against excepting the

times of the development of real issues inwhich laborers and trade unions really haveto organize and create coalitions of manyunions to defend themselves, particularly atthe end of the Second World War when therewas a real effort on the part of capital in thiscountry to move in every direction, interna-tionally, to suppress any movements amonglabor for higher wages, to stop all that. Andof course anti-communism—the commieissue—was one of the instruments. Very, veryconcerted and clever job on the part of theRight in this country to use the communistsas a way to disrupt and to change the policyof unions.

Well, it must have been a gift particularly, I think,to a lot of southern politicians on the whole civilintegration issues.

Oh. Oh, yes. Well our union [NMU] andother unions in the Gulf—New Orleans andin Texas—where there were segregatedcrews . . . . I mean, I think I mentioned be-fore this fantastic business of there beingblack crews . . . was it the Munson line,would put on black crews. When ships werecoming up, the white crews would be takenoff and vice versa, whenever it was politi-cally correct socially to do so. Black and whitecrews were kept separate—not equal but sepa-rate.

This is after the war.

After the war. During the war, I must saythe Left sat on its hands a lot, because theywere supporting the war and had a no-strikepledge during the war, all that, which eventhe Left felt we should be getting some recog-nition for, that we opposed any strike. Therewere a few, which we blamed on the

605FLYING SQUADS

Trotskyites, of course, or just ignorant, unpa-triotic loose cannons. [laughter] We took thatposition that it was unpatriotic to strike dur-ing the war, because it was a war againstfascism, and I had no quarrel with that. Ithink that was a period during and right afterthe Browder period, the idea that Americancapitalism, the American bourgeoisie, wasgoing to learn so much in this struggle thatthey were going to be good to us after the war.There was that feeling, I think, during thewar. There was going to be a more coopera-tive kind of society.

Well, you demonstrated during the war that youcould cooperate, in fact.

Yes, sure. Right. The Third Party hadcome out against strikes and had supportedthe war. And within the party—I wasn’t init at the time, but I certainly know what hap-pened, as the people told me—the wholethrust of discussions in the party was how towin the war, how to help win the war. Still,there was the move for civil rights and all ofthat was going on, but it was diminished. Nogreat issues were raised that would be seen asinterfering with industry and getting the shipsout and all that, so that a lot of these beefswere sort of kept under wraps.

So as soon as the war was over, we felt itwas time now to demonstrate that the coun-try was changing and that the Rooseveltpolicies were going to be carried on anddeveloped and extended, and that we wouldhave socialism without struggle. [laughter]That’s a little exaggerated, not quite that. ButI mean, that was the view, that there was along, long, slow transition toward socialism.

Well, wasn’t there the view, too, that socialismwas part of the natural order, that this periodwould enable that transition more quickly?

That capitalism was going through a cri-sis, and it was transitional, and now was thetime when there would be the slow evolu-tion toward socialism. And of course, a lot ofthe discussions within the party at that timedealt with the idea of revisionism that somepeople were saying would happen naturally,and others were saying, “The struggle mustcontinue.” You know, there were variouskinds of factions developing, even within theparty itself. There were even some people leftwho felt that Browder had been right, andBrowder was carrying on a campaign by go-ing to Europe and talking to the progressiveparties and Communist Parties in Europe try-ing to get support for him and the idea thathis policy had been right. But they didn’tagree with him, and then the Duclos lettercame and blasted the American party out ofthe doldrums with the idea that socialismwasn’t around the corner and that there wasa hell of a lot of work to be done, and thatwe had let a lot of things go—not only theAmericans, but all over Europe—and let alot of things go in the interest of the waragainst fascism.

So all this was yeasting in 1946, 1947,and 1948 so much that I can’t, in my mind,as I’m extemporizing here, put it all together.But it was there now. So the little Union Oilstrike . . . I keep going back to the West Coastand where I was planted at the time and con-sider interesting to me. I mean, I can thinkof things like this was the year in whichGandhi was killed, and that had a deep im-pact on me. I had been a fan of Nehru andhis writings, but Gandhi was, to me, a greatfigure. And things like that were going on.There were all sorts of things happening onall levels. The situation in China, andIndonesia and the Dutch; the beginnings ofthe anti-colonial movement were going onin India and China and Indonesia; Africa was


coming up in the next decade, all the anti-colonial movements. So this was all yeasting.It was an extremely vital time in that sense,but a little overwhelming. So nevertheless, Iand a lot of people I knew were focused onthe maritime workers on the West Coast,essentially, and what was happening to us inour jobs.

And those jobs had gone down. I can re-member many weeks when twenty to thirtymen were shipped out in a week, you know,as against hundreds before. And there justweren’t the ships. And of course we were veryangry about the fact that the ships were be-ing turned over to foreign flags, the AmericanMerchant Marine was being diminished, wethought, purposely, conspiratorially, toweaken the maritime unions, to weaken theposition of American labor, and in favorof . . . .

Because the traffic was still coming into the Bay,right?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. But not on our ships,not on American ships, or American-ownedships, but under a foreign flag.

Right, with foreign seamen and . . . .

Foreign seamen at one half the wages thatwe were getting and all that.

Right. But now were American longshoremenstill engaged in loading and unloading, or . . . ?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. On the West Coast, theILWU was the union, on the East Coast itwas ILA and a national . . . .

Well, was that seen as because there were strongunions or because it just happened to be consis-

tent with the designs of the owners, to haveAmerican longshoremen.

Due to strikes, due to struggles! [laugh-ter]

So it was a strong . . . ?

The ILWU came into existence in 1935or in 1938 . . . 1937 and 1938 with tremen-dous unity among maritime workers and thelongshoremen to establish their own unionindependent of the AF of L, which they feltwas doing nothing for them. And the CIO—the ILWU was a CIO union—developed as astrong left-wing fighting union on the WestCoast and was a dominant feature in mari-time on the West Coast, had clout. HarryBridges, you know.

So we were very much tied to the ILWUat the time and what it was able to do bysupporting its strikes so that it would supportours, and they did. I remember, my friend PatTobin and I, during this interim period whenthings are just falling apart in early 1948, wefelt that the Curran faction of the unionreally wanted to allow those ships to go tothe SUP, and we really saw it as a slap againstus, “those damn left-wingers on the WestCoast.” And there was a situation down atSan Pedro that truly told us that.

I don’t want to go into it now, but I guessOctober of . . . well, it was in fall, anyway, of1948, when some scabs went aboard on twonew tankers, and the national office, underCurran and his group, gave such conflictinginstructions to the agent that it looked asthough it was just planned to keep usfrom . . . . How was it? That whether our menshould leave those ships or not leave thoseships; and scabs [from the SUP] were readyto come aboard, and there was such confu-

607FLYING SQUADS

sion that it took a fight to drive the scabs offand keep the SUP off those ships for a while.Well, that gave us a clear indication that thatwas one of the moves.

But during that period, we still had fly-ing squads going out when it was necessaryto defend, to watch the docks, to keep finksand scabs off. We saw finks and scabs beingslipped on sometimes when our crew wouldrefuse to work a ship for one reason oranother. And we saw that the scabs that weresent on by the ship owners were just prelimi-nary. Some of them were SUP members—trip-card members, we’d call them, allowedto get cards, union cards, just for the purposeof making a particular trip. And they weren’treal regular members of the union. They weretrip-card men. Often they were in the union,but they did not have the same position asfull-time book members who had priority inshipping. And we felt that the SUP sent trip-card men out as scabs, you see. So we hadflying squads.

Now scabs are non-union people who will crossthe picket line, and finks are people within theunion?

Well, use them interchangeably. No, finkis anybody that was . . . .

Oh, OK. Just a fink.

A fink is a fink is a fink. [laughter]

[laughter] OK. Well, I thought maybe they werepeople within the unions that were . . . .

No, scab was just another word for it. Imean, these are people who took jobs fromother people when other people were strik-ing or when they had been locked out orsomething of that kind.

And so there was every indication thatthe Union Oil company was going to lock usout of those ships. Well that came a little bitlater, but right now we were concerned withsaving the ships. And we had—not only we,but the CMU or what was now CIO Mari-time Committee had taken the place of theCMU . . . .

I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the name.

The CIO Maritime Committee was acommittee that was set up by the CIO to carryout the same functions as the CMU on anational scale.

So anyway, it was in a period when theILWU had just settled its contract, its Juneor July contract, and there had been thisthreat of strike in 1947 and 1948. Every June15 and every September 15 was a strike-threatening period during this time, becausethat’s when contracts are going out. But theILWU, I think, had just settled its contract,and some of the other unions had gottensome things at that point. But here we hadthe Union Oil problem in the NMU.

So Pat Tobin, who knew Harry Bridges,said, “Let’s go see Harry about this. See if wecan get some help from these longshoremenout there. You know, we only have enoughforces here to handle these . . . to watch theseships.” And it was true. We just had a few . . .oh, a dozen guys to scatter around all thedocks and then up and down the coast inPedro and all the little oil docks along thecoast and up into Seattle. So, he and I wentup to see Harry Bridges. And I had seen himoften, but I hadn’t really talked to him.

He was a little guy, a little scrawny guy.He didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but he waswiry, and he had a big head. And he sat be-hind his desk, and, “Hi guys,” and all that,you know, “Sit down. What do you guys


want?” And so Pat laid out to him the prob-lem we were having with Union Oil.

Most of these halls you know, IMCS,ILWU, NMU, MFOW, were within a fewblocks of each other, so, you know, you couldgo back and forth and see people and havemeetings and things of that kind.

So here we were talking to Harry, and Patwas very clearly laying out this problem withUnion Oil, how we were going to be losingthe Union Oil if we didn’t really have enoughforces to keep the finks off and to keepLundeberg from slowly eroding our positionon those ships. And we even had good infor-mation that he had sent people into ourunion to go onto these ships—people withdouble cards, trip-card people from one unionwho sometimes would go to another, or inone way or another get aboard the ships, as adock worker or something. They would dis-rupt and try to mislead the crews and all thator wait for a vote or something.

Did you actually see some of this and are youconvinced that it was really going on, or did youjust hear that this was going on?

Oh, no, no, no. I know it was. You meanthe last thing I said about . . . ?

Yes, yes, about people double carded.

Oh, yes. We knew guys now and thenwho were on our [NMU] crews who wereworking with the SUP. They had NMU cardsor trip cards or whatever, but they had beenin the . . . . In fact, I myself was often ques-tioned by certain of my crewmates, you know.“Hey, you were in the SUP.” But my recordwas fairly good. I mean, I didn’t have muchtrouble with that. [laughter] But I mean, welooked for that.

And there were certain guys—peopleknew of them—who actually had direct con-nections with the SUP and were seeing SUPleadership and coming aboard ship. I don’tknow how many, but there were enough sothat we were aware that this could happen.And that’s a legitimate, reasonable kind ofthing for a union to do. It’s just competition,it’s a dog-eat-dog and a kind of warfare. Sowe were very alert to that.

So we were telling Harry all this and say-ing, “Look, Harry, we hate to ask you, youknow. Your union has got plenty on its plate,but could we have some guys to help us guardthese ships? Not necessarily for picket lines,but just for flying squads out there to discour-age anybody trying to get aboard whoshouldn’t get aboard.” This was during peri-ods when we were temporarily locked off aship or there was some kind of negotiationsgoing on in which our men wouldn’t work orwhen a ship would come in and the crewwould get off for regular shore leave. Andthen there would be the problem of others[from the SUP] getting on to take their place,which happened in two cases, one in SanPedro, pretty much with the company look-ing the other way. I mean, this was imminentand happening.

So Harry listened to us, and I rememberhe put his great big head on his hands, andhe thought a moment. He says, “Look, youguys, let me tell you something.” He says,“You know, you’re coming to me with thisgoddamn little pissy ass problem here. We’vegot the whole goddamn West Coast and theGulf and the Lakes’ problems, you know, ofcontracts for this year, and our people areworn out. They’ve been on strike, but they’restill ready for any kind of action that’s legiti-mate and meaningful. But,” he says, “how amI going to tell them that you NMU guys here

609FLYING SQUADS

at this goddamn one port can’t handle yourown ships? You don’t have enough guys tohave surveillance on a ship? You’re not com-ing here asking us for big help, you know,like a big picket line or something. We’vealready supported you guys, you guys havesupported us. But now you’re coming withthis little thing, you know, and you have togo out and keep your eye on ships and allthat sort.” He says, “You can’t do it yourself?You’re coming to me? Let me tell you whatJohn L. Lewis once told me.” He was a greatadmirer of John L. Lewis. He says, “Let metell you what John L. told me one time. Iwent to him with the same kind of questionabout something that was going on. Youknow what he said to me? He says, ‘Look,buddy, don’t bring out your cannons when apopgun’ll do.’” [laughter]

He shamed us. I mean, we just felt awful,you know. He was right. We’re coming to thisguy who had really been, I would say, thearchitect of a tremendous amount of tradeunion development on the West Coast, sup-porter of all kinds of basic trade union issuesthroughout the country and internationally.

He was at that time still under the cloudof indictment for being a communist, whichhe was not; I’m quite sure he never was acommunist, but he worked with anybody whohe thought would help his union. Secondly,I think he was very left-wing in his thinking,anti-capitalist, and he’d gone through some

hard knocks. But here he was looking at uslike, “You guys, you know, go get yourpopguns. Don’t go pointing a cannon.”

And so that was a great learning experi-ence for us. We went back with our tailbetween our legs, trying to figure out how wewere going to do it. And that’s when the fly-ing squads were still going on, but we justhad a few guys; there weren’t many guys inport. The guys that were in port out of workfelt there was no use hanging around the hall,because there weren’t any ships coming upon the board. So a lot of the guys were scat-tered looking for other jobs.

It was kind of a sad period for the unionand an angry one for those of us who hadbeen around for a while, because we couldsee the sign of the times. It was a feeling thatwe had sort of a last-ditch stand kind of situ-ation.

Well, I think you could see that there were largerstakes . . . it was a bigger issue.

Yes, sure. When I went on the long dockthere in the early part of 1948, you know, itwas really to hold it, because the phonies weretaking it over, and it was just getting ripe foran SUP takeover. And I helped to bring itback into shape, and we had a left-wing crewon it and all that sort of thing. But those arejust temporary things, because the right-wingmovement was on—slowly on.

70WORKING FOR WALLACE

O ALL THIS TIME, of course, I hadbeen elected as chairman of the ThirdParty Wallace Committee for Mari-

among those supporting the Third Partymovement, which the union finally at thatmoment accepted. But the right-wing wasslowly eroding support for the Third Party.And the Left . . . I guess in those days wecalled them left-sectarians, like theTrotskyites, in the sense they’re creating left-wing sects, way far left. Anarchists would bea left-sectarian and the Trotskyites. Theywere saying, “We should be running laborcandidates. The hell with those people likeWallace and all these social views.”

Well, of course, our position was, “Whatkind of crazy talk is that?” If you’ve got a guywith a good program, he doesn’t have to be acommunist, for Christ’s sake. He doesn’t haveto be a guy who walks around in dungarees.If he’s got a good program, by god, as againstTruman and Dewey, you know, it’s clear weshould be supporting him.

I think that was a strong movement. Imean, most laboring people that I knew werepro-Third Party, but not all of them weregoing to go for it, because some of them feltit was throwing a vote away.

Stime Workers, and that was taking a lot ofmy time, and it was quite a problem. WhenErik was born and I got the call there at theMaritime Bookshop, I mean, I was there forThird Party business, and we were turningout leaflets. And we turned out hundreds andhundreds of leaflets. [laughter] Oh, my god,were we leaflet-mad. And it was not on thebeautiful new kind of equipment we havetoday. This was on old barrel . . . .

Mimeograph?

Yes, mimeograph.

Purple ink?

And the purple ink thing, both laying outon the table. And we turned out masses ofliterature during that time on the strike andon the Third Party.

Of course, ever since the NMU conven-tion in 1947, just the year before, I had been


Well, you’d said earlier that you had anticipatedgetting like three million votes, and he actuallygot one million.

I think it was around a million, which isa lot!

Yes, it is.

I mean, that’s no small matter. If theCommunist Party of that period was thoughtto be 300,000, and there were more votesthan that . . . . [laughter] But no, we thoughtthere would be more.

But what was going on? Six members ofthe Communist National Council were in-dicted in 1948 right about this time. Well,the press then was immediately full ofWallace being a stooge of the communists,that the communist fronts were supportingWallace. All this was going on as the elec-tion approached.

You know, it was so clear what was hap-pening to us at that time. We just really feltwe understood. It was one of the powers of apolitical movement, I think—a left-wing, atleast, political movement—is you might notalways be right, but you have a sense of thetrend of the times. We had a feeling that weknew the kind of forces generally that wereat work, and that we were on the spot. And Iwould say that a lot of the workers at thattime didn’t think that way, you know.

Like the movement almost creates a lighteningrod, so that you can see what the forces are thata lot of people are totally unaware of.

Well, you have a preliminary agenda, andthey don’t care about that. What they careabout, as we used to say, were pork chops andthat’s all, I mean, what your wages are, what’son your plate, and what kind of raise you got

or didn’t get and day-to-day concerns. Per-fectly legitimate and meaningful, but notenough, because if you don’t see what’s hap-pening to you—I mean the big picture—youbecome the victim of that. Well, you mightbe the victim anyway, but at least you’d be afighting victim.

Right, a conscious victim.

You’d be an aware . . . [laughter] a trueconscious victim. And I still think that’s basi-cally true. I mean, I suppose it’s better to godown knowing why you’re going down thangoing just down.

You might go down anyway, but they won’t hood-wink you.

[laughter] Well, you have the satisfactionof knowing what was going on. So we hadthat feeling that we knew that. And we didn’tknow every . . . of course, we didn’t. Andwe made all kinds of mistakes, but we hadthis feeling that we were part of history, thatwe understood our role in history, which is apowerful feeling, by the way.

And I had a lot of criticisms not of whatwe did, but what the Communist Parties weredoing. I had a lot of criticism of the AmericanCommunist Party, which began to jell later.Nevertheless, I would much rather have beenthere doing that and thinking what I wasthinking then than what most people werethinking and doing. I’m grateful for thatopportunity.

And you think that it permanently affected howyou viewed the world from then on.

Oh, because I still pretty much think that.[laughter] I’m pretty well still in that groove,you know. Lots of changes, but nevertheless,


that, to me, among the things that were go-ing on, was the most legitimate, clear, aware,meaningful kind of role that people couldplay.

Well, it sounds like it was truly a forum for thingsthat mattered.

Sure. I mean, as I said before, all this wasgoing on. We were having classes on thewoman questions, supposedly on male chau-vinism. And not that people were able to doall these things correctly, but we were talk-ing about it. This is before anybody wastalking about these things, there was a gen-eral program going on. During all thisconvulsion, we had classes or get-togetherson the Negro question, on the woman ques-tion (as we called them, those awful words),and male chauvinism in which we had to beself-critical about our own families and whatwe were doing and what steps we had takento see to it that our wives had an opportu-nity either to get out in the work place or tobe part of the things that were going on. Towhat extent do we share in care of childrenand things around the house? And this washard for seamen to even dream of, you know.But they were doing it.

There was a lot of grousing and dirty jokesabout this and all that, but the interestingthing was it was also a weapon. The morepious members of our group were always call-ing us on these things. “You can’t use thatword. What do you mean ‘girl’? This is awoman.” You know, “What are you doingabout your wife being stuck in a house allday, for Christ’s sake?” you know. We weregetting that kind of . . . .

Really! It was really that . . . ?

Oh, all the time! We were very consciousof it. In fact, there was just as much grousingthen, even within the Left, as there is todayamong men about the women’s movement.“Oh, for godsakes, what’s going on here?” Youknow, “This is too much.” But it was pressed,it was pushed.

And on the so-called Negro question. Mygod, we had a lot of awakening kinds of dis-cussions about that—not only Negro history,but black-white relations on the day-to-daylevel. “So-and-so said what? How did youhandle it?” What do you do when you’re witha black member of your crew or a black com-rade, and somebody makes one of thesegoddamn remarks? What do you do? Juststand there? What do you do? And we didn’talways know what to do, but we discussed it.How do you handle this?

And we had black people in our unionwho we’d meet with, and we’d talk aboutthings. My god, these discussions were goingon back there in the 1940s.

Yes. Can you remember any of the conclusionsor strategies that were suggested, or . . . ?

You mean about these kinds of day-to-day issues?

Yes.

Yes, mainly it was the responsibility of thewhite member to take a position. You can’talways expect the Negro guy who has beenunder this stuff for so long and learned tohandle it by quiet or withdrawal, you know,you can’t expect him to take the brunt of it,if it was serious. Sometimes you overlookedthese things, but if it was serious, if it wassomething that was deeply embarrassing or asignificant interaction, it was the white guy


who was supposed to make a comment, like,“What are you talking about? We don’t usethose terms. We don’t talk that way. Wheredid you learn that?”

You know, sharpening your ability to pickit out and do something, and criticizing whitemembers in our group or in the union whodidn’t do that, who sat back, who said thingslike, “Well, what can you do? This guy, youcan’t do anything about him. He’s grown upthis way.” Or, “The black guy doesn’t care.He’s used to it.” You know, these were allconsidered chauvinistic positions, and wewould analyze and criticize them.

Black women—why is it that blackwomen are in even a worse position thanblack males and what we did about it? Forexample, in hiring that would go on, if we’dhave a black woman secretary, which some-times we would push for, how was she treated?

Well, I remember there was a big flapabout giving a woman like that, a black secre-tary, a raise in our local. She was overworked.And she wasn’t the best secretary in theworld, but my god she worked like hell. Shewas loyal, and so the question was raised ofgiving her a raise. And boy, was there oppo-sition to this, even from some of theleft-wingers. You know, “We can’t afford it,”and all that. And yet, a white woman whohad been there before had received two raisesbefore she left. [laughter]

So all this was brought out and discussed,not necessarily in open public union meet-ings, because sometimes that wasn’t a waythat you could get anywhere, but certainlyin our seamen’s club with either communistsor their supporters down at the MaritimeBookshop, at section meetings, or SanFrancisco Communist Party meetings. In theliterature that came out, these things werediscussed. Incidents were brought up of thingsthat had happened. There were party mem-

bers who were leaders in the area who weredismissed or removed from leadership andtold that they had to go back to work in someindustrial union and get clear on who theywere, you know. [laughter]

Well, did the party and the labor movement—Imean, the left-wing movement—also provide avenue for the black intellectuals who were writ-ing theoretical or critiques of history and . . . ?

Oh, in the union, I don’t recall that. I’mnot sure there were, but certainly nationally.I’d say the Communist Party had a number,not only in the party, but people connectedwith the party. Oh, yes. There were a lot ofwriters, writers of fiction and creative stuff,there was a lot of that going on—this was ahighly creative period—but I’m thinking interms of the Left. Oh, yes, there was a tre-mendous amount. Harry Haywood was onethat I remember and certainly Pettis Perry,who wrote a great deal about black commu-nist orientation, articles in Political Affairs andbrochures that I always had with me, becauseI felt they were terribly sharp.

And during this time was the wholequestion of the Negro nation as againstassimilation and things of that kind. I alwayssay that the beginning of a hard-hitting civilrights movement was taking place there rightafter the war. And I still believe that theCommunist Party, with all of its faults, witheverything that was ratchety about some ofits policies, was in the vanguard of this anddoing what I consider to be a great job inthinking through the problem, although notalways carrying it out very well.

But the loss of the black membershipduring the war to a considerable degree hadto do with the fact the party was totally cen-tralized on winning the war. And the partywas blamed for that, because it was said we


did it only to protect the Soviet Union.[laughter] You couldn’t win. “The left-wingunions were only saying they wouldn’t strikeand supporting the war effort, because theywere supporting the Soviet Union.” [laugh-ter] I mean, it sounds wild when you think ofit.

Was there any political analyst or magazine—and I’m thinking of something like the AtlanticMonthly or Harpers—that you were readingor that you felt was at least representing the Leftin the mainstream?

In the mainstream. The Nation, I forgetwhen it started, but The Nation was one. Itwas a pretty good left-wing publication.[Founded in 1865, The Nation “has stood forhuman rights, civil liberties, and economicjustice, taking on monopolies, militarism, andImperialism (www.nation archive.com 10/10/03)] Gosh, what were some of . . . ? Yes, therewere some. Not many, though. This was atough time for such views if they wanted tomake money. But there were. At the moment,I can’t think of them, but there was a lot ofliterature. The NAACP was very progressiveat the time, and then there was the NationalNegro Consul, I guess it was called, whichwas pretty much far left, and they were put-ting out a lot of material. So it was a livelytime, but also a churning time, one in whicha lot of things were beginning to get “back-to-the-wall”.

So it was during this that I was workingon the Third Party, going all over town; littlegroups of guys, and we’d go up and visit fami-lies and bring them the Third Party literature,visit other unions and city-wide meetingswhere we would speak as representatives ofthe waterfront unions. And I think therewere meetings at the university, you know,in Berkeley sometimes, not on the univer-

sity campus, but in Berkeley where the Stu-dents for Wallace were pretty well organizedand doing a hell of a job. We were very busymoving around at this point.

Toward the end of November . . . . Well,of course, November was terrible, because wewere there fighting, making our last stand onthe Union Oil ships, but it was one of thosetimes when I was away from the office I hadin the top of the NMU building . . . .

There were three stories, I think, and wayup at the top was a little attic office with twoor three rooms, and I had one of those officeswith a desk and a file cabinet, and I’d do myleaflets there and see people and do phonecalls—I had a phone and all that. And theagent of the union was a really right-wingphony. They had been trying to get me outof that office for a long time. They saw it as areal setback for them that d’Azevedo, notonly chairman of the Seamen for Wallace onthe front but of the Maritime Committee forWallace for the whole area, was using theNMU office for this and turning out commieletters.

And there were enough guys around thehall at that time who would agree with themas against the majority of our guys. I mean, Iwould say most seamen supported us locallyfor most of the time until they saw the hand-writing on the wall and they began to thinkof us as just an anchor around their neckslater on.

So I was away to one of these meetings—this was before the election—and when Icame back, everything had been moved outof that room and had been taken down thestairs and moved out. And I couldn’t findanybody who knew anything, because exceptfor the guys that were with us, the hall wasalmost empty. Obviously some of these char-acters, under the leadership of this one guy,had done this. And I couldn’t get anybody


to say where the hell this stuff was. Finally, Ifound where it was, but it was just too late.The election was about to happen. And Iremember going to a union meeting and say-ing, “You know, what are we going to doabout this? He’s thrown the IPP, [Wallace’s]Independent Progressive Party, out of the hallupstairs and ruined all of our literature andall that.”

And a lot of guys got up and madespeeches and got mad and said what theywere going to do, you know, and there wasjust too much going on, and there was a reso-lution passed to denounce this guy and sendit to the National Council and all that. Butit was a little late, and by that time I didn’tgive a damn. I was just mad. I mean, therewasn’t much more to do.

And then, of course, the election came.And you know, when I come to think of it, Idon’t think it was a great downer. It wasn’t agreat depressing event. It wasn’t anythingthat was terribly unexpected. We had hopedfor a few more votes, but just the idea thatwe had had the organization and that therehad been the expression of a left Third Partyin American politics, aside from the oldsocialists and all these little splinter partiesthat developed locally throughout the coun-try. We’d had this national movement witha lot of important things said and with a lotof good literature out and a lot of support fromnot only working people, but middle classpeople. The fact that even a million decidedto “waste their vote,” in this case, was, Ialways thought, positive.

There were some gloomy feelings amongsome of the Left, you know, like, “My god.What can we expect here in this country?And what is ever going to happen to it when

people don’t see?” But I think most of us real-ized, hell, it doesn’t mean people were againstit, but it’s like any Third Party—you don’tgo and put your vote there unless you’re reallyfired up. And, in fact, there were one mil-lion fired up people in the country. Thatseemed to me to be a damn good thing. AndI don’t think anybody expected that . . . .Well, there were expectations the Third Partywould continue, that there would be a con-tinuing Third Party movement. But this wasthe period of great anti-communist, anti-leftmovement in the country, that pretty wellundermined the development of any of thesethings.

So that was the Third Party of HenryWallace. I found him . . . people, particularlya lot of the Right, would talk about him asan airhead and a dreamer. Well, hell, thatwas always an attraction to me. He was a ter-ribly eloquent, clear guy, outspoken,courageous, taking positions in support ofunions, not denouncing the communists,welcoming their help if they wanted to helpbut making it clear he was not. He had a verygood post-Roosevelt position and a good for-eign policy, which criticized the MarshallPlan, which I still feel was one of those greatmoney-engineered programs to get control ofworld trade and to control the various smallgovernments throughout the world. And hewas critical about it, certainly critical on theTruman plan, the Truman doctrine. He wasnot supportive of the Soviet Union, but call-ing for rapprochement, calling for us not todevelop a competitive hostile stand in theworld (which ended up being what hap-pened)—the Cold War, a competition, etcetera. So it was a lively period.

71IDEOLOGIES

OW ABOUT ideologies. So muchof our programming at that timeutilized the literature and concepts

was a good guy or if the party of the SovietUnion succeeded. I saw it as an experiment,I saw it as an extremely important alterna-tive. It was disappointing and discouragingto learn about what was wrong with theSoviet Union and the Soviet party, but I don’tthink it took away the gains that had beenmade, you know.

And when did this start sort of coming into yourconscience?

I didn’t begin thinking about this seri-ously until I was going to school, back toschool, that I began to . . . .

Like in the early 1950s?

In the early 1950s. But it didn’t make meanti-Soviet, it didn’t make me anti-commu-nist. It made me reflective on what canhappen to social movements. And you know,the idea of the day, that communism is deadfrom the point of view of our president, isridiculous. That ideology is going to rever-

Nhaving to do with Stalin and Stalin’s writ-ings, which weren’t, of course, all his writings,but committee writings as true of most lead-ers. And there was a defensive posture aboutStalin. If there’s anything that I think ofwhere I wasn’t alert enough . . . well, I was,but it wasn’t the key thing. Out there on theSan Francisco waterfront, I wasn’t really con-cerned about whether Stalin was leader ofthe Soviet Union or what.

The Soviet Union, as a symbol of thedevelopment of a different system than capi-talism, was, to me, important. This historywas, to me, glorious and magnificent. So thatthe facts about what was going on in theSoviet Union as far as Stalin’s role that latercame out . . . and I can’t say it shocked me,because I wasn’t one of those hard-bitten left-wingers, of which I only knew a few. Most ofthem I knew were much more flexible andreasonable. I wasn’t one of those who felt thateverything later depended on whether Stalin


berate for many, many decades yet to come.It hasn’t finished its course of action through-out the world.

Of course, never would I condone thethings that we now know that took placethere, the kinds of repressions that took placefor some people, the kinds of secretive polit-ical corruption that was involved. This iswhat happens when power gets centralizedand in no way is open for criticism—whichby the way, if anything, made me more reflec-tive about something called “democraticcentralism” as it existed in the parties and inthe American Communist Party.

Not that I’m opposed to it in any way,but I thought there were many things wrongwith the way democratic centralism was un-derstood and developed within the party.Often, later on as the party began to disinte-grate, the so-called factions, considered to be“revisionist bourgeois factions,” were talkingabout the lack of democracy in the way demo-cratic centralism developed within the party,or was used within the party. Many of theirobjections were to any kind of restrictionupon criticism and I suppose they resisted theidea that you had to give way to the majorityonce the decision was made and carry outthat majority view without discussion untilthe next discussion—which is democraticcentralism to some extent. That’s not all itis; it is a very complex kind of concept goingall the way back to Bolsheviks and the revo-lution and Lenin’s statement on centralism.

But this was an ideology within the AmericanCommunist Party or more progressive . . . ?

This was the structure of debate and dis-cussion within the party where authority layat each level of discussion. And centralismmeans that you centralize your position peri-odically.

According to how the masses . . . .

Well, not just the masses, the member-ship of the party who were part of the massesand connected with the masses.

One of our self-criticisms about the wholeparty toward the end of the 1940s was therewere just too many non-working-class peoplewho had come in during the war who werecarrying with them all of their middle-classconcepts and things of that kind, you see, Ibeing probably one of them. But I don’t thinkI was that unclear in terms of party politics.But I remember that I had the feeling thatthe way democratic centralism was actuallyapplied within the party, because of thestresses on the party and all that, really turnedout often to be decisions made at the topcoming down, whereas democratic central-ism was supposed to be developing thediscussion below. The majority agrees at acertain level, then the new discussion’s at thenext level, then the majority agrees, and thenfinally at the top, the top represents the cul-mination of decisions made, at the discussionsof the major annual national conventions.

So at each level there’s a consensus.

Yes, sent up to the next level. And this isthe ideal concept, and then when the cen-tral committees take an analytically definedposition, that becomes the policy of the party,and you don’t oppose that until next time;there isn’t a continual period of criticism. Theperiod of criticism is during the developmentof policy. Once policy has developed . . . it’slike law; you know, it’s like congress’ law untilyou overturn it or change it. However, it wasmuch more rigid than this, because you hada revolutionary fighting party, and thereforeit often got distorted.

619IDEOLOGIES

So I had some objections about this too.But some people were very opposed to it andleft the party, and there were all the factions,things like that. All that was going on at thetime, and it was a rough period.

I guess I’ve always felt human beings arefallible. I mean, they can take all kinds ofprograms and develop them either positivelyor distort them. And a lot of the criticismwithin the party about its own policies andstructure were in terms of this understand-able thing that people do—misunderstandpolicy and failing to see the goal and the longrange purposes.

You have people on the one hand sayingwe should be able to criticize anything atanytime. Well, the answer to that is, well,this can take up hours and hours and daysand days while we got big problems, youknow, like a strike on the waterfront. So howare we going to come to any conclusions? Wehave to use the policy we have, and that is ituntil we have an orderly discussion at someother time. Well, sometimes those discussionswould never come about.

And then there was the other group thatsaid, “Whatever the party leadership says,that’s it. That’s our rule.” And then therewere even some who were accused of takingleadership from foreign Communist Partiesor from the Soviet Union.

That was the basis of charges from theRight against the communist leaders, thatthey took their orders from the Soviet Union,which is nonsense, absolute nonsense. Cer-tainly the Soviet Union’s position on worldevents and on any matters having to do witha revolutionary movement were very impor-tant to the Communist Party of this country,as were the positions of other CommunistParties, very important, because we had a sortof internationalized view of the developmentof the parties.

But as for taking orders, not only do Idoubt it, I mean, I never saw any evidence ofit, because I don’t think our leadership attimes even knew how to interpret what wasgoing on. [laughter] I mean, there were ques-tions to what degree was there an astuteMarxist orientation on the part of our lead-ership? Some were brilliant and some werestumbling along like people like me and alot of others. I mean, we were not expertMarxists.

So the American Communist Party had its ownagenda and had its own character?

Yes. However, it was certainly influencedby the agendas of other parties and anythingwe could learn from them; or we certainlydidn’t want to be at war with them. I mean,we would often accommodate our position,certainly in terms of labor conditions andstrikes and things of that kind. We supportedinternational trade unions and cooperation—certainly we did that. Our party had all kindsof connections with parties in South Americaand throughout Europe, and issues and mate-rials in our newspapers and in our magazinesoutlining what was going on in the rest ofthe world in other parties, and what theagenda was of imperialists in the capitalistsystem with regard to these countries.

The fear that Americans, in particular thecapitalist system of the United States, wasprone to fascism, was very much in our minds.You know, we began to hear things, and be-ing conspiratorialists at heart, like most of usare and I was certainly . . . . [laughter] I mean,the idea that we were bringing in Germanscientists, regardless of what their politicalbackground had been, bringing them in andusing them eventually for the atomic bomband all that. In fact, we turned the othercheek at thousands of Germans going to


South America and coming here who hadhad terrible, terrible histories in Germany interms of the Holocaust and all that. Thisworried us a great deal, and we saw this as asign that American capitalism was interestedin capital, not necessarily in the directionof . . . .

So you do feel that many German immigrantsthat came in were imported into this country, soto speak, having questionable pasts?

We know that. Oh, we know that now. Imean we get that in the newspapers from thelast ten, twenty years. I mean, somebody’salways being picked up somewhere.

But at the time, you feel like you were aware ofthis?

We just felt . . . . Oh, yes. We felt that itwas quite clear what we were doing, and Ithink it turned out to be right. Therewere . . . .

Do you think most of the American public wasduped, or do you think they just went along withthe . . . ?

I don’t think they paid attention.

They paid no attention.

I mean, some of the commentators wouldmake comments about this. What are wedoing? We’re bringing in all these Germanswhom we’re not even investigating, thoughother Germans can’t come in. Or American-Germans are under attack all the time, andyet we’re bringing in these guys.

Not only that, but things like Germansthat were in the camps that we had in this

country were eating better and having morefreedom of action than blacks in the Southaround them, you know. I mean, they weretreated like visiting dignitaries, partly becauseAmericans looked upon them as whiteAnglo-Saxons and wasn’t it a pity that wehad to fight them kind of thing.

And so, you know, there was every basisfor development of this kind of concern, Ithink, after the war. Well, for example, wefelt that the Truman plan and then theMarshall Plan were aimed primarily at resus-citating Germany and Japan, who had beenthe centers of fascism and imperialism dur-ing the war, for purposes of utilizing theirhighly developed industry. For our purposes,we wanted to develop them faster than any-body else, and we were turning down all kindsof little countries who had problems becauseeither they were not sufficiently developedor capitalist, or their orientation was morein terms of civil rights, revolutions, andchanges. And it was a highly selective sys-tem. Those things made us feel that we wereliving in a time when all the promises of thewar, all the promises of movements forchange during that war, were being undercutby extremely powerful forces in the world,lead particularly by American and Europeancorporations and capitalists.

And I still feel that. I mean, I feel thatthis is going on in the world today. One cansee those same forces at work.

And if anything is dying, it’s capitalismas it was. When I say capitalism, I’m not sosimple-minded that I think there is a unitarymonetary thing called capitalism. There arecapitalist systems, and the system that’s de-veloped in the Western world has had its day.Marx wasn’t all wrong, his timing was a littleoff, but its had its day. And all sorts of spin-offs on not only capitalism in its democratic

621IDEOLOGIES

form, but in its fascist form, and all sorts ofspin-offs from the class-conscious revolutionsand revolutionary thought will be going on.But Western capitalism as we have known itis tiring, is wearing out. And I say good.

[laughter]

Now however, all of this that I’ve beentalking about here over and over again, thesame themes, I suppose, comes back to myown position. I was a trade unionist on theWest Coast; I was intellectually a left-wingprogressive, strongly influenced by what Iknew, which was limited, of Marxist thought,quite loyal to the Communist Party’s posi-tion, though I had many questions about it.But I felt it was a positive movement and thatthe things wrong were things that, as far as Iwas concerned, didn’t interfere with its posi-tive role and effect in the work that I wasdoing where I was. So there’s where I wasfocused.

Secondly, the most important thing in mymind—and I’ve always tried to figure out howthis came about, where it began in my life,but more and more when I think of it, mypositive concerns about my party activities—was the role that the party had withAmerican blacks, with African-Americans.That somehow or other, to me, was the lit-mus test. I mean, where people stood on therace question, where people stood aboutenfranchisement of American Negroes,either in our country or anywhere, or otherminorities certainly, but this was the one thatwas the main one, in front of any American,was black Americans and the race problem.And I saw it as the single most important,most profound social problem in the UnitedStates.

Because there was utterly no awareness of thefact that the American Indian had any politicalidentity left at this time.

Yes. Well, I had that in mind, I meanother minorities. Oh gosh, I worked withHispanic groups on the Third Party cam-paign. My god, there was a . . . notHispanics—I forget what they called them-selves—oh, Latin Americans for Wallace.And there were Chinese for Wallace, therewas a small group that was there, led by avery, very articulate and admirable Chineseguy who I think was in the Marine Cooksand Stewards—I forget his name. And youknow, there were these various groups. I don’tremember any American Indians beingaround at that time, except as individuals,not as any activist group.

Right. As political identities, I don’t thinkthey . . . .

However, because of my own interest andbackground, I always felt that that was oneof the great crimes of the development of theAmerican body of politic. Not only the CivilWar and its origins and consequences, andreconstruction and post-reconstruction,which I became very interested in later on,but the destruction, the decimation of theAmerican Indians was something that alwayshad been in my mind as one of the great nega-tive events or processes in the developmentof the United States. But also I saw it as aconsequence of unlimited, unfettered freeenterprise and capitalism; I made that ideo-logical connection during this period. I sawit as a consequence of unfettered, buccaneercapitalism, unfettered greed, open-endedcompetition with no controls. People gothurt—a lot of people, not just a few. And


people like Native Americans were easymarks. They were perceived as easy to get ridof as the buffalo, but fortunately there areenough around now to cause some trouble,and I’m all for them. Even the little Washoearea is doing fine. [laughter] Much better thansome of the people in Africa that I knew andworked with. OK. So that was my focus, ontrade unionism, seamen’s issues and also atthe same time, what I considered to be amajor issue in American life—the positionof the African-Americans.

And it’s of interest to you, I mean, you just saidthat you’re not quite sure what the origin of thisfocus was . . . .

Well, I could come up with something,yes.

But nevertheless, it was a very strong one rightat this time.

Yes. All the way back even when I wassort of apolitical going to sea at the begin-ning, somehow or other, that was on mymind, you know, the SUP being all whiteand . . . .

Well, you know, when I was asking you wayback when we were talking about your earlyschool days and before in Modesto, and you weresort of talking about the different people in yourclass, you said there was only one African-American.

Right. And all my life I remembered her,Samantha Henderson. I wonder what everhappened to Samantha. Because I alwaysthought what a courageous thing it was, andthat she was so smart and had to work so hardto maintain dignity and maintain a position

there. Though nobody gave her a bad time,in a sense it was because she was isolated.

Must have been very isolated.

Yes. As I say, I don’t know why [this be-came such as issue]. It must have somethingto do with the position of my grandparentson both sides, having somehow or other suchan identification with working people orpeople who are minorities and all that sortof thing. I don’t know. I have to think thatthrough.

But anyway, so here was the end of 1948,really now the end. Of course, one of themain things that was happening from thepoint of view of the union was that we werelosing the Union Oil ships. I’m not quite surejust what date this happened or under whatcircumstances except that the companylocked us out somewhere in October orNovember, sometime at the end of the year.And I called . . . .

So you think it was after the election?

During and after. Everything was happen-ing at once. I even called the agent of theNMU, a guy I don’t know. He was an old guyand he’d been around a time, but he couldn’tremember exactly when we lost Union Oil.But it was at the end of 1948 some time.

We were really not so much on strike ashaving guys out to the docks to try and defendour jobs, to keep the jobs. And while we weredoing this, the SUP was getting guys on theships by subterfuge, bringing them in bylaunches around the other side of the docksand all kinds of things, getting them on boardand getting the ships out. Sometimes whilewe were watching waiting to stop finks fromcoming on, the ship would drop its lines, pullin the oil lines, and take off.

623IDEOLOGIES

Oh, that’s terrible.

And we knew we’d been had. And be-cause there was no longer the real push andstrength and unity within the union, it hap-pened. So we lost that.

I understand we still have Keystone Oil,two or three ships or something like that. Butthere are hardly any union ships for seamento go on from union halls, including I thinkthe SUP—I’m quite sure of it because I vis-ited the SUP hall in Seattle. The maritimelife has pretty well come to an end on theWest Coast. It’s a sad thing. I mean, I feelvery disconsolate about it.

Nevertheless, the end of 1948 was aperiod in which that happened, and so as Iremember, I was thinking, “Now what’s go-ing to happen? What am I going to do?” Herewas a period in which I hadn’t shipped outfor a couple of months since the LP St. Clair;that ship was gone. That was a tragedy, be-cause I remember the guys that I had knownhad been locked out.

It was a very discouraging time, and wecould see the handwriting on the wall withalso a deep sense of anger and disappoint-ment at what was going on within our unionand throughout the country. The CIO wasbeginning to be anti-communist, conserva-tive. Union leadership was just sort of sellingout right and left because of the pressure thatwas coming on from the government andfrom corporations who really had, now, theupper hand. And the anti-communist move-ment was wiping out the progressive Left, andwe could see it was going to happen in mari-time, that there was going to be either loyaltyoaths or screening or whatever. In fact, itcame a year or two later; already had startedwith some companies that were refusing tohire seamen who had a record of left-wingbehavior and sending them back home and

saying, “We can’t take you,” and then usingthe Taft-Hartley Bill as their cover, on andon.

This stuff was going on to such an extentnobody knew which way to turn, how to fightit. And there wasn’t enough push within theunion to do it. ILWU held fast for its ownpeople—a remarkable union all the waythrough. I attribute that not only to HarryBridges but to an extremely alert kind of lead-ership and internal structure they had.

OK. So I remember being on the beach,my friend Pat Tobin and I—we had gottento know his wife and family very well—andwe wondered, “What are we going to do?”So we thought, “Maybe we’ll take an off-shore trip. We haven’t got tankers anymore.Let’s take an off-shore trip.” Well, you know,Kathy and I were in deep discussions aboutit was really time for me to do something elsebesides maritime. And I had promised it fora couple of years, since the end of the war.And I was in a deep turmoil again about whatI was going to do, yet I felt this great pull tosort of stick with it, not just give up.

So, you know, Kathy and I talked aboutit a lot, and I remember eventually—I thinkit was in the spring of 1949—I decided tomake this one last trip with Pat. Kathy wasvery much against it, and so I left under acloud. We had a lot of strong feeling about iton both sides, and I said, “Look, this is mylast trip, but I feel I’ve got to cap it with anoff-shore trip now and with a bunch of goodguys.” And they were. They were all a bunchof left-wingers that I had known who weregoing to get on this trip. And I just felt Ineeded . . . I wanted to be there. So I de-cided to do it.

And in the meantime, I had seen mybrother and my parents. I’d see them fre-quently off and on. And I must say, lookingback at some of the things that I’ve said about


my parents and all of that earlier in this dis-cussion, I haven’t given them credit for beingextremely . . . not tolerant, because theydidn’t like what I was doing, but not givingme a bad time about it, not preaching to meabout it. In fact, I don’t think either of themknew how to preach to me about it. I mean,they were just mystified that they had a sonthat was out there doing all these, in theirminds, crazy things.

They were both progressive people. Theyhad voted Democratic, they were pro-Roosevelt, anti-Hoover and all that sort ofthing, anti-war and all that, so that they hadthis middle-class, progressive social demo-cratic orientation to things, but they weren’tprepared to have to deal with a communist,you see.

Also, there was the religious aspect in mymother’s mind and all that. But she was care-ful, and I have to give her credit; she wasterribly careful not to try to give me a badtime about it.

My father was just his usual silent selfmaking a few grunted remarks now and then.But nevertheless, he did help us now andthen. He lent us money to put down on thathouse we had in Berkeley, and I was payinghim back whenever I could get it, $100 amonth, which at that time was a lot. When Iwas working, but when I wasn’t working, helet me hold it over. So you know, they werevery kind.

I didn’t learn until later how much thishad bothered my mother. In fact, she had afriend who was very anti-communist whoreported me to the FBI. And I don’t thinkmy mother knew this. I learned it when I gotmy freedom of information stuff. Poor oldElizabeth Deacon, I think her name was. Andshe felt she had to do something on behalf ofmy mother, which was to report her son to

the FBI. [laughter] And she wrote a letter,which I have seen, which is absolutely fan-tastic. You know, she accuses me of everynefarious thing in the world, including Kathy,because she just felt that I was giving mymother such a hard time.

But my mother didn’t let me know howmuch it bothered her, which I respect. I thinkthat’s great.

When I look back on my folks, I have alot of feelings about my father which arenegative, but at the same time, he never reallygave me a bad time, and, in fact, was helpfulnow and then. His problem was he just wasremote. [laughter] He was under remotecontrol.

And so anyway, that was going on. Butmainly with Kathy, I felt very badly when Idecided to take this trip. Was it in March?No, January of 1949.

I wanted to get away from this hor-rible . . . I think that this was true of Pat andtwo or three of the other guys, NMU guys weknew, wanted to get away from that morasson the front which had turned into the mostdepressing kind of thing. There really was areturn to a kind of doldrums, pretty muchunder, not control, but the umbrella of theright-wing in the NMU. There was just nojob situation to create a membership. It wassmall and it was right-wing and nasty—notall of them, but there were enough there tomake it nasty. And you saw programs begin-ning to fall apart everywhere.

So we took that trip, around Panama toNew York. And then I betrayed Kathy oncemore on this. Coming back from New York,I stayed on the ship and went to France. Andthat was a dirty trick. And I really felt thatKathy was kind of . . . going to just pull off,and she almost did; she was going to jumpship. [laughter]

72RELIGION AND CLASS STRUGGLE

WANTED TO ASK you one quick ques-tion about your feelings about theCommunist Party stance on religion. Did

Again, I saw what I considered to be realworking class solidarity coming from them.Women coming down with pies, blackwomen on the picket line. And there weren’tmany of them, but they did that along withothers. So, you know, my view was if they’reChristians, let them show how Christian theyare. Who are they for? What’s their Chris-tianity for?

You know, “Religion is the opiate of thepeople.” I sort of accepted that notion. In away, I still do. Certain ways in which reli-gion is organized is opiative. It is the opiate.It’s like gin and the Bible for the NativeAmericans. “Here’s the Bible to keep yourmind straight as you drink the gin to easeyour pain.”

In talking about the role of the organizedreligions, but particularly of the variousChristian denominations in relation to classstruggles, the church has always been veryfree with proselytizing and with the conquestof the great territory that’s now the UnitedStates. I mean, a whole people were deci-mated, sometimes with representatives of thevarious missions right along with the troops,

Iyou feel it was a political necessity to turn yourback on religion, or did it not affect yourpersonal . . . ?

I never turned my back on religion. I wasalways a religious as well as secular person. Iam now. I have a lot of religious and spiritualfeelings and ideas and somewhat mysti-cal . . . .

But it wasn’t a relevant issue for you at the time?

It was relevant in the sense that I saw theorganized churches and the Catholic churchand others as being very right-wing politi-cally, that they seldom supported strikes. Youknow, I figured if they’re Christians, for god’ssakes, why aren’t they out there on the picketline? Why aren’t the churches organizing aid?By the way, some did, mostly black churches,you know, and some of the Hispanic . . . .

Yes, and that’s interesting.


carrying the Bible while others carried gin:“Here’s something to relieve your pain andto fill your mind while we take your land.”And this is something which many thinkershave commented on, the relation of the mis-sionaries in colonialism to power, what theiractual role was.

And I do have something to say aboutthat. Later when I was doing fieldwork, I hada very negative opinion of missionaries eventhough I knew some individually and likedthem as persons. I felt that they were misled,that they thought they were doing somethingthat really didn’t result in what they expected,that they were telling people to put theirminds to various matters of faith, to read theBible, to pray. And while they were doingthat, these people were being totally op-pressed and sometimes killed by their leaders.And under colonialism, very much the samesort of process went about.

I have somewhat modified my view aboutthe contributions made by the kind of mis-sionary who is doing service work andmedical work under trying conditions. Someof them had done noble things, magnificentthings. At the same time, that doesn’t meanthat the movements that they were part ofwere really positive, were really helping orawakening people to their actual conditions,giving them a consciousness of where theywere at and why they were where they were.Not just “God’s will,” but the actions of othersin their society or in other societies that wereutilizing them, oppressing them. But I can’tsay that I’m anti-religious just because I’manti-church or that I’ve had negative atti-tudes about the whole process of missionizing,et cetera, in history.

At the same time, I have a lot of admira-tion for many people that I’ve known or readwho are religious and were concerned withbroader questions, philosophical questions,

the human condition, and I have felt verystrongly about that. Certainly a guy likeMahatma Gandhi was deeply religious, andto me, in a very positive way. He had his spiri-tual orientation which led him to action, ledhim to risk himself for larger ideas and forthose people in his society and the world’ssociety who had nothing else to, in a sense,empower them with ideas. And his passiveresistance was not passive in the sense of say-ing, “Do nothing. Just await your fate,” but,“Do something about it.” That’s, to me, ad-mirable. And later there was Martin LutherKing Jr., an heroic figure in this regard.

I’ve never been opposed to religion, andall through my life when I was dealing withother people, if they were religious—even ifthey were fundamentally religious in aChristian sense—I could tolerate that. Mygod, my grandparents were that way on bothsides of the family.

But my Swedish grandparents were deeplyfundamentalist Christians. And I saw this asa very necessary part of their lives. They hadnothing else, and they didn’t know how toget anything else. They had no idea that theconditions that they were in as immigrantsin this country, coming as peasants from theold world . . . they had no idea how to fightthat, what to do about it. There were no waysin which they could attach themselves to anysocial movements. They wouldn’t haveunderstood them.

And also, the churches of their time weredenouncing any kind of unionization or anykind of confederation of people for their owngood. No, this was said to be the work of thedevil, so put your faith in the Lord. I under-stood what their situation was, even when Iwas a little kid and my grandmother spokein tongues when she was praying in the mis-sions that they would take me to. I rememberasking her once something like, “What is that


you’re saying? What are you saying,Grandma?”

And she says, “That’s the language ofheaven. That’s the language of God.”

And later on, I was thinking, “Gee, therehas to be, we have to think of some kind of alanguage for heaven and with the differenthundreds and hundreds of languages of theworld. What kind of a language is spoken inheaven?” And my grandmother had an an-swer. [laughter] And I always thought that itwas kind of great that I had heard the lan-guage of heaven in my grandmother’sspeaking in tongues.

And whenever I’ve done any work withother peoples of other groups, I’ve always hada great feeling of respect for the ideologies,the faiths, the beliefs that they have thatmake their lives whole for them, give theirlives some kind of structure and meaning.Hell, the people have to have that, and everysociety in the world has created these kindsof beliefs.

Well, don’t you think among immigrants in par-ticular that maintenance of a religious ideal, eventhough it might change, would be part of main-taining an ethnic integrity?

Well, more than that.

When they’ve changed everything else?

Well, they had come from extremelyfundamentalist backgrounds, very fundamen-talist, straight-laced Scandinavian- Lutherantraditions that came with them here, and thatthey sought out here in the various charis-matic movements. However, it was more thanan ethnic . . . . This was inter-ethnic. Thisallowed them to make connections in theirmissions and churches with other ethnicgroups. My grandparents . . .

So it was forging a new community.

. . . my grandparents were able to makeconnections or have relations with theirneighbors who were Jewish or Italian, in somecases even black, which in that time was rareand difficult. Also with Chinese . . . . TheChinese were more difficult, because notmany of them were Christians, but anybodywho was a Christian, Irish or whatever . . . .My grandfather, he changed his name to anIrish name to be able to go along with themand get jobs in the Irish-dominated lumbercamps.

No, it created a multi-ethnic setting forthem, which was absolutely essential in orderto get along, to make a living, to have con-nections, to have a network. The mission wasa network. And I guess the early trade-unionmovements would have been a network too,but there was a tremendous amount of pro-paganda against that, and they wereimmigrants, and they were going to do theright thing. And the church, they could atleast argue that even though most of thepeople in upper levels of the society lookeddown on these holy-roller churches, therewere a lot of people who belonged, and atleast they had the fortification that this wasGod’s will.

Well now, these were important kinds ofinstruments for survival, and so I’ve neverbeen against religion unless it takes the formof fortifying the ignorance of people, fortify-ing their sense of dependence upon unseenforces that are created for them by tradition—except under the conditions where they havenothing else.

Well, would you say at that time in 1949 andprior to that that you thought that the working-class and the labor unions, in order to achievesome social parity, that most of those ethnic prac-


tices and identities were going to have to fall bythe wayside? I mean, did you have any idea atall about how people were maintaining their . . . ?

Yes, I suppose, when I look back—it’s veryhard to reconstruct one’s thinking way in thepast.

Yes, but I think that under those condi-tions and the kinds of things that I wasreading and the associations that I had, thatI was at that time more strenuously anti-church and anti-religion than I might be now,though I’m still secular and I still hold thosegeneral views. I mean, there was a sense of akind of a warfare with ignorance and tradi-tions that were holding people back. Thatwas very much a part of my thinking and thethinking of most of the people I knew. Notnecessarily the people in the CommunistParty, but generally progressive people lookedwith a little bit of wariness on any kind ofreligious movement that had this fundamen-talist calling people to the faith withoutgiving them any instruments to resolve theirproblems in society. Yes, I think I had a muchstronger view of that kind than I had later,and for a good reason.

My god, though, I used to attend blackchurches in San Francisco. During the ThirdParty movement, I attended with some of myblack friends the churches and would pass outleaflets and things of this kind. And it re-minded me of my relations with mygrandparents. I mean, it wasn’t strange to meor weird or anything of that kind, and I wasinterested and I also respected the tremen-dous feeling that was involved there, thepositive emotional feeling that people got.

And by the way, this is about the timethat the book by Gunnar Myrdal came out,The American Dilemma. This is almost for-gotten in American life. This was atremendously powerful piece of work. An

American Dilemma or The AmericanDilemma—I don’t know which. But it was amasterful, scholarly work that had taken himyears to do under auspices of various grant-ing groups in the country. Here was a Swedewho had been asked if he would . . . a famoussociologist, asked to come to this country todo that. He took it very seriously, and thestatistics, the data in that work was a mind-blower, and it had a tremendous impact oneverybody I knew—Gunnar Myrdal’s work.In fact, Herskovits had been one of the con-sultants for it and a number of other people Ilater was to know. They had been part of it.It was being denounced as a left-wing thingand all that by a few, you know, in the press.

When you say, “have an impact on you and thepeople you knew,” is this still around the Mari-time Bookshop?

Well, there, of course, because that’swhere I was. But no, many people in profes-sional life that I knew and people at theuniversities and the people who were writ-ing, columnists and others. This had a greatimpact, because it proved or gave a base forwhat people already felt, that things werereally bad, that racism was deeply ingrained,was rampant in American society. And hehad shown this in every domain of Americanlife. And how he managed to gather thatamount of material together with the staffhe had, I mean, that in itself was an amazingthing.

Where was he centered out of? Do you remem-ber?

Where did he work out of? I forget. Wasit Chicago?

I’m just curious.


Minnesota? I’ll have to check. I forgetnow. I haven’t read this thing in so manyyears, but I remember that I poured throughit, and everybody I know poured through it,because here was the proof of what we knew.And it’s amazing that when I used to assignthis in classes back in the 1970s and 1980s,nobody knew it.

Yes, I know. I’ve never heard of it, which doesn’tmean anything, but I mean . . . .

Well, it says an awful lot about history,you know.

Yes, it does.

And yet I’m sure . . . I know that thatmaterial has moved into all aspects ofAmerican life. It’s been utilized and it’s beenpicked up by others, and sometimes not evencredited, but it gave the impetus for tremen-dous amount of sociological . . . .

And this, was it done in the 1940s? Was it doneright after World War II, or . . . ?

I think it came out in 1948 or 1949. Youknow, he had been working during the 1940s,maybe even earlier. But it had a great impact.Now how deep the impact was, I can’t say.All I know is that in the world that I was in,it was . . . .

But you also said that he was also denounced bythe Right . . . .

Well, the work was denounced as biased,and as this or that by a lot of the usual crazies.However, there was generally a tremendousadmiration for the work and respect for it.And it was awfully hard to avoid the impli-cations of it. I mean, it showed that there

was a deep, sharp division in American life,and it offered a good analysis of previous workabout African-Americans in Americansociety.

Was it targeting the race question, or was it allaspects of class differentiation or . . . ?

Well, it was that also. That was an im-portant part of it. It showed class differencesand ideology about these matters and behav-ior. Oh yes, it was a good sociological work.It was a masterpiece. And you know, soci-ologists, some of them may have been criticalof certain of the methodologies in there, butnevertheless, the material itself was so com-pelling that I think it probably awakened agreat deal of the thinking that went on dur-ing the civil rights movement later. It wasconstantly referred to during the 1960s.

In the 1960s, it was still important as areference work—the figures for health andfor jobs and highly detailed studies of atti-tudes on different levels of American society.You know, these were very useful things. Youeven heard it referred to in congress in the1950s.

Gosh, you’d think fifty years later it’d really befascinating to go back and take the same . . . .

And see . . . . Well, I think it’s been done.I don’t know enough about the literature nowto be sure, but oh, I’m sure that there hasbeen a lot of reflexive work about that. Butmaybe not enough, because I know studentsaren’t aware of it.

Not if a book like The Bell Curve can be on thebest seller list for . . . .

Well, that’s true, except it got highly criti-cized too; but at the same time I do think


that works like Myrdal’s may not be con-stantly in the public mind, though thematerial that’s in them has influence.

Just gets absorbed.

And has influenced a great deal of otherwork and consciousness.

I remember when I first was reading it inthe late 1940s, it was sort of the thing to read,at least among the people I knew, not justthe party people or trade unionists, buteverywhere. I mean, people were talkingabout it. It was just a subject of conversation.But I do think there are works like that thatsort of disappear in themselves, but have gen-erated an enormous amount of alertness andawareness. And I think there’s no doubtabout it, that it was integral to the develop-ment—at least from the point of view ofinformation—of the civil rights movement.Here was something one could point to andsay, “Look. Here are the facts,” you see.

So anyway, that was going on. And bythe way, you know, anybody wondering whyeven myself or anybody else was concernedabout the so-called Negro problem at thattime . . . my god, there were fifty lynchingsa year going on in the South! There werebeatings and small riots, and god, the Ku KluxKlan was active and highly voluble. I mean,leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk wereable to make public statements that gotnational attention, parades of thousands ofpeople, even in New York we’d have them,and in various large cities. They had status.

It was a major issue. And when Myrdal’swork came out and other works like it andsimilar works or spin-offs or before—therehad been previous very important blackwriters, DuBois and others—when it cameout, it gave us an underpinning for what we

were saying, you know. “My god, it’s not onlygoing on here, it’s going on all over.” Andthe newspapers report these things, but hereis why.

And The American Dilemma, that marvel-ous title, his view being this is the Americandilemma, and I think it still is. It has notchanged. So I’m glad I remembered that,brought that up. That was an importantevent. That was an important scholarlyevent, and it had a deep impress on me. Infact, it charged me to do more reading, to domore thinking about it, and I think affectedwhat I did later on when I went back toschool, what I was interested in.

So the question of why was I interestednot only would have been the impact of ear-lier experiences on me in my early life thatgave a kind of . . . I suppose paved the wayin a sense, but it was what was going on. Toanybody who was thinking at that time, theyhad to think of the race problem and theemergence of strong trade unions as two ofthe major things going on in American life.

Now I’m sure millions of Americansdidn’t see it that way or even think about it.Nevertheless, to people who were doing thingsin terms of social action, those were the issues.And one can go through two or three decadesof issues of the Political Affairs, the majorCommunist Party discussion magazine, andfind that every issue deals not only with tradeunion issues and with party philosophicaltheoretical issues or Marxist issues, but alwaysthere was some major discussion going on ofthe race issue and the development of Negronationalism and consciousness and what thismeant theoretically. And women’s issues—not as much, but here and there—white malechauvinism and women’s issues.

No one else was doing it. Of course therewere others now and then, writers and


thinkers, who were commenting on it, butthere was no movement that carried thisalong. So that’s why I made such a point ofthat.

73THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY

OW WE WERE on the subject ofthe verges of the beginning of thedisillusion of the Communist Party.

and the other; along side of the Taft-HartleyBill in the United States that was clearlymeant to weaken trade union organization,and to weaken hiring halls as far as we wereconcerned in our union. All these thingstogether and the arrest of the leaders of theCommunist Party, the indictment of them,at least, at that point, all of these thingspointed to a massive move against the Left.And not just the far Left, not the Commu-nist Party. That was the tag. It was against allprogressive parties and all progressive move-ments, particularly within trade unions. Andthen all of the so-called front organizationsthat were “toadies of the Communist Party”and all that crap was going on.

Henry Wallace was tagged with the redlabel, that he was a dupe of the CommunistParty. All of this happening within a spaceof two years. It was massive, and it had itseffect. The party began to, I would say, disin-tegrate. Dissension was in the party, and itawakened all the factionalism that had beenlying there that had been put aside, particu-larly during the period when we thought theCIO was really moving toward very progres-

NWe had talked about disillusion in the partywhen Browderism almost brought about thedisruption of the party because of his revi-sionism and social democratic orientationand things of that kind. But that was noth-ing like the real disillusion that was going onat the end of the 1940s with the attacks uponnot only communists, but everybody who wasdoing anything progressive was tagged as ared.

From a political point of view, it was quiteclear at the time—and we were very awareof it—that this had to do with post-warattempt on the part of corporations and capi-talism as we saw it, those big capitalized wordsthat require a lot more identity than I cangive them here.

Nevertheless, there was that post-wardrive to control markets, to control trade, toextend it throughout the devastated world;to put American interests foremost under theguise of all kinds of aid programs and healthprograms, the Marshall Plan and this and that


sive goals and that there was a chance forsuccess, that there was going to be change,social change and all that because of it, morepower for working people in the unions.

And then we began to see the shadowscoming, this warfare was really one-sided, andthey were . . . the Right was able to splitunions.

Well, the CIO actually started expelling unionsthat were communist . . . .

Yes, in 1948, 1949, 1950, our union,Joseph Curran and his group had successfullyat last been able to raise the flag of anti-com-munism, the specter of communism withinthe union. Curran hadn’t dared do that be-fore, because he was an opportunist. Theparty was helping him and had kept him inpower, and then when he had the chance,he moved. And the chance came when theCIO began to have factionalism within itabout the Left and then the Taft-Hartley Billexplicitly called upon unions to get rid oftheir trouble-makers and all that sort of thing,and undermining the hiring halls so thatemployers could actually begin to affect thehiring and things of that kind. All of this washappening, and it was doing its job.

So that by 1949, we had lost the UnionOil ships, and to me, that was direct. Thatwas my immediate interest. I had been at thehall, and I was a trade unionist on the WestCoast and maritime worker, and here afterall these struggles, our own national leader-ship under Curran was undermining ourattempts to hold those ships and making dealswith the SUP on the coast and actually say-ing so.

Curran, at one point in that period, saidsomething like, “There’s no reason why weshould be sailing there. That’s SUP territory,”

et cetera. And then he would deny that hehad said it. It was terrible, because he cre-ated such confusion among the membership.They didn’t know half the time which waywe were going. Our meetings were shoutingmatches between one group or another, be-tween those accusing others of revisionismand petty bourgeois attitudes, social demo-cratic revisionism as against left sectarianpeople way on the other side who were anar-chists and Luddites. And name-calling beganto happen within the party, and little factionspulled off and began to write their own lit-erature and leaflets and send out all kinds ofcalls for special meetings, undermining theauthority of local communist leadership anddenouncing individuals. Oh, it was a terribletime.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating, and Ithink anybody who was there at thattime . . . . I wasn’t one of the more informedand aware characters, but some of those thatI admired—needn’t name their names—lead-ing communist figures in the maritime union,even they were deeply troubled. They didn’tknow quite how to handle it except to callfor discipline, organization. And the more theparty called for discipline, democratic cen-tralism, the more these looser factions on theoutside began to say, “This is undemocratic.This is not the way.”

And I remember there was a pamphletput out by the San Francisco leadership ofthe Communist Party on democratic central-ism—or maybe it was the leadership of thecentral California party. Nevertheless, it sortof laid out the basic party views based onLeninism of what democratic centralism was:how it worked, how the structure of discus-sion worked; starting at the bottom going upto the top through various levels, throughdiscussions, taking positions. Once positions


were taken, that was your position till it gotup to the top, and then the top also thenentered its views. And the final view at thenational convention, annually or every twoyears, at that, when the position was taken,that was it. If you disagreed, you waited tillthe next round of those discussions. Other-wise, you were a disrupter, you were “anenemy of the people.”

I never really liked these kinds of terms,these kinds of attitudes, but at the same time,I could see how important they were. Therehad to be some kind of disciplined center ofaction. And when you saw what happenedwhen there wasn’t, you realized, “We’re go-ing nowhere. We’re going to be swamped.”And we were. [laughter] We were swamped.

You know, there was the idea of a partyas a vanguard of the working class, those oldsort of time-worn terms that we were usingat that time, and they had sense. I mean, tome, it was sensible. Even though I didn’t feelthat I personally could really be a leader underthose conditions, that I was not constitution-ally capable of working indefinitely underthat kind of direction and personal discipline,nevertheless I respected the need for it andcould see that under certain conditions, bygod, that was the only way to work, or youhad nothing. Not that I was of two mindsabout it, but I just accepted the fact that Ihad limitations in the degree to which I couldaccommodate this kind of centralizing orga-nization, because basically I struggled for myown intellectual and personal independence.But I was willing to give it up at periods oftime when I felt that it made sense. It’s likewar. I mean, you know, during the war, wedidn’t strike. We called for cooperation, inindustry and . . . .

And you made a personal accommodation toyour . . . .

Yes, and the personal accommodationwas that when there’s a task that involvesthe struggles of people who you agree withand you feel strongly about, then by god, thisis the time to relinquish some of your per-sonal predilections and feelings and enter infull-heartedly.

So I understood intellectually, I think, theconcept of democratic centralism, and itmade a kind of a sense to me, if it worked, youknow. And of course, what was happeningwas that many of the factions within the localparty groups that I knew about were saying,“It’s not working. It’s not democratic. It’s cen-tralism without democracy.” Well, part of thatwas really true, because what was happeningis that the party and similar organizationswere under such pressure. You know, we weresure that at every meeting we had, there wereFBI agents. Oh, in fact we learned later itwas true—that people we thought we trustedwere working for the FBI, making reports toit, just as informers had done this during tradeunion struggles in the past.

And so, on the one hand, there were thepeople saying, “There is no democracy now,because everything is being done from thetop downwards. Where are our disagreementsand interests being expressed in meetingshere? What’s happening to them? They don’teven move up. Nobody cares. We’re gettingit from top down.”

Of course, this left some of the far Rightwithin the party moving into a much morerespected level, because leadership must allbe coming from the Soviet Union, that wewere following their dictates. You know, craplike that was going on, that every move hadto be sanctioned by the Soviet Union. Andto some degree, the coordination of partiesthroughout Europe and the Soviet Union didhave an influence on national leadership


views, but that’s not what was happeningdown below.

However, it was pretty much a matter ofus, in a sense, getting directives about whatour position should be, and then pretty muchhaving to rubber stamp it. That was begin-ning to happen, and therefore, a lot offactionalism developed around that. At thesame time for a while, even though I evenagreed with some of the factional views thatwere going on, I felt this was a lousy time forus to be raising these issues.

And, of course, the answer to that was,“That’s why the working class isn’t behindyou,” instead of saying, “They’re not behindyou because billion dollar presses are at workpropagandizing against the Left,” you know.

It was always the fault of the group, theparty, or the union. You can’t galvanize theworking class when they are given directives,it has to come from them.

Well, to a considerable extent, our posi-tions locally were from the people we wereworking with, so I didn’t feel . . . I wasn’t afactionalist. I felt, “While I’m in the party, Iam going to work with the basic legitimatestructure, and when I can see a reason fordoing so, or else we’ve lost everything.” Well,we were losing everything anyway. The partywas breaking up.

When I say the party was breaking up,that’s a little premature, because there werea lot of strong cords throughout the countryof support for the leadership when they wereindicted. There was still a lot of action goingon. But where I was, within the maritimeunions, I could see it all beginning tocrumble, and I think people that I knew feltthat.

But we weren’t prepared to oppose theparty or denounce it. That happened later,later for good reason. A number of peoplethat I knew took issue with what was left of

the party, but not at this point in 1948 and1949.

And so my feeling of solidarity—not onlyclass solidarity, but with the party—was main-tained. Even as uncomfortable as that was attimes and as disheartening to see what washappening, I felt the only chance we had wasto maintain this sort of so-called democraticcentralized development of policy, eventhough I began to feel that anything that wethought down below was not affecting any-thing up above.

But I can’t even now bring myself toblame the party for that happening. Therewas every reason for it to be disrupted andfor the processes that had been working ear-lier not being able to work under theseconditions. There were a lot of serious mis-takes on the part of people that we had putinto leadership. It was a . . . what would bethe word for it? Not only confusion, but akind of a desperate scramble to hang on towhat had been there, and it wasn’t working.

So that isn’t why we lost the ships, be-cause of the Communist Party. We lost theships because of the finagling going on in thewhole trade union movement. And the anti-communist aspect of it was purely aninstrument of the Right within the tradeunions. And like the McCarthy period thatwas looming right up ahead—two or threeyears ahead—the most convenient weaponof the Right, and even of sometimes well-meaning moderates, was the legendarycommies, the reds. They were the cause . . . .

Do you remember when Russia exploded theatomic bomb?

Yes, was that 1949?

I believe it was. Yes, that must have fueled . . . .


Well, that made a big difference. Oh, youbet. [laughter]

And it was also 1949, wasn’t it, that Mao . . . ?

And also, yes, the establishment of thePeople’s Republic of China.

I mean, what a year!

Yes, that was just while I was on this othership. [laughter] We’ll get to that. So anyway,I guess I made that point about why I did notleave the party at that time. Because I feltthere’s still something here to work with, andthere’s nothing else. There’s nothing else.Democratic, Republican Party, all these otherlittle splinter parties, various kinds of smallgroups around—there was nothing else thathad a structure to be a vanguard for working-class thinking.

But the party was losing that edge. It waslosing the reputation, the confidence thatpeople had had in it. It was being looked uponas a loser.

Was there an intellectual leader of the party thatyou were . . . ? Was there any particular per-son who was writing in . . . ?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Well, not any particularperson. I would say people like William Z.Foster was a pretty effective Marxist working-class scholar who was the chairman of theCommunist Party. There were lots of localwriters like Herb Tank who had been a sea-man and all, writing pamphlets. Who weresome of them? Pettis Perry, a black figurewithin the party. I had a tremendous amountof respect for him.

I guess the point of my question was to ask you ifpart of the reason you also did not leave the party

at the time is that there was still a tremen-dous . . . . I know you said it was the onlyplatform for addressing social issues available atthe time, but also, there still must have been anintellectual appeal to you. I mean, I’m asking ifthere was an intellectual appeal.

Within the party?

Yes.

Well, the intellectual appeal was Marxist.And what little . . . not that I consider my-self now or certainly not then any kind of awell-read Marxist thinker, what I had read,what I was aware of, and what had filtered tome through the general literature, et cetera,made sense. I saw it as a powerful idea andstill do. I mean, there’s no doubt about it.But I saw it really through the lens of tradeunion work and the lens of the world I wasworking in pretty much and as it camethrough to us. But I also had an indepen-dent . . . . I read some of the works of Lenin.I was very interested in the Bolshevik Revo-lution, how it had taken place, what thedetails of it were, how it managed to succeed.I was interested in other aspects of left move-ments throughout the world, thedevelopment of the IWW, the earlier Ludditemovements, which were the early anarchistmovements that helped me understand whathad happened earlier when I was at sea witha lot of anarchist seamen, and what theirviews were—how it had come down the SUP,in a sense, as a repository of the remnants ofthe old Wobbly movement of the old sea-men and how the Trotskyists made full useof this because they were, in our terms then,left-sectarians way out on the left. They werea movement, but certainly not a labor move-ment. They made use of these kinds of views.So yes, I was interested in that intellectually.


And people like . . . . See, a lot of myreading had to do with the race problem—DuBois was very important to me, as I saidearlier, and Herskovits’ work. And people likeHarry Haywood, as I have mentioned already,and Pettis Perry in the party. There were anumber of such people that I would read. ButI can’t really say that this was highly intel-lectual reading. I wasn’t reading the Europeanphilosophical communists, you know. Lateron, I began to read some of the, I suppose,more advanced Marxist thinking, particularlyin sociology and anthropology later on. Butat this point, it was pretty hit and miss. I wasgrabbing at ideas and straws and what madesense to me.

What held me intellectually while I wasin the party was essentially its policy, its ac-tion, the things that it did that I thought weremeaningful, that made sense, and things thatI could involve myself in that made sense.And where party policy gave us a perspec-tive about what we were doing that made itmore than a day-to-day combat or struggle,but had long-range perspectives—socialismas the goal, I never really had . . . . I thinkI’ve said this, I never really thought a social-ist revolution was around the corner likesome of the guys that I ran around with. Youknow, “When is the revolution coming?We’re ready.” But I never felt that.

I felt that I would always be a socialist ofsome kind or other, that so-called free enter-prise, you know, free-for-who capitalismwould have its day. It couldn’t go on. In fact,that’s very clear today, that it crumbles. AsMarx has said, it has the roots of its owndestruction.

And the destruction and the eating awayaren’t overnight. I mean, this can be decades.It can mean a century or more. While theworld experiments, finds out new ways toorganize itself, there are great dangers because

it can go in many directions, it can becomehorrible. The worst kind of oppressive soci-eties can develop, as well as experiments anddirections that are new and accommodatemore of basic human needs and requirementson all levels.

Oh, I guess later, not then, I was readingsome of the idealists, the socialist thinkersin the eighteenth, nineteenth century, SanSimon and others, but that was a little later.Nevertheless, I still felt that the communistorganization as it had developed out of theBolshevik Revolution was a very importantweapon and tool. You had to have some kindof vanguard that developed strategy anddeveloped it in terms of as much democracyas possible.

And what had happened in the SovietUnion, it was very depressing. It bothered me,but I wasn’t surprised, because I think thatexperiments like this are going to come andgo as human political and social life have inthe past, and will continue to do so. Andwhat is happening in various sections of theworld show that these ideas aren’t dead, cer-tainly not communism or socialism as goals,whatever that means to various people. Imean, it means completely different thingsto different people, but there are certain prin-ciples you’re going to draw out of it and say,“This is what it means generally.”

But, you know, questions of how you dis-tinguish it from what we’ve called fascism andall that . . . . We’ve had a lot of weird think-ers in this country, saying that communismand fascism link together, that they’re the tailin the mouth of the snake and all that—suchbullshit would go on, you know, in order toreally undermine and cloud the issue. Theyare two distinct systems of government. Theycan become like each other, though, but byinternal change and corruption and influ-ences from the outside. You know, to what


degree did the Soviet Union develop the wayit did with the ability to create the deeplycorrupt inner core that it had? A response tothe conditions of the Cold War. How muchwas this the pressure to militarize to main-tain in some way or another warfare againstthe aggression of the so-called capitalistworld? We could go into that on and on andon.

I wasn’t then and I’m not now depressedby it or surprised. Is China going to be com-munist? Is it socialist? Is it what? Is it doingwhat a large mass of people want to do tofind their way through to something better?

A lot of that discussion is reminiscent to me ofthe whole discussion on whether the Kalaharibushmen are hunter-gatherers or not.

Precisely.

Well, whatever they are, they’re still going abouttheir business. [laughter]

Yes, with a lot of things in their way. Butthe point, to me, is that, like the Republic ofChina, it may have within it the roots of someterrible things. It may turn out to be a horri-bly repressive and evil regime or socialexperiment. On the other hand, it may not.Maybe it’s evolving in another direction andall that. We all have to see, just as we had tosee with the Soviet Union. We’ll have to seeabout Cuba, our great enemy, our “enormous”enemy right beyond our border that is aboutto destroy us.

And you know, we’ll see where it’s going.We’ll see what’s happening in the variousstruggling democratic experiments and move-ments throughout the world, partly that wehave helped to engender and then immedi-ately clamped down on them when they

they’re no longer good trading parties.[laughter]

When they start exhibiting some free enterprise.[laughter]

Well, when they’re not supplying us whatwe want as free enterprise. And we’ll have tosee where these various movements go. Butthe idea that the impetus of these earlier revo-lutions is dead, is ridiculous. It’s there. Is itMarxist? To some extent, it is, but it’s manyother things; that just happened to be one ofthe most singularly powerful ideologies thatcame out of the end of the nineteenth cen-tury.

Were you aware at this time, and were peoplewriting about at this time, the developments incolonial Africa in terms of the communist—democratic . . . ?

Oh, yes, yes. There were things in theliterature, as I remember, a little later when Ibecame more aware of these things, denounc-ing the Soviet Union for infiltrating andarousing African nations to anti-colonialmovements; and then the reverse side, thatthe left-wing communist-inspired move-ments were the basis for renewing thesesocieties. On and on. Oh yes, there was a lotof this beginning to take place, but I wouldsay it was in the 1950s that it was really tookplace as . . . . Well, when did India get inde-pendence—1949, 1950, something like that?

I thought it was in the early 1950s.

Well, Indian independence sort ofsparked it. And Indonesia was an example ofknocking off the colonial yoke. And it didbegin to reverberate throughout the world.


There were other reasons for it spreading, butthat was a great symbol. Here as a large popu-lation . . . .

Yes. Well, the jewel in the crown.

And a little later, when the French weredriven out of Vietnam and all that, and wegot our little licks in there. Got licked.

Because we didn’t understand history. [laughter]

Well, we don’t. We don’t.So anyway, that was all that was going

on, Penny, a lot. And how much of it I wasstruggling with at one time, I can’t tell wayback then, except I remember that this kindof thing was constantly coming across to us,all these various kinds of problems and issues.

74ONE LAST TRIP

O I’M BACK in San Francisco at theend of this long NMU lockout, whenUnion Oil Company finally locked us

We did our job. I mean, I remember this.On most of those ships, our ship committeesworked on this, getting the crews to be goodseamen. We even had training for ordinaryseamen on ships, on two of the ships that Isailed on, and I heard that the others did. Sowe got the job done, but when the companywasn’t living up to its part of the agreementwe raised hell, you see. We’d do somethingabout it. Get the patrolman down, go up tosee the ship owners if necessary at theiroffices. And this wasn’t nice, and they didn’tlike that.

The SUP seamen were more passive.They could get pretty mad and throw stuffoverboard and wreck things and have wildevents now and then, but in general, theywould comply. And everything was workedup through the offices of the union to makethe deals and work things over and decidewhich beefs were worthy and which weren’t,rather than coming from the seamen.

So that’s gone. That was gone. And it washappening throughout . . . .

Sout for good and was able then to turn theships over to the SUP. And I must say I feltthat I’d lost my own home, my own life. Ihad given a lot of time to the Union Oil ships.And a lot of the guys I knew, a lot of theseamen I knew, they just left. They just leftSan Francisco and went to other ports look-ing for jobs or took jobs ashore. At least forthe progressive Union Oil seamen that Iknew, it was a terribly disappointing and uglyperiod.

And I just felt terrible. You know, you feelthat somehow you’re responsible, that wehadn’t really put up a good fight to save thoseships. But the ship owners . . . Union Oilwas determined to get rid of us. So maybe wewere the cause because we were so nasty theywanted to get rid of us. No, they didn’t likeour constant demands for increased condi-tions, wages, and they didn’t like the fact thatwe were a very feisty and proud group ofworkers.


Did the National Maritime Union actually dis-solve?

No, no, not the National MaritimeUnion. It’s still there. [laughter] There’shardly anything left of it except on the EastCoast.

Yes, I was a little unclear about that.

Oh, no, no, our union agents and hallsare still . . . at least a few of them, not all ofthe halls, but they have hardly any seamenand hardly any ships. I mean, it’s a depres-sion on the West Coast, at least. On the EastCoast, not so good either even thoughthey’ve got the major shipping out there forthe NMU. No, it’s a bad time. I was talkingto a couple of guys in the NMU, and youknow, they’re lucky to send out twenty tothirty jobs in a month, and not even thatmuch sometimes.

Wow. It’s almost like a token.

Yes. I mean, there are just a few guys sit-ting around the hall waiting for their cardsto come up. And also that affects the racesituation of the union, because, you know,in the South, whites come first. Even thoughwe fought that, now there’s nobody strugglingagainst it.

And blacks just left. There are a numberof blacks in the ILWU and in the MarineCooks and Stewards, but the maritime ain’tthe place to get jobs for them. They’re outgetting jobs elsewhere.

So all right, so here in the end of 1948with all this going on, myself and a few otherguys, including Pat Tobin, my good friend,we decided to take an off-shore ship, get awayfrom this coast-wise frenzy, take a ship, andget back to sea and feel like something. Well,

as I said, this was somewhat critical withKathy and myself, because Kathy felt it wastime for me to come ashore, get a job, see thefamily more, and do what I had alwaysplanned to do—get back to school, or what-ever, but I just couldn’t go on year after yeardoing this. And now there weren’t even jobs.

And by the way, this was just before . . .a year later, 1951 or so, then came the pro-gram of screening all left-wingers off theships; you couldn’t get a job anyway if youhad been left. And nobody else was gettingmany jobs, but you were just told you couldn’tsail.

So it was just before this that we got on aship, the Pine Bluff Victory. I don’t evenremember what company that was, U.S.Lines or Luchenbach. And of course it tooka while for the shipping agents to put othercompanies down except War ShippingAdministration, because during the war,almost all the ships were under War Ship-ping Administration. But I think it was aLuchenbach ship. Well, anyway, at leastwhen we left.

So four or five of us managed at the righttime to be there and take jobs on Pine BluffVictory that was heading around the canal toNew York. And so we piled on that ship.

And this is after I had long conversationswith Kathy promising her that this was mylast trip, that I just had to have a kind of anend trip, at least an off-shore trip, because Ifelt that all this coast-wise and all this prob-lem within the last year or two has made mefeel that I was no longer really going to sea,and I had to go to sea. So she agreed to that,that I’d get off in New York.

And so we took off. And it was kind ofvery nostalgic. It was kind of a sad trip, be-cause we used to sit around, four or five of usand the other members of the gang, talkingabout the things that were happening to the

643ONE LAST TRIP

union and the glory days of the past and allthat sort of thing. And it was just like—oh,what would you call it?—a feeling that some-thing had come to the end, and we didn’tknow where it was going.

And, of course, internationally, all kindsof things were happening. This was on theeve of Mao Zedong’s declaration of thePeople’s Republic of China. Oh, I think AlgerHiss was indicted in this period. And theparty leaders had been indicted, and so muchwas going on. I think it was the year thatGandhi died; Gandhi died in either 1948 or1949, I don’t know which. All these thingswere affective, even to the guys that I knew.Gandhi was something of a strange but heroickind of figure.

So anyway, we went down the coast—nice trip, as I remember, good weather—andwe went through the Panama Canal, in thisold scow, this Luchenbach Pine Bluff Victory,and I don’t even remember what cargo wehad. But we went through the canal—that’salways a beautiful trip anyway—and throughthe Caribbean. And I remember, you know,how I had been taken off in Curaçao and putin chains, way back, and we were exchang-ing all kinds of stories of this kind about ourexperiences, our wartime experiences, untilwe got to New York.

Did you have any ports of call there?

I don’t think so. I think we stopped brieflyat Panama. I don’t recall stopping. No, theship was heading toward Europe, and this wasjust an interim. It was two trips, because therewas pay-off in New York, and then you hadto re-sign or say you were going to stay on.

And so on the way up, I was thinking,“What am I going to do?” I didn’t want to goashore yet, and I felt terribly guilty . . . aw-

fully guilty about my kids, about Kathy. But Ihad formed certain kinds of alliances duringthe trip, and they were going to go on toEurope, and I just had this awful feeling thatI could not leave now. I wasn’t ready. I neededthis last trip, and I felt wonderful being out,off-shore, out to sea. And also, then, terriblyguilty about being away from home. I was apretty miserable cat.

So I got to New York, and I think I’d madea decision I was going on, but my problemwas, how was I going to spill it. And while Iwas there, I wanted to do something posi-tive, so I went out and renewed my A.B. Outat Sheep’s Head Bay there is a maritime cen-ter out there, and I got my new green A.B.ticket. I had had a wartime sort of ticket, andI wanted to have a regular able seaman ticket,and I got it. And I was very proud of myself.I passed the exam, and it wasn’t a great one.

And so then I remember . . . I don’t thinkI called them. I telegrammed, because peopledidn’t telephone across country in those days.I sent a telegram saying, “The ship is goingto Le Havre.”

It was a long telegram, an expensive one,in which I was explaining why I felt I had tomake this end of the trip and that I would becoming back to the East Coast and wouldthen come directly home, and then we wouldtalk about where things were going. And Irealize, now, here was Kathy, who had stuckwith me, tolerated my actions and my wishesfor a number of years, and who, although shewasn’t fully in agreement with all my politi-cal views—though she was very left, veryprogressive—and she didn’t always approveof how I was going about it, she neverthelessstuck it out and was supportive during all thattime and did her part well. She did muchmore than her share of working and worry-ing about the family and taking care of things.


And here I was, always coming and go-ing, though I did spend quite a bit of timeashore with the family and doing variousthings. Nevertheless, it was a rocky life. Itwas not conducive to a long-term relation-ship lasting. When I look back, I wonder howit did, but it did.

And anyway, so I sent this telegram try-ing to explain and making all kinds of newpromises and realizing as I did it that I was aliar, that I had already compromised myself.Nevertheless, then I waited. And I don’t re-member how I got the word. I guess it wasanother telegram, something that was verybrief. “Do what you have to do. If you feelyou have to do it, do it.” Well, that’s the worstkind of thing you can get, you know.

And I had no idea what she really meantand all that, but my feeling was that she wassaying, “This guy has turned out to be a realass.” [laughter] And I felt very badly. Butthose years . . . .

Then I remember writing her and saying,“I am leaving. Thank you for your telegram.And I will be going, and you will hear fromme as soon as I get back or from France.” Itwas a long letter, and I sent it off. That’s whatsingle-minded nuts of the kind that many ofus are did. I was going to do what I was goingto do, damn it.

On the other hand, I couldn’t imagineleaving [the ship] then. I just felt I was insuch poor shape personally about what I wasgoing to do, that I was a no-good, and that Iwould feel worse unless I carried somethingthrough with these guys that I was with andeverything. Poor reasoning, but nevertheless,if I had left at that time, I think I would havegotten back as a blubbering mess on the WestCoast, feeling guilty about not carrying some-thing to some kind of conclusion, doing itgracefully, I mean, not just quitting and say-

ing, “Oh, I’m going home now,” you know. Ijust couldn’t do that. And at the same time,I was about to lose a relationship if I wasn’tvery careful, and I wasn’t being careful. It wasa bad time. It worked out, but lord knowshow.

So anyway, off we go across the Atlantic,and this crew was . . . we had a very left-wingcrew except for two or three guys who werereal phonies. I mean, they were the phoniestof phonies. [laughter] They were not onlyright-wing in their thinking, in their poli-tics. They didn’t have any politics, they werejust against everything that we were doing.They were suspicious, and they were spyingon us, and one guy was keeping a journalabout our activities and what we were say-ing, which he later turned in to the FBI whenwe got back. But I figured it was worth it. Wehad a feeling of being left-wing seamen do-ing our job. We were good seamen, all of us,and this ship was run well. I don’t rememberus having any trouble with the officers.

Were you a delegate on this ship?

I don’t remember whether I was delegateor whether Pat was delegate. I forget. One ofus. Oh, no! I was delegate, but there were Iwould say, seven or eight delegates. [laugh-ter] We all were people who had been leaderson the front, on ships, and we had a feelingof camaraderie that was very good. The othermembers of the crew were respectful of us andliked us, and you know, they had beenthrough the Curran and anti-Curran strugglesand were sort of hip politically, except forthese two or three guys.

I think one was in the engine room andone was even on deck. And they were foulguys. They really were. They were drunkenbastards with evil intent. [laughter] I don’t

645ONE LAST TRIP

think I need to soften that at all. They werescroungy characters. They were enemies ofthe working class. [laughter]

But anyway, so we made the trip over. Wewent to Southampton and unloaded andloaded some cargo there and went across toLe Havre and just were there a day, I guess,and then moved down to Dunkirk. Imagine!We had the feeling, “Here we are atDunkirk,” you know, the Battle of Dunkirkfrom the beginning of the war. Dunkirk wasin all the news and was kind of an icon—you know, where the British had lost all thosemen, and we had done so too—the beachesof Dunkirk.

So here we’re tied up at Dunkirk, and wehadn’t been tied up for an hour before a dele-gation from the local trade unions swarmedto the dockside handing out leaflets . . .[laughter] . . . in French, you know, callingfor action opposing the Marshall Plan. “Joinus, you American seamen,” and all that. Andso as delegate, I just went down, and I toldthem, you know, through a translator—I usedto speak a little French in those days; notmuch—but I just said, “Well, we’re with you.We agree with you. I’d say most of this crewwould agree with you.”

“Oh!” there were great cheers. [laughter]There were a number of women there.

They all had signs, and they had these leaf-lets I still have. And they were so excited.

In fact, this was the beginning of ourproblem with the phonies who were watch-ing. [laughter] Oh, boy! And I’d say theofficers were getting very leery. They wereafraid that there was going to be some kindof demonstration holding us up or somethinglike that. And I remember Pat and I went upand assured them, “No, this is just trade unionbusiness. We’re being greeted by French tradeunions.” [laughter] And it was really a won-

derful moment. I mean, you know, there musthave been . . . .

It must have been wonderful after kind of thedepressing dissolution you just had left . . .

Yes, right.

. . . to see this . . . .

And then they heard, you know, we wereCIO. “Oh! CIO! National Maritime! Oh,yes, we know. You people have done suchgood work.” And they were terribly happyabout our being there and kind of telling ushow wonderful we were. And here they hadcome to proselytize, and we were right there.

So then they said, “Well, we’re going tohave a big meeting. We want you to come.We want you to come.”

So they put out this leaflet about ourattendance that I have here now: “A Meet-ing For Peace.” Starts out, “The capitalistAmericans are preparing the Third WorldWar, but we will have a grand reunion forpeace.” And this was mid February. I’d for-gotten that. “Rue de Callais a Dunkerque.And come, because we’re having delegationsof Americans who are going to speak to us,”and all that. [laughter] All of this happenedalmost overnight. We hadn’t even agreed toanything.

Yes. Because they’ve already got a leaflet.

They’ve already got a leaflet saying thatwe’re going to be part, because we had partlysaid, “Yes, we’ll come,” you know. But theyhad us now as speakers and honored guests;we were going to be honored guests.

Well, it was quite wonderful, I must say.It was crazy, but it was wonderful. And so they


wanted somebody . . . one of us to be aspeaker, so, you know, the crew said, “Well,hell, d’Azevedo, you’re a delegate, you speak.”So we went to this big gathering.

God, here we were in Dunkirk. I had thisstrange feeling. Now here I am where a ma-jor event of the war had taken place, and hereI am on an American ship and a member ofthe American trade union, opposed toAmerican policy in Europe—the post-warperiod Marshall Plan—pretty much think-ing in defense of the Soviet-Union againstthe Cold War moves, the Truman doctrine,and so on. And I was thinking, you know, astrange peculiar position to be in.

And yet, I felt strongly about it, that thiswas what I should do, what we should do.And these guys were all on the verge of astrike of their own. Not only French dockworkers, but seamen and a number of otherunions were involved in it.

And they were opposing the Marshall Plan.

That was just one of the things. Theywere mainly denouncing what they called theAmerican moves toward a Third WorldWar—I guess the Cold War. They were de-nouncing American policy. And here wewere, you know, being invited to be part ofit.

So I remember this big meeting. Theremust have been two or three thousand peoplejust massed into this little Rue de Callais area.And they were giving speeches in French,which we couldn’t follow, and passing outleaflets and waving banners and singingsongs. And they were singing “The Interna-tional,” so I knew there was a good sizablegroup of French Communist Party peopleinvolved. [laughter] It was an extremely de-lightful and high spirited kind of a meeting.

And then they said, “And now we’re go-ing to have a delegate from the CIO,” youknow, “from America, from the Pine BluffVictoire!” [laughter]

I had a few ideas of what to say, so I gavea short little speech of solidarity supportingtheir strike and the French working-class, andwe understood the kind of struggles they werein, because we were in the same kind ofstruggles, and we too felt that the MarshallPlan was really a plan that was going to helpbig business and capitalists and not reallyaimed at the people of ravaged Europe or else-where in the world that needed help. And itwas something that we opposed too. It wasabout five minutes, less than ten minutes, andoh god, there was cheers, and we were car-ried on people’s . . . people picked us up andcarried us around, and I don’t know, slappedall kinds of badges on us. [laughter]

And I hadn’t really been in anything likethat since the waterfront in its heyday; youknow, on May Day parades and things. Andhere, it was a big one.

There were parties afterwards. And I wasinvited to some guy’s house. He had a houseout on a farm, but he was a worker in someplant. He wanted to have me at his home,wanted me to meet his wife and his kids. Itwas this very simple sort of peasant-likehouse, and that’s where I had my first realFrench-fried potatoes. [laughter] You know,little whole potatoes that had been deep-fried, and I forget, some kind of stew. And itwas wonderful. Lots of wine, and I guess I gotdrunk, and everybody was singing. And Iwent weaving back to my ship, with somenew friends accompanying me. It was quitewonderful. I must say that I liked it; I likedthat kind of thing. It felt good. Also I feltwith all of the gloom that we had beenthrough this was worth it. We needed it, and

647ONE LAST TRIP

it was good. And the other guys in the crewwere being wined and dined at differentplaces.

I went back to the ship, and on the way,I was asked by one of the people in the groupdid I want to go to a big strike that was goingto take place in Lille, center of the textileindustry in northern France. There was go-ing to be a big strike, and there was going tobe a great big gathering in Lille. Did I wantto go? It was only an hour or two hour trip.And I had time off from the ship, so, “OK,I’ll go.”

So next day, we headed off to Lille, andhere was an enormous demonstration. Theremust have been 10,000 people. They justfilled the streets. And speakers from the left-wing members of the government, from Paris,were there giving speeches and denouncingeverything, and, you know, calling for work-ing-class solidarity. And then at onepoint—what’s her name?—Germaine some-thing-or-other (she was a communist leader)turned and says, “And we have an Americanfrom the Pine Bluff Victoire.”

I wasn’t asked to speak, but, you know,they were pointing me out, and so I had alittle coterie who was showing me around andintroducing me around.

And then we marched. It was an enor-mous march, singing all these patriotic songs,French patriotic songs and “The Interna-tional” through the streets of Lille, and itlasted two or three hours. Then we had toget back in this little broken-down car thatthis guy had, and we all piled back toDunkirk.

I had one thing that I wanted to do whileI was in France, and that was to get into Paris,which was I forget how many hours by train—not far—and see some friends of mine, EarlKim and Nora, who had been friends of oursin Berkeley way back, a composer. And he

was in Paris, and a couple of other peoplethat I knew, and I wanted to see them. Andso I still had a day or two of shore leave, andI got on a train by myself and went to Parisand met Earl and Nora.

And when I got there, they said, “I don’tknow if we should be talking to you!” [laugh-ter]

And they waved in front of me an edi-tion of a newspaper Lumet Etet? withheadlines, “American delegate denouncesMarshall Plan,” and I’d say a whole page ofthe speech that I had given in five minutes,that had now been amplified by many edi-tors into the complete position of the FrenchCommunist Party, I’m sure, on the MarshallPlan and the Truman Doctrine.

I was a little taken aback by this. Thiswas the kind of thing that I felt didn’t sit well.I thought, “This wasn’t the thing to do. Thisputs me on the spot, it puts my crew on thespot,” and . . . . Oh, and when I read it andworked it out with my poor French and thehelp of others, you know, it isn’t that I woulddisagree with what was said, it was the tone.I was making great denunciations and call-ing for, you know, action and all that sort ofthing. So, although it was kind of funny, Ididn’t feel good about that. But I had a won-derful day with Earl and Nora and otherstooling around Paris.

Now what was their last name?

Kim was his name, Earl Kim. And NoraPhillipsborn, whom had married.

So a wonderful day. And when I got backto the ship, of course, the word had gottenthere. And these guys that I knew were say-ing, “You know, Warren, this is going a littlefar. Jesus, we’re going to have a little troublewith this,” and I felt that too. On the otherhand, they were in agreement, but they just


felt it was a little bit of grand-standing onmy part. In a sense, it might have been, but Ireally didn’t intend it to be that way—hadn’tstarted out being that way.

So here I was a delegate of a crew whohad just given a major supposedly completespeech, advertised in Paris, denouncingAmerican policy and all that. So then thesetwo or three phonies aboard ship and I’d saysome of the officers were getting very leery, alittle aloof, you know.

Oh, while I was in Paris and in Dunkirk,because that’s what I do, I picked up dozensof pamphlets from various bookstores andunion halls. I was picking up all the thingson the youth movement in Czechoslovakiaand the Yugoslavian problem in French andin English and all. And I must have had abox full of pamphlets, which I intended tobring back. I was and had always been a col-lector of books and pamphlets, and when Ididn’t need them, I would turn them over tothe Maritime Bookshop, you know, some-thing like that. And so these were in myfo’c’s’le.

And we had a good trip back, but as weapproached Norfolk, Virginia—NewportNews, I guess, which is near Norfolk . . . .Newport News was where we were heading,and as we came up, we were beginning to getreverberations from these phonies, you know.“We’re gonna get you guys,” and, “We’re go-ing to see to it that you get yours.” And ofcourse, we didn’t pay too much attention tothem. We expected that kind of talk. But Iwas beginning to . . . there was a feeling withsome of these junior officers where they weresaying things like, “Ah, you guys,” you know,“What the hell?” So we got to Newport News,and sure enough, the first thing that hap-pened was a group of—I guess they were FBIor naval intelligence, coast guard intelli-gence, I don’t know what—came aboard.

Well, one was in uniform, so it was probablynaval intelligence. And they searched theship, mainly my fo’c’s’le and the fo’c’s’le ofthe guys that I knew. And they went througheverything, and they got all my pamphletstogether and piled them on my bunk. Andthey were going through, jotting down whatthey were. And they didn’t even talk to me.They just did this, you know. They didn’t askanything about them, except one guy says,“Now are these yours?”

I said, “Yes, I picked them up in Paris andDunkirk.”

And all the while, these two or three guyswho had been our enemies aboard ship werestanding around leering and really enjoyingevery damn bit of it, because they had re-ported us. They had probably reported usthrough the skipper, you know.

And it was a very unnerving thing. Andwe thought there would be something worse,but all they did was do that. And then theyleft.

We paid off the ship. And then, I tell you,it was, all in the package. It was a bum time,a bummer time. So we left, about seven ofus, three or four whites and three black guyswent off the ship with our sea bags andheaded for the entrance to the dock, lookingfor a taxi. We were with three or four of theblack guys that we knew on the ship, onebeing the young guy that I had been givingleft-wing lectures to who told me to, youknow, “Shut up and leave me alone.” [laugh-ter] “Leave me alone. Go talk to those otherguys. I’m tired of hearing that stuff. Just leaveme alone.” In which I learned not only toleave him alone, I learned to leave a lot ofpeople alone from that. But yes, he liked meand was very friendly, but he just didn’t wantme to talk about politics, had said, “Keep outof my life. I don’t want to hear about thatstuff,” you know, “It’s not my . . . I’m not

649ONE LAST TRIP

going to think about it. Go talk to thoseguys.”

Anyway, as we stood there—this musthave been seven or eight at night and it wasgetting dark—taxis would go by and look atus and just go zipping on, one after another.We yelled at them, and one of us stood inthe street and all that. And finally, I’d sayabout after an hour of waiting for a taxi andtaxis going by and not stopping, finally, abroken-down little ratty taxi came chuggingup, stopped, and a black driver looked out,and he says, “You boys know what you’redoing?” [laughter] He said, “Do you knowwhat you’re doing? Do you think you’re go-ing to get into town all at once, all of youlike that?” meaning the whole group of sevenguys. “You know,” he says, “You don’t knowwhere you are, do you?” Now the black guysknew exactly where we were. They were sortof hanging back, but they didn’t know quitehow to approach this thing with us. And hesaid, “Now, if you’re waiting for one of thoseother cabs, you have to go in two cabs. Youguys,” he said, “you know better than this.”He was saying, “You know better. You haveto go in one cab, and these other [white] guyscan go in another cab. You’re not going toget into town this way.”

It suddenly dawned on us, you know, howstupid we were. And we just felt so stupid.We didn’t understand where we were—notthat we felt that we should take it, toleratethis, but that it was a surprise.

And the black guys with us had not saidmuch. They weren’t from that area. I guessmost of them were from the North or theWest, but they knew that something was go-ing to happen.

So we said, “We don’t know what we’regoing to do.”

And then this cab driver said, “I’ll takeyou, though. You can all get in my cab.”[laughter] It was wonderful.

That is wonderful.

I will never forget that evening, as we allpiled in on top of each other in this little oldcab. In fact, I think we practically ran thesprings down to the pavement with ourweight. And he went chugging along, andoh, I don’t know how long it was to get fromNewport into Norfolk, but we had to get toNorfolk to get transportation out. And onthe way in, he was saying, “You know, this isa quite different kind of place than you guysare used to.”

And we said we knew, “We understandthat,” but somehow it had not occurred tous. We thought maybe Norfolk was north.“Hey man, north is where you don’t find thatkind of thing,” you know . . . . [laughter]

But anyway, he said, “I’m glad I saw youguys, because you could have gotten intotrouble. You could have found yourself in akind of a bad situation there, or you mightbe there till midnight.”

So I don’t know what it meant for him tohave a mixed bunch aboard, but he didn’tseem to mind. He took us into town—it wasabout a twenty minute drive, I think. And itwas dark—it was night—and the town waskind of empty, Norfolk. And he drove us upto a district with stores, and there was onelittle store, a shoe shop, that was dark, andhe says, “Just a minute. We’ll go here.”

And he went and knocked on the door.And an old white man came to the door, andit turned out to be an old Jewish man part ofsort of an underground railroad. And this cabdriver says, “I got some boys here who don’tknow where they’re at. They just don’t under-


stand what’s going on. They ought to, butthey don’t. Would you straighten them outand tell them how to get around down here?Because I’ve got to go about and make somemoney.”

And so we thanked him and paid him offand went inside, and this old man—verystrong Jewish accent, sounded like a NewYork accent—and he turned on the lights inthe shop and pulled down the blinds in thefront of his shop.

My word. Yes.

Well, it was a strange time, this was just1949. And when I look back, I’m thinkingof how ignorant I was. I mean, I knew thatawful things were going on in the South andwas loaded with that kind of . . . . But I hadnever experienced it. I’d never seen it; I’dnever been there. And it was a different kindof thing altogether when you’re there. It wasreal! You began to feel the pressure, you know.

And these African-Americans that werewith us, they would come joking, “Well,you’re seeing the South now. We’re seeingthe South.” But I think they were irritated,because they’d gotten themselves into thisgoddamn thing. They all wanted to get home,but they were being nice about it. And theyfelt a certain connection with us, because wehad been together this whole trip.

Now that one guy was really not going to listento you. [laughter]

Oh, no. He was the best. He was saying,“Hey Whitey, you see what you’re getting meinto? Look what your kind of talk gets meinto!” you know.

I mean, he was laughing. He was justgreat. He and I got to know each other. Hewas joking with me, giving me a bad time.

He says, “I can’t hang around with guys likeyou. Look what you do,” you know.

So we sat there while this old man lec-tured us on what we had to do to get out oftown. He said, “Now you’re not gonna go tothe bus station and get on the bus together. Ihate to tell you this, but it’s not going to hap-pen.” He says, “If you take one of thecross-country buses, not even these guys,”meaning the African-Americans, “are goingto get on the same bus, because whites comefirst, and if it’s a full bus, then not even theback of the bus would be available.” He says,“If you’re going to go together or at the sametime—not on, you know, the same bus—yougotta wait for a local bus that will take you alittle way down the road. And after a fewbuses, you might get to some place whereeverybody can get on the same bus.” But hesaid, “You don’t want to go through all that.”[laughter] “You don’t want to go through allthat.”

And I think that by this time, the blackguys were laughing at us. Because they wereready to leave. They were on their way. Butthey were being polite waiting for us to get . . .

Get a clue. [laughter]

. . . get cleared. [laughter] And so thisold guy gave us coffee, and he had some toastor something. He was a very nice guy. Butyou know, it also reverberated in my mindlater with the number of Jewish and otherEuropeans who were positive figures, locallylike this, in the Civil Rights movement. Theywere the ones that stuck their necks outsometimes, got into real trouble, lost busi-ness, sometimes got beat up. And this old guywas like that. His store was open for just whathe was doing. It was . . . well, as my friendsaid, an underground railroad you’re runninghere. [laughter]

651ONE LAST TRIP

Just because you were trying to get in . . . gosomewhere as a group.

Yes. Right. Oh, yes. You just didn’t do it.And he said, “Look, if you had insisted andif you had gone and done that, you’d havebeen taken to jail for questioning, you know.So he said, “You can’t do that, unless youwant to get beaten up by somebody. Youknow, you can’t do it here. It’s just not done.”

So we said, “Well, how do we get out ofhere?”

He said, “Well, you’re not going to getout together. You’re gonna go to a certain partof the big bus station, and the black guys aregoing there, and you’re going to go there.You’re going to take different buses unless youhappen to be in a bus where they can sit inthe back, but it’s not likely. They’re going tohave to go their way.”

And so I remember one of the black guysthat was with us—a very sharp guy—he says,“Look, you guys don’t need us. You guys workout your problem. You get on a bus, and yougo.”

He said, “I’m not even taking a bus. I’vegot a friend who’s got a car, and we’ll get inthe car. If these guys want to go, I’ll take them.We’re going to get in the car, and we’re go-ing to drive the underground railroadcross-country.” [laughter] I mean, there wereplaces you could stop in various towns andcities.

Later when I moved to Reno, Nevada wascalled the Mississippi of the West, and therewas a certain hotel down on Lake Street thatwas part of the underground railroad, whereblacks and others would come for advice andhelp. Certain people we knew would comefor . . . .

To just learn how to get around?

And colleagues, black colleagues from theEast that, you know, had to make this run.There were towns they couldn’t stop in.

I just don’t think most of us can comprehend that.

No. Well, I didn’t until I saw it. I heardabout it, but I didn’t comprehend it. Here itwas. And it affected what we were doing.

So we went to the bus station, and I askedone of the black guys if they wanted us to gowith them, and he said, “No way. We don’tneed you, man.” [laughter] He said, “You’rejust trouble!”

And, you know, my willingness to go withthem, just out a feeling of friendship and soli-darity was no friendship or solidarity at all.They wouldn’t be able to get out of town.[laughter] So it was a very warm thing. Wesaid good-bye to each other and said that we’dmeet.

One was going to Chicago, one was go-ing somewhere in the Midwest, another wayout to the coast, who says, “I’m not going toget on a bus with a bunch of whiteys.” Hesays, “We’ll find a way to get out there. I’llnever have any trouble. I’ll go. I’ll go. I’ll getthere.”

And here one of us had to go to the john,and suddenly there we were—“colored” and“white.” And it was so demeaning and sohorrible. I remember feeling so angry. I mean,I felt like I wanted to knock something down,you know. And you felt helpless. There wasnothing you could do. Well, there was, butyou couldn’t do it there. And they were en-joying . . . these black guys were enjoyingwatching us, you know, “Hey, you want totake a piss, you go, and you do it in the rightway!” [laughter]

Oh, god. And the drinking fountains, youknow, signs. Oh, that was a nightmare. I felt


so awful leaving these guys. We liked them,Pat and I and others who were saying good-bye to them. And while we were talking,people were looking at us and walking by andstaring. You just felt trapped. We felt we werein a truly alien world.

So anyway, I got on the bus. And howwas that? Pat was going somewhere . . . well,I was the only one that ended up going allthe way to the West Coast, because theseother guys had places they were stopping at.I don’t remember. And I think I was the onlyone of us on the bus all the way to SanFrancisco.

So here I start three days or somethingacross country, and I had a lot of time tothink. A lot of time to think. The closer wegot to the West Coast, the more I felt I haddone myself a whole lot of jeopardy, and whatwas I going to do and how was I going to makeit ashore and what was I going to do aboutseagoing and all that?

So I got back, and Kathy was very niceabout it, and said, “I’m glad you’re back,” butshe was also angry.

But I was so relieved, because she at leastwas, you know, “So long as you’re here, let’sget cracking.”

So when I had to start looking for a job, Iwent over to San Francisco a number oftimes, and I retired my book in the NMU. Ihad to do that, because you leave it too longwithout paying dues or shipping, you lose it.

So that’s an explicit step you had to take, sayingyou’re not going back to sea.

Well, I could renew it, but the thing is Ihad to retire it so that . . . I mean, it wasbeing held but that I didn’t have to keep itcurrent. And so I did that. I didn’t like that.

And then I went down to the MaritimeBookshop. I went down there, you know, to

talk to one of the guys who was running it.And there was a group of guys who had beenin the seamen’s section of the CommunistParty, about ten guys. And they were wait-ing for me. And it was great.

They gave me a book, Port Arthur, a novelby a Soviet writer. [laughter] And it had aninscription in it. I have to read it, because Ifeel very proud of it: “To Warren for outstand-ing work on behalf of the working class.”These are very moving lines—not to you, butto me: “Your devotion, sincerity, and confi-dence in the working class and theCommunist Party has helped to enrich ourwork on the waterfront. Your contribution,no matter how big or small it may have beento you, has helped to pave the way for a bet-ter life for all the people, the world ofsocialism. We shall miss you. You will be re-membered by all. On behalf of the executiveboard, Waterfront Section, SFCPUSA, forthe board, Alex Treskin,” my old friend.

Oh, how wonderful!

Well, I’m very proud of that, because itwasn’t the idea that I was leaving the party.You see I was leaving the waterfront, and Iwas going back to school, which I’d alwayssaid I was going to do. And so it was a veryfriendly, helpful thing. I wasn’t being calleda sell-out or anything like that. And a lot ofguys were leaving anyway. Others were leav-ing and going. But I’m very proud of that,because I felt it was closure of a good kindand that I’d had what I considered to be anextremely gratifying and enriching relation-ship with people on the front and in the party.I felt very strongly that I would never reallyrelinquish the principles that had gotten meinto it.

And you never really have.

653ONE LAST TRIP

No. I got to the point where I disagreedwith what the party was doing but that’s dif-ferent; I mean, that’s purely a matter of tacticsand structure and all that. But in terms ofthe principles, hell, I’m for them, and theyjust went sour, that’s all.

But anyway, that, to me, was a greatmoment. I got a send-off from Alex Treskin,who had recruited me years before after I wasdumped out of the SUP. And here is Alexwith a group of guys giving me a book, some-thing they pulled off the shelf . . . [laughter]and inscribing it and letting me leave feelingthat I was part of it.

So, Penny, it’s now late, and I havebrought you to the point where I have leftthe waterfront. I didn’t leave it entirely, be-cause I still had connections and saw people,but now you will be in the East Bay and onthe Oakland and Berkeley side and all theproblems that being ashore entail. And thatis the beginning of a new life or another one.

Well, we’ll start the land-lubber section.

Yes, the lubber period. Yes, the stump-jumper. [laughter]

PART THREE

75RETURN TO REALITY

KNEW NOW that I really had to find away to make it ashore and that there wasno way out and that I had to make an

waiting for weeks for a job, but at least know-ing that there might be one turning up.

But now I had to think in terms of entirelynew kinds of jobs, and also, what aboutschool? I got back, I guess, in the summer of1949, so I had a few weeks there to thinkabout school, and I felt I better go. And Kathyencouraged me to do this. And when I cometo think of it, it was quite noble of her witheverything that was going on to think that Ishould do that, because that’s what I hadwanted to do.

When I was thinking about how I wasgoing to go back to school, in a way I feltvery diffident about it. There was somethingabout having—let’s see, oh my god—eight,nine years since I had last been to school andgotten my B.A. and all that distance betweenthat time and the world of academia. And Iguess I had a lot of feeling of having gottenolder and that there would be all these kidsrunning around. And here I would be atwenty-eight-year-old old man.

And not only that, but somehow or other,I began to realize I wasn’t sure if I could crack

Iaccommodation with a new venue. And in away it was also quite wonderful. Anya wasnow four or five years old, a beautiful littlegirl and extremely vivacious and bright. AndErik was I’d say a little over a year old, andhe was a feisty kid, wonderful little kid. Proneto tantrums and wanting his own way, andmaybe he didn’t get it as much as he shouldhave, because things weren’t that flexible atthat time.

But nevertheless, I really enjoyed beingthere, and Kathy was working at the nurseryschool. And fortunately, she was bringing ina little—not very much. Nobody got muchin those days. And I have the problem nowof finding work, finding a job.

And for years, my job had been prettywell laid out for me by going to the hall andgetting in line and waiting for a ship. And Ipretty well knew that in time I would get one.If I had been shipping at this time, that wasn’ttoo clear; jobs were scarce, and I had been


it, if I was able to do it, which as I look backat now, is utterly silly. There were lots ofpeople older than me going back to school,guys that had been in the army and the navyand who had had their lives disrupted by thewar. But I was mainly concerned about howwas I going to be able to adjust to it and allthat. Nevertheless, I felt I had to do it. But Ialso needed a job.

Were there any of your cohorts from the frontthat you knew that were going back to schoolalso?

Well, there were, but not right there be-cause two or three of the guys that I knewcame from Los Angeles or the Midwest, andthey were going back home, the ones that Iknew from the front.

Quite a few were leaving the front at thattime because jobs were scarce; you justcouldn’t work, and there was the growinganti-left policy that was screening seamen off.Later on—1951, 1952—this became really arigorous program of screening off anybodywith a left-wing background. But in 1949,1950, it was beginning, and we could feel thepinch.

That isn’t why I left; I left because of along-term, delayed promise to my wife that Iwas going to do this and saying that I wantedto do it. But I kept procrastinating and put-ting it off, because I felt all involved in whatwas going on on the front and did maintainthat feeling that it had been the most vigor-ous and exciting and productive period thatI knew.

So I had all that stuff swarming aroundin my head, but the first thing is I had to geta job. And job hunting was, to me, weird. Ihad no idea where to start, except looking innewspapers, you know.

I think the first job I got was in responseto a little squib in the paper, something aboutthe fire department in Berkeley was hiringfire alarm operators. I had no idea what a firealarm operator was and all that, but never-theless, it was nearby—almost walkingdistance from my house near the courthousein Berkeley. And so, you know, that soundedpretty good, and I thought, well, I’ll take atry at it.

I was so stupid. I had no idea what I wasdoing or getting into except that I needed ajob. And there were other jobs, but this onesort of stuck out at me. So I went over thereand applied, wrote out the papers and wenthome, and then a few days later I got a no-tice saying, “Would you turn up for aninterview?”

So I did, and I turned up, and there was anice old guy—I wish I could remember hisname—in his fifties or sixties and near retire-ment, and he said, “Have you ever workedfor a fire department before?”

I says, “No.”He said, “Well, maybe that’s good.”

[laughter]And he was a very affable guy, and he

asked me all kinds of questions about what Ihad done at sea. “Well, then you must knowsomething about rigs and electricity.” And Ididn’t tell him I was only on deck, you know,but he had some idea that I must have beenin the engine room or something like that.And I was so ignorant about the whole pro-cess, I didn’t know what to say—or not—inmy favor, and so I just talked. And I think hetook a liking to me, and I liked him, and Igot the job.

Well, it turned out he trained me. He wasa very nice guy. When I come to think of it,he must have just wanted to give me a job.

659RETURN TO REALITY

I told him I wanted to go to school too,that I wanted a job where I could work nightsso I could go to school during the day. Oh,that was one of the things, you know, “Whatkind of job did you have?”

I said, “Well, do you know aboutwatches—4:00 to 8:00 and 8:00 to 12:00?”

“Well,” he said, “we’re on the watch sys-tem here. You know, we work all day and allnight.”

And I thought, “Gee, that sounds good.I could get a night job.” And so he put meon the graveyard shift, 12:00 to 4:00, whichwas weird, you know, but nevertheless, to meit sounded like I might be able to work thisout.

And he worked with me and had mecome in before I actually started working towatch. The fire alarm in those days was a verystrange apparatus in this large room, with allkinds of buttons and levers and gauges andlittle phone lines. I don’t even rememberclearly what it all was about, but you woreearphones, and when an alarm rang, a sort ofticker-tape arrangement told you what areaof the town the fire was in, and then you dot-dashed the code off to the right firedepartment to get out there.

So, you know, it was a kind of a crucialjob, and this guy seemed to trust me to dosomething about it. [laughter] And I must say,as I was working with him, I was thinking,“I’ll never be able to do this alone.” And littleby little, I got the hang of it, and then he putme on with another guy. I guess my first onewas 8:00 to 12:00, but I was going to be onthe graveyard shift regularly. And so I workedwith this other guy and finally got the hangof it.

There were long hours sometimes whennothing happened, so I had a chance to read.And I thought, “Oh boy,” you know. “This isgreat.”

Then when the alarm would go off, you’dhave to rush around and send these littlemessages to the right fire department. Andyou got pretty familiar with the variousdepartments in the area.

So I got the job. And I felt so good aboutthat. It wasn’t much money, but I rememberit wasn’t bad. I mean, it was no worse thanwhat I was getting at sea. And I felt really,“Oh, wow! I’m going to make it.” [laughter]And so that encouraged me, then, to go upto the university and check in.

I was very, very reluctant to go directlyto the anthropology department. Because Ihad graduated from it all these years before, Ijust didn’t want to confront those people—not that they’d ever remember me or give adamn, but it was that feeling, “I’m not ready.”But I wanted to take anthro.

So what I did instead, because I foundout that I was deficient in certain things thatnow I should do—certain English and eco-nomics course and all that—I signed up for acouple of courses in English and one in eco-nomics just to get going. Well, they turnedout to be wonderful. I mean, I’ll never forgetthat. In fact, I stayed another semester withthese same guys.

There was Mark Shorer, who was a writerand a critic, a well-known guy. I had a coursefrom him in English literature which got meall fired up about seventeenth, eighteenth,and nineteenth century English literature. Hewas a brilliant guy, and I think I still havesome of my notes from his course.

And oh, gosh, I was reading Moll Flandersand Tristam Shandy. When I read that, it waslike an eye-opener, and I thought, “This is aworld I understand,” you know—this wild,satirical guy, Laurence Sterne. There wassomething about that period of satirical andrealist English writers that I dug. I just loved


it. And, you know, I felt there was a continu-ity with what I had been doing, the kind ofpeople and world.

And then a picture of the changes andgrowth of literature, Shorer was wonderfulat relating it to social conditions, the socialscene historically—you know, a real pictureof the development of ideas. That was a won-derful course, as I remember.

And then there was a guy named JohnCarter in English, and he was in Americanliterature. And he was also marvelous, andbecause of him, I got to reading all sorts ofstuff that had been on my mind anyway—slave narratives and a whole period of pre-and post-Civil War literature about and byAfrican-Americans, and the various kinds offigures that had been involved in the aboli-tion movement. Post-Civil War, ThomasWentworth Higginson was one, and WendellPhillips and a number of the abolitionist,from my point of view, left-wing writers.

It was just an eye-opener that these guyseven existed. You know, after Tom Paine,who had always been a sort of heroic figureto me, here were these guys who were put-ting up this struggle in the pre-Civil War, theCivil War, and the post-Civil War periods,being very aware of developments in the labormovement. People like Wendell Phillips,who was really an early intellectual supporterof labor and various kinds of socialist move-ments that were going on, and then peoplelike Thomas Wentworth Higginson, this guythat I’d never heard of and was still not verywell-known historically. These remarkableminds and figures who were putting up thisfight, spurred by the Civil War and the placeof the American blacks in American life.

So I got really involved in this literatureand I was reading avidly. And I remember Iwas going to the library and looking up theseobscure sources, and it linked to people like

Philip Foner and others who I had read whenI was reading Marxist literature, and therewas a continuity with DuBois and all theseothers, and certainly Herskovits, but a deeperone: I was getting into the social life of theUnited States as it developed during the post-Civil War period, at least.

Somehow, this was very congenial. I feltthat it was just what I was looking for, forthis sense of ignorance that I had, that I didn’tknow what my own society had been andwhat it was going through and what had hap-pened. And so I remember writing, oh god,many papers for both Shorer and particularlyfor John Carter, kind of romantic pieces ofrevelation, you know, about how all this won-derful stuff was going on while Whitman anda number of other well-known people werewriting. Here were these other guys doing thisother kind of work. And I was really fired upby that.

And I was able to take these courses andwork nights. It was a rough schedule, youknow. I was working, getting home, youknow, at 8:30 or nine o’clock, and then go-ing to sleep and then getting up and tryingto get my course work in. I was just takingthese few courses; nevertheless, I had to studyfor them and read for them.

And I was doing some of my reading dur-ing the job, which was partly my undoing,because I would get reading, and the bellwould go off and I’d be in cloud nine. Andonce or twice I sent engines to the wrongsite or called the wrong place, and there wasa big ruckus about it. Nevertheless, thatpassed over. [laughter]

[laughter] It just burned up.

[laughter] Well, no, it wasn’t terribly seri-ous, but these guys in the various fire stations,they’d get pretty mad.


I mean, you wake them up, and they’reall set to go, and they find out it’s the wrongplace. They don’t like that. So there wereone or two places where I got a bad name.

And this old guy covered for me. He waswonderful. He would fix it up and make ex-cuses. And I wish I could remember his name.He was a wonderful old guy, and he was ex-pert. He knew the whole system but toleratedthis character that I was, and he knew I wasbusy reading. He just told me, “Warren, yougotta keep your mind on this, because this isa matter of property and life and death.”

And then I’d be, “Yes, I know.” I felt aw-ful and all that. But here I am, thesewonderful books in front of me. [laughter] Myfirst job; my return to reality.

So there was another course that wasequally stimulating that a Robert Brady, aneconomist, taught. He was something of aMarxist. I shouldn’t try to characterize him,because it’s too far back, and I don’t remem-ber enough about him excepting his courseon economics dealt with—well, really thepart I remember—the development ofAmerican capitalism.

And it was just loaded with rich insightsinto how large corporations develop and theirinfluence upon the market and, you know,upon the distribution of wealth. Andalthough it wasn’t a revolutionary kind of acourse, it would creep through, things that Irecognized to be Marxist concepts and ideas.

And those were the days in which guyswho were Marxist or quasi-Marxist were verycareful about . . . . In fact, this was true laterI realized in anthropology, all the damnedanthropologists writing on social change andeconomics and material culture. You know,Marxist ideas crept in under the rug.

Julian Steward and all these people woulddeny they were Marxist, and probably weren’t

from their point of view, but they were obvi-ously influenced by these ideas. In fact, theywould have been outraged if you were to say,“Well, that’s a Marxist approach.”

“Oh, what are you talking about!” Well,this went on all through my graduate years. Iremember that, being aware of how influen-tial was Marxist thought and how difficult itwas for American left thinkers to admit anyconnection with Marxism.

And this was going on in this course ineconomics. I just felt, “My god! This guy issaying things that I’ve read and heard else-where, and yet he’s putting it in a larger, moreneutral frame and being very careful abouthow he said them.” But it was a powerfulcourse and loaded with information aboutdistribution of wealth . . . .

Is it the kind of thing that if the politics had beendifferent, that people would have felt free to justdiscuss the fact that these ideas had been pre-sented and discussed by someone named Marx?

Yes, I’m sure there were those who did.But I think one has to remember this was avery touchy time, and it’s admirable that somany . . . . I mean, it’s true that academiawas the place where these so-called goddamnquasi-lefties and communists were. That’swhere they were, a lot of them. And yet theyweren’t necessarily militant left-wingers andnot necessarily consciously Marxist, but theywere widely read, and they were influencedby thought.

And there was so much intervening lit-erature that had already processed thesethoughts, you know, in various ways, that Ijust felt so much of it was congenial. I felt,“My god! These guys are giving me now thestuff that I need to back up the generalizedkind of . . . .”


Well, it’s almost like the intellectual and rationalframework for understanding the social processesyou’d actually witnessed.

Well, and things that I’d read. I had reada lot of Marxist literature. I wasn’t very adeptat it. I had really little understanding of somuch of it, because certainly Marx himselfand Engels and Lenin are really complicatedwriters, and I didn’t have enough background,really, to understand a lot of it. But what Icould understand, I absorbed very fully; Imean, it was meaningful to me. And so whatI was getting in some of these courses was, asyou say, the kind of background material thatfortified what I had merely felt and knownin a more generalized way.

And yet, these guys were not open oreven conscious left . . . . I think Brady knewhimself to be a left-wing thinker. He hadaround him a number of graduate students,and some of them I got to know very well. Iwon’t name their names, but very brightyoung economic graduate students. And Ihad a very good relationship with three orfour of them, and we used to get together andtalk over the materials of the course. Andthey were avowed Marxists, you know, so itjust sort of rubbed off on old man Brady.Whether he deserved it or not, I don’t know,excepting he stimulated this kind of thinking.

Now when I say they were avowed Marx-ists—there are all kinds of Marxists—theseguys were, in a sense, intellectual Marxists,and they disagreed among themselves. Theyhad different kinds of orientations about whatit all meant, and that kind of fervent disagree-ment, I felt I needed; I needed to hear all thevarious approaches and the fact that therewere all kinds of Marxists throughout Europe,and that they were all disagreeing aboutsomething. They disagreed about the basicprinciples and about what Marx had really

said and whether Marx was right or wrong.You know, I had never run across that kindof foment, that kind of intellectual foment.

It was a wonderful, wonderful period.Those guys, I remember them well, and theywent on to teach or to write or went intopolitics of various kinds. One was a blackscholar, very bright guy. He went on and didvery well in sort of a left political way.

So there I was, staying up half the nightbeing blurry-eyed, sometimes because Iwouldn’t get enough sleep during the day. Ican remember a couple of friends of minesaying, “Well, we better keep our eyes open.d’Azevedo is handling the fire trucks. Berke-ley is burning, and he wouldn’t know it.”[laughter] “Berkeley is on fire, and hewouldn’t know it, but all of us would be get-ting in our cars and running to the hills.”

But anyway, those courses, I was very for-tunate to run into them to begin with,because they really stimulated me to do a hellof a lot of reading. I felt positive about goingto school. I was getting good grades, and Iwas doing very well, as against my veryratchety undergraduate work. I had A’s andB’s and, you know, I was lucky to come outwith an average of C’s as an undergraduate,because I only did well in courses that I liked,that I was interested in. And the ones I liked,I always got very good grades in.

So I was doing very well there and alsowriting papers, which I enjoyed doing, and Ifelt that I had a handle on it. This was in1949 through 1950, actually, these kinds ofcourses.

Oh, also in 1950, I took a sociologycourse, because I needed certain backgroundcourses. I was sort of avoiding going directlyinto anthropology, though I had visited thedepartment and reopened an acquaintancewith Theodore McCown [1908-1969;McCown was Associate Professor of anthro-


pology in 1946 and became Full Professor in1951], and Lowie I said hello to, and Kroeber,just letting them know that I was thinkingof returning. Not that they were happy aboutthat. [laughter]

They didn’t remember me, really. I thinkKroeber may have, because I had taken hisart course and had a lot of arguments withhim. He acted as though he remembered me,but that may have just been politeness.

Nevertheless, I began to feel I could getback in there, but I hadn’t really taken acourse yet. In fact, I was recorded as anEnglish major, and I wanted to shift over toanthro as soon as possible, but I did have toget the department’s approval, so that wasbeing held in abeyance.

But in the meantime, I took a course froma Wolfram Eberhard, a sociologist. And hiscourse was essentially about social change.Not minorities so much, as the movementsof peoples and their impact upon nations. Idon’t remember the title.

You mean by movement like migration?

Yes, you know, the impact of migrationsand movements of population and minori-ties developing within large nations, andwhat this meant not only for the highly devel-oped nations, but for the underdevelopednations of the world. It was a very broad-ranging and extremely informative course. Iwish I had notes on that course, because Ilearned a lot.

We had to have a term paper. And I re-member in taking the course I had comeacross, because of my work with Carter etcetera on the slave narratives and slave peri-ods, the whole matter of the relocation ofAmerican blacks, the back to Africa move-ments. Even the most enlightened Americanabolitionists felt that . . . in fact Lincoln had

felt that whites and blacks could not live to-gether in the same society, and therefore,even he supported movements relocatingparticularly freed blacks, because they werea problem.

And so all that interested me. And in theprocess, I had run across the American colo-nization movement and Liberia. And it waswhile I was working with Eberhard that I didtwo or three papers on the American Colo-nization Society and the social conditions,the context, in which that had developed—the pre-Civil War period and the abolitionistmovement, the post-Civil War movement,the role of the American ColonizationSociety as, really, an instrument of formerslave owners, and even some slave owners,and liberal politicians to find a way to get ridof the African-American. And this fascinatedme, how this movement could have devel-oped. And then I kept running across Liberiaas one of the early experiments. England hadSierra Leone—had sent a lot of the NovaScotian blacks to get rid of them to SierraLeone, which was almost like, you know,sending all their convicts to Australia.

And this was a revelation to me, thatthese movements had taken place and thateven people like Lincoln and GeorgeWashington’s brother, Henry Clay—thesevarious figures had been struggling to find aplace to send blacks. The Caribbean, Texaswas even thought about, you know, [laugh-ter] and South America, Panama. All thisscramble to find a way to resolve in the mindsof both liberal and right-wing Americanwhites a way to get the blacks out of the way.

The “go back to Africa” movement wasan important aspect that at least a fewAfrican-Americans supported, although itwasn’t popular. People like Frederick Douglaswere opposed to it and put up a big struggleagainst the colonization movement. Never-


theless, there was this coterie of Americanblacks who at least in an idealistic and roman-tic way supported the idea of returning toAfrica.

Well, the Liberian experiment came outof that in the early 1820s, and that fascinatedme, and I wrote two or three papers. I evenwrote a paper for Eberhard on the Americanpress’ reaction to Liberia, how they talkedabout Liberia, what was the general attitude,the mode of discussion of not only Liberia,but West Africa in general. And little bylittle, I began to get a really strong feelingabout this as something I was deeply inter-ested in.

And so let’s see. All this, when I come tothink of it, was while I was with the firedepartment . . . [laughter] the fire alarmoperator. What little money we had was fromKathy’s job and mine as the fire alarmoperator.

Well, the fire alarm operator gig lastedfor I guess almost a year, and then there weresome changes in the structure of the place.Not that anybody felt that I was someone

they wanted to keep around, but I don’t thinkI was let go. But maybe it was an indirectcrunch, the idea that they wanted to put theirkey persons on the night shifts, and theyupped the wages for those guys. And that leftme out, because I was a junior, I was anapprentice. And it wasn’t because of me, butthe idea was that I would be working in thedaytime with very experienced guys. [laugh-ter] I’m not sure what . . . I was doing allright, but I made a couple of mistakes thatprobably gave me a name around there.

But anyway, that made it impossible forme to go to school, because I think the onlyshift open was either morning or afternoon,and with the courses I needed to take, Icouldn’t do it. And it was a very serious prob-lem. They were unable to keep me and twoor three others on at night, because there wasthis change in policy.

Maybe they’d had too many mistakes.[laughter] I don’t know, too many unreportedfires. I don’t recall, but little by little I real-ized I was going to have to get another job,that this wasn’t going to last.

76CAKES, NOTIONS, AND WINE

LOOKED AROUND, and jobs weren’tvery available. And I didn’t know evenhow to get jobs. I didn’t know how to go

work in the afternoons or whatever it was.And so I got the job, but the question waswas I going to join the teamster’s union?

And I think at that time, they didn’t havea closed shop at Edie’s, but I was approachedby somebody in the teamsters, and I said,“Hell, yes. I’m going to join the union.” So Igot my teamster’s card. What a wonderfuloutfit: “International Brotherhood of Team-sters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, andHelpers.” And so now I had another unioncard.

And as I remember, the company didn’tparticularly care about this, and some peoplewere union and some weren’t. It was a tran-sitional period. But at least I felt I had to bein the union.

Now was this an AFL or a CIO union, theteamsters?

The teamsters were CIO, I’m quite sure.I’ll have to check that out. Well, jeez, I thinkI can find out in a minute here now thatyou’ve raised this crazy question.

Ifinding the kind of job that I should have,particularly because I didn’t know what myqualifications were for anything, you know,other than I had by this wonderful chancegotten into the fire department. [laughter]

So I’m hearing about or reading abouttruck drivers that were needed by some out-fit called Edie’s Confections or something likethat in Berkeley. And I needed a job inBerkeley, because it had to be near where Ilived. So I went and checked it out, and Icould get this job. It was fairly well paying,as I remember. You had to drive one of theselittle trucks around carrying cakes and can-dies and pies.

But you couldn’t read while you were driving.[laughter]

No, no, no, I couldn’t. [laughter] But atleast it was a well-confined day job, you know,where I could work out my hours. I forgetwhat it was, but I could work it out so I could


No. It was an AFL union, probably stillis. But actually I guess I was confused, be-cause they had been very helpful andcooperative with the ILWU and some of theWest Coast maritime unions during ourstrikes. So here I was now back in an AF of Lunion and very happy to pay my dues, and Ifelt I was at least doing the right thing.

Well, anyway, that was a wonderfullyweird job. The Edie’s company—still therein Berkeley—had a restaurant, and it madevery elaborate cakes and pies and candies, andEdie’s candies were very well known through-out the area. My job would be to arrive inthe morning—in fact, I started in the morn-ing and worked until noon. I had a job thatwas split that way. I went on again in theevening to do something else.

But anyway, my job was to turn up therein a white suit as the driver of this strange,funny little truck, and the workers would pileit full of pies and cakes and candies, and Ihad a whole list of places where I was to de-liver these things. Well, I didn’t like that kindof . . . I hated being in that position. I wasvery snobbish about this from having been aseaman.

There was something about wearing auniform. I remember, that was like wearing acoat and tie, which I had to learn to do allover again when I went back to school. See,in those days, you wore a coat and tie to goto seminars, and you know, you dressed prop-erly on campus.

But the whole thing bothered me, but itwas good pay. And so I turned up, and I hadto learn to make this route and drop thesethings off. And dropped a lot of them.[laughter]

One time I remember it was like missingthe right code for the fire department. Iremember I had to stop quickly at a corner,

and a dozen pies and cakes fell on the . . . .[laughter] However, that happened so often,the company was quite used to that. But, youknow, I got reprimanded and told it shouldn’thappen. But on the other hand, it wasn’t myfault.

One thing I remember about that job wasthere were a lot of Portuguese young ladiesworking in the candy part of the factory thatI’d have to walk through in the morning. AndI had to walk in this long line where thereare these candy-dippers dipping cherries intochocolates and things of that kind. And theysaw my name, they got to know my name,and they called to me, “Oh, here’s thatPortuguese boy.” [laughter] And I had thiswonderful relationship with . . . god, theremust have been twenty. Most of them werePortuguese I think or a few maybe Hispanics,but there were enough Portuguese so Ithought of them all as Portuguese.

It got so every morning when I’d gothrough, they’d be holding up these choco-late covered cherries and sticking them inmy mouth as I went down the line. [laugh-ter] I felt really that I was being treated likeroyalty every morning, you know, this greet-ing with songs and kidding.

And these women worked like hell. Theymust have worked sixteen hours a day onshifts. And yet they were always chatteringand laughing and telling jokes. And I was adiversion, you know. I’d come, and therewould be a kind of a celebration and mouth-fuls of fresh chocolate-covered cherries.[laughter] I got sick on them in the morning.

So then I would go to my truck, and itwould be all loaded, and I’d get my list, andI’d take off and make the rounds. And I re-member a couple of times when my routetook me through Berkeley near our house,I’d stop in front of our house, and all the kids


in the neighborhood coming by, and I alwayshad a box of chocolate-covered cherries.[laughter] I’d get out and talk to the kids.

And it was kind of wonderful when Icome to think of it. I don’t think it was avery happy period, generally, but these thingsstick out as being a lot of fun.

So I had that job for, oh gosh, a fewmonths while I was going to school. I wastaking those same courses, so this must havebeen early 1950. And something happenedwhere that job came to the end. Somethinghappened at the company where they had tolet drivers go, and I felt badly about it, be-cause I was doing pretty good. I was a gooddriver and did my job. But they had todownsize for some reason. I forget what it was.They made a shift in what they were sendingout, in how many trucks. I didn’t have senior-ity, and the older drivers stayed on. So thatwas only a few months I had that job. Andafter that, oh, god, then one of the worst jobsI’ve ever had in my life came up.

Because I was driving, I had my unionticket, and I heard about a place called HandySpot Company that had trucks that woulddrive around, make deliveries. Well, that wasa horrible place. It was one of these little fly-by-night, sleazy outfits that had everything.I don’t know if you have them today, but inthe stores, they would have racks with allkinds of notions, everything from toothpasteto combs and medicines and just junk, justmasses of junk. And Handy Spot would havethis merchandise on these trays on shelvesin the stores all through the city.

And so the drivers had to pick up full traysin the morning loaded with junk, load thetrucks with trays, and carry them into vari-ous places to replace stuff that had been soldor take out stuff that was old or broken orsomething, and then check with the ownerof the store and get signed up and find out if

there was any problem or anything that theyneeded they didn’t have.

And I hated it. I just hated this, mainlybecause the products were so sleazy. Just aw-ful. You know, I felt like I was bringing poisoninto the system.

But it paid even better than the previousjob. But you worked your tail off. And as Iremember, it interfered with going to school.I would just be worn out. I had to go all overthe city. I remember I would have to stop atdozens of places during the day and carry inthis crap and take out the old stuff and thencome back and load my truck and clean it upand all that.

And then the unkindest cut of all, thegreatest insult of all, was this owner hadmorning pep sessions. The drivers had tocome early, like 6:30 or something like that,and for a half hour, he would harangue usabout business policy and growth and pro-ductivity, and that we must improve day byday. He thought he was applying businesspsychology of some kind, you know, gettingus all revved up.

And I used to look around, and there werethree or four of these guys out of a dozen thatwere revved up. They loved it. It gave themenergy.

And I looked at them with contempt.Like, “OK, boys. We’re ready to go! We’reready to go!”

My feeling was, “I’d like to blow this placeup,” you know.

And there were fortunately two or threeguys that I could level with about this. Weall hated it.

The one I drove with, a nice guy, was alittle older than me, and he had been doingthis for a long time. Sort of a heavy set guy,and he drank heavily. He and I were friendsbecause he wanted to stop for a drink everynow and then, and I didn’t mind. In fact,


sometimes I’d have a drink with him, andhe’d tell me all the stories of his life and allthat. Then he’d also tell about how he feltabout the goddamn company. He had a won-derful time running the company down.

But this boss, this guy, was such a sleazebag, I couldn’t believe it. I think he believedwhat he was saying.

You know, it was soul searching on thebusiness level. “The more you sow, the bet-ter person you are,” kind of thing. “You’regrowing along with the company,” and onand on. And he’d get very excited, and hiseyes would sparkle as he was talking. And Iwould get sicker and sicker, and by the timeit was time to get out to work, I wanted tothrow everything into the street, you know.

But I needed the job, so I did it. I remem-ber one time in this truck I looked at myselfand thought, “You’re a snob, goddamn it,because, you know, a lot of guys got to dothis. Get in there and do it,” you know. But Ifelt demeaned by that kind of job.

In the fire department job, I felt good. Ifelt I was doing something important. Butthis, I felt I was as sleazy as the company.

I remember once I was driving toOakland, and I stopped at a stop light, andacross the street coming in a beautiful dresswas this gorgeous young woman with a babycarriage. And I looked at her, and remem-bered she was a girlfriend of mine in highschool in Modesto. I had had a crush on her,a really deep one. And she hadn’t given memuch of a chance to pursue it, but she knewwho I was. And she says, “Warren!” [laughter]

And I remember, I stopped in the middleof the street, I got out of the truck, I embracedher, and we talked about her little baby.

I remember looking at her and thinkinghow beautifully middle-class she was. She wasdressed in, you know, these long skirts thatthey wore in the 1940s, and her shoes and

her hat with this little veil. And this beauti-ful girl had turned into this middle-class frau.She was very, very contained and dignifiedwith her little baby. But she knew that sheand I had some connection.

So here I was, cars honking, you know.[laughter] But anyway, I remember that. Oneremembers things like that. So I got back inmy truck and said good-bye to her. And Iwas . . . I think her name was Stephanie. Shewas beautiful. Even under those conditions,she was beautiful, though I had this awfulfeeling that she had descended, you know.She probably felt that about me . . . that Ihad descended into a very dismal life, but shewas beautiful anyway.

So that went on for a while, and thensomething happened at Handy Spot. Well,it was a fly-in-by-night agency. I think it justbroke up. I think it went bankrupt or some-thing. That lasted two or three months.

But in the meantime, you’re taking classes.

Well, during this time, I held off goingback into anthropology, because I didn’t haveenough time, and I was worried about doingit right. Yes, I was taking these other courses,and somehow or other, I managed to go—Iwas only taking two courses at a time.

But to go to class, you would have to get dressedin a coat and tie?

Well, not necessarily to class. You couldwear a nice shirt, but you had to dress prop-erly. But no, to go to a seminar or to go to ameeting with your professors, you wore a shirtand tie or coat and shirt and tie.

And on that topic, I wanted to ask if in generalthe professors, these men that you’ve mentionedthat you admired and that were stimulating, I


mean, were they pretty accessible? Could youtalk to them?

Oh, yes.

Did you have a relationship with them?

Oh, yes. With John Carter, I had a goodrelationship with him, and I used to see him,talk to him all the time. And Mark Shorerwas a little more distant. He was a very busyscholar. But you know, you could go to theiroffices and see them, sure.

Had long discussions with Eberhard. Hekind of enjoyed yakking with students. Youhad small classes, an easy going atmospherearound departments. Oh, it was so differentthan what ten, fifteen years later.

Is this after, you think, the first rush of G.I.’s?

Yes, yes. There were a lot of G.I.’s, ex-G.I.’s on campus, people on the G.I. Bill. Oh,yes.

Well, when you were saying that the classes weresmall, I was just wondering if the classes youwere taking . . . .

Well, I think the classes I was taking werenot necessarily the kind of classes that mostof them were taking, you know. A lot of themwere coming back and really doing theirundergraduate work, you see. Yes, I was in aquasi-graduate student position at this point;I was in an interim period.

So would you say that these were at a minimum,upper-division classes, or were they graduate levelclasses?

I didn’t take any . . . . Did I take a semi-nar? No, these were upper-division classes.

But you had accessibility.

Oh, yes. Well, and then earlier back inthe 1930s when I was an undergraduate, mygod, I can remember, you know, we’d stopand chat with Kroeber as we were going backand forth to classes, and Lowie, seeing themon the campus, and Lowie would sit downon the bench with you and chat. Everythingwas very relaxed. [laughter]

Yes. Well, it was part of the educational experi-ence of that time.

Oh, yes. It was such a differentatmosphere. And then, you know, later onwhen I taught at Cal, in the late 1950s, Imean the place was a maelstrom, you know.Comparatively it was just total chaos, andinaccessibility to your mentors unless you hada very special project with them.

Anyway, so I was managing to hold myown with a couple of classes during that yearwith different jobs. Handy Spot, I wasn’t atall unhappy when that thing folded. AndEdie’s, I think they had just changed the kindsof things they were sending out or the waythey were delivering, and maybe they cutdown on their delivery service. I don’t know.But in each case, it was because somethinghad happened in the structure of the job. AsI remember, I was a pretty good driver, and Idid my work. I don’t think I was ever fired. Idon’t remember being fired anywhere, thoughsometimes I deserved it. [laughter]

But Handy Spot, when it folded . . . Ithink it went bankrupt; they were just fly-by-night. They just picked up, pretty muchwent to another town and did the same damnthing probably. I was elated. I wanted an ex-cuse not to go there.

This must have been in mid-1950, and Iwanted to get back in anthropology, so I


searched around for jobs that were more con-genial, convenient. And I finally ranacross—I don’t know how I did; I think itwas some friends who told me about it—alittle liquor store way out on Solano Avenuenamed Bear’s Liquors. And I went out thereand saw this old owner who had been a formersea captain, Old Rogers, old Captain Rogers.And I got talking to him, and we hit it off.

Later he got two people, but he neededsomebody to handle sort of upper . . . Thiswas in the upper part of Berkeley where inthose days kind of well-to-do people lived,up in the hills. Right at the bottom of thehills on Solano Avenue, he had this littlekind of grubby store called Bear’s Liquors, andhe needed somebody to help him service theplace.

I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’tknow anything about liquors or wines or any-thing, but he didn’t care. So I got a job therewhere I would go and, you know, sell wines,service the store, clean it up at night, andput new wines and liquor on the shelves andcheck the stock in back. Oh, he was veryhappy, because he hadn’t known how he wasgoing to handle all the liquor and wines inthe back of the store, because he had themall stacked up in boxes, that he’d have to gothrough. Well, I got carload after carload ofapple boxes that we set up in rows so youcould pass through the little rows. I set upthese rows of apple boxes, and put the winesand liquor in them. He was absolutely de-lighted. I could do no wrong from then on. Isolved the problem for him. I even put tagsup, you know, such and such a wine, this andthat and the other thing.

And one thing about that job, I learneda little bit about wines. (Maybe that’s why

my son is so interested in wines these days.)But these wine salesmen would come in everyday with wine for us to taste. And we’d go inthe back and taste wine. Well, Christ, by theend of the day, I was whacked out. [laughter]I wasn’t used to that kind of thing. [laughter]But I did learn the kinds of wines I liked, andthere was a zinfandel I was absolutely crazyabout. What was the name of it? This nolonger exists, but the land still exists—Nicolini wines. And it was jug wine,zinfandel, big jugs, something like a dollarand a half, two dollars a jug, you know. Deli-cious! Real wonderful California zinfandel.So I’d take that home. We didn’t drink muchin those days, but we liked it now and then.

So anyway, I got so that I was able tohandle the store. It took me a couple ofmonths or something like that to work outmy hours so I knew I could go to school andall that. We’d be open from, I don’t know,8:00, 8:30 to 10:00 at night, and I could workout my hours between him and myself andlater, another guy. So that turned out to bealmost an ideal job—ideal in many ways.[laughter]

Also, I was up there on Solano where alot of people that we had known, certain pro-fessional people and academic people, wereliving, and they would start coming into thestore, and there was a real feeling of connec-tion. You know, friends of Kathy’s from thenursery school started coming to the storebecause I was there. So I brought in a littlebusiness, and Old Rogers and I . . . . Well,he wasn’t always around. He was a heavydrinker, so there were times when he didn’tknow what had gone out or in the store. ButI couldn’t worry about that. [laughter] I wastoo busy worrying about myself at the time.

77BACK TO ANTHROPOLOGY

HAT MUST HAVE been the fall of1951 where I finally went up to theanthro department and I think I

graduate students in anthro were very . . . .See, when I say “left-wing,” in those days Imean they were very progressive. They wereintellectually very concerned about newideas, change, and they were political dissi-dents of all stripes. And it was a lively bunchof characters. Well, I don’t remember theirnames now, but a number of people whom Ilater knew and got to know as colleagues werehanging around at the time.

And so I started taking courses. Theywanted me to redo my general anthropology,so I took anthropological theory, I think, fromLowie. And I remember an earlier time, I hadtaken a course from Lowie which we used tocall “cross-cousin marriage around the world”,see, because that’s what we did. But this onewas a more general course, and it was basi-cally on the kind of material that was in hisbook, Theory In Anthropology, whatever it was[History of Ethnological Theory, 1937]. And itwas a good sort of general introductory course,and I always liked him.

Oh, he was getting all kinds of troublelater on from students who were denouncing

Ttalked to McCown. Was Heizer around? I for-get, but whoever the two or three people Italked to, I said, “Do you think I can get backinto anthropology after all this time? Youknow, my courses I took are way back.” Andyou know, the usual graduate student’s ques-tions about this.

And they were very supportive. Theysaid, “Sure.” In those days, things were a lotlooser than they are today. “Sure,” you know.“For god’s sakes, just sign up. It depends onhow you do, you know. Sure. Take a seminarif you want to, come in.”

I was elated. I made that transition.

At this point, are you also very focused onthe . . . ?

Oh, yes, very much. The same subjects,yes. I went into anthro carrying this wonder-ful baggage from these other courses, and, ofcourse, my background. And I found that the


him for coming from Europe under a cloud. Iwon’t go into that, but there was all kinds ofgossip about poor old Lowie.

He was a wonderful man. He was a manof great dignity, great erudition, very politeand kind to students, very helpful. I liked hima lot, and I think I got quite a bit from coursesI took from him, though it’s hard for me toremember any details, you know.1

And then I think I took a physicalanthropology course from SherwoodWashburn. I believe it was Washburn whowas around at that time. I only could take acourse or two at a time, but I took that 105Aand B, I think it was, and then at some point,I had a course from Washburn and anotherfrom McCown. And those were very impor-tant to me.

But boy, I tell you I had one course—Ican’t remember who it was, the name of theguy—on race, in which I think every shib-boleth about race that I ever heard, heuttered. He was a minor member of thedepartment, but he was almost an embarrass-ment. We had to make fun of him, becausehe was so backward in his thinking, in hisknowledge, and he was a racist.

I’ll always remember it because in thosedays—even in Kroeber’s book, Anthropology,his text book—race was so important. Halfthe book is about race and you know, theseinnumerable dozens of races and sub-races andheights and cephalic indexes and arm-lengthand leg-length and pelvis. And skin color andhair form was taken quite seriously.

This approach was beginning to break upat that time with the shift into people likeBoyd. What was it? Boyd’s Genetics in HumanEvolution? Anyway, Boyd had made a greatimpact in blood-group studies and things ofthat kind. There was beginning to be an ero-sion of the older view and distress at the race

classification view. But it was going on. Every-body was doing it at that time.

I remember the first courses I taught later,I would go over this just because it was sofascinating, you know, how we had been ab-sorbed in race classification and how ingraduate school, it was one of the first thingsthat I got, you know. And yet, I was deeplyinterested in pre-history and human devel-opment and the emergence of primates andall that. And anthropologists at that timespent a lot of time with this. It’s what youtaught along with cultural anthropology.

I wish I could remember that guy’s name.One thing we used to enjoy about him wasthat he would lose track of his lecture as hewas walking or pacing back and forth whenhe’d come to a woman with her knees crossed.And he would sort of get absorbed and wouldbe talking and gazing totally oblivious of thefact that he was in full view or that anybodysaw what he was doing. [laughter] And hewould sort of lose track and lose the threadof his lecture and then have to shake his headand begin all over again, you know. Oh, wethought that this was the perfect wedding ofthe two images of the guy who was absorbedin race classification and a guy who wastotally dumped on by women. [laughter]Well, it lightened this boring class enor-mously to watch this aspect of his personality.

Now were you fulfilling certain requirements?

In a way, yes. I was sort of getting coursesthat they had advised me to take and thisgeneral course of Lowie’s, which was ex-tremely useful, very good. I didn’t take anyKroeber at that time, I don’t think.

Well, when you just touched on the fact . . . yousaid Washburn and McCown’s courses were very


important, could you maybe say why or just talkabout that a little bit?

Well, I’m about to, yes. I just got side-tracked by this guy on race.

Oh, by the knees. [laughter]

Washburn’s course, which I don’t remem-ber in any detail, I remember as a very goodcourse on fossil primates and human evolu-tion and various important sites and variousfossil types that appeared in the evolutionaryfossil record. But one thing I do recall—andI don’t want to be unfair by misstating this—but that was a time when Dart’s material,Raymond Dart and his Taung skulls, the earlyaustralopithecines, that he was writing about,were very much in doubt.

A lot of physical anthropologists didn’treally believe that the evidence necessarilyshowed that this particular primate had beena hunter, as Dart was saying, who had killedbaboons. You know, they argued that all thebaboon skulls found with the left side of theirheads bashed in and all that, that other ani-mals could have done this. There was a lotof arguing about it, and really, Dart was sortof looked upon as something of a performerin a way, overstating his case.

And I remember Washburn being sort ofcynical about the australopithecines: “Well,we’ll have to wait and see.” It was a period,too, when Piltdown was still very important,you know. And I must say that people likeWashburn put it on the questionable list, butit was, “a legitimate claim,” kind of thing.

So Sir Arthur Keith’s disclaimers not-withstanding, people needed it. They neededPiltdown. It filled the niche, and it was be-fore Africa was recognized as really central.But Dart’s stuff in south Africa, for god sakes,

was well before Leakey and all the Olduvaistuff.2

When I come to think of it, how won-derfully naive we all were at that time.Speculation was rampant, and all kinds ofconclusions were being drawn from verylittle, you know. I remember . . . . Oh.

Well, didn’t Dart not have a traditional academicpedigree?

Yes. I forget what it was, but he had had arather unusual development and background,not necessarily highly professionalized fromthe point . . . . And his associate, Broom, wasreally something of an adventurer type andall that. Yes, so that came over with it, yousee.

It was ten years after that course in 1950before the matter was taken seriously. It tookLeakey’s material really to impress it onthe . . . [anthropological community]. Iremember just when I started teaching in thelate 1950s, early 1960s, that it was beingtaken seriously, see. There were still doubtsand all that, but . . . oh, and then theNeanderthal problem was being talked aboutjust as it is today.

It’s amazing how long the Neanderthalproblem has been around, you know. Werethey or were they not progenitors, or werethey a separate species, and did they maketools?

Oh, and that brings up McCown. I hadthis magnificent course from McCown onLevantine Mediterranean archeology andpre-history, and McCown was, to me, the lastword in scholar. The man was so careful andso prepared in his lectures and so full of infor-mation and personal experience.

He had worked Palestine in theLevantine. Who were his side-kicks? There


would be the woman archeologist and some-body else. It’ll occur to me. Anyway, he hadworked on those finds where neanderthaloidand homosapienoid forms, twenty, thirtythousand years ago, had been found together,and where the question arose about separatespecies or were the Neanderthals really, youknow, totally separate from Homo sapiens? hadthey had any relations at all, and all that wasbeing bandied about.

In fact, it still is. It’s amazing. This is stillgoing on in the literature on a different level,fortunately, and with more data.

But nevertheless, McCown’s positionwas, and along with those he worked with,that as far as they were concerned, Neander-thal and so-called sapiens were all justvarieties that, you know, were capable ofsexual interaction, reproduction, and that inplaces in the world they had mingled. Andalso, the other thing was that quite possiblymany populations showed these variations oftype within them at the time. Well, this washighly advanced to us, to students there, ahighly advanced point of view.

I wish I could remember who it was thathe had worked with. Oh, dear me, I wouldlike to remember. He had worked very closelywith a well-known European archeologist.

So anyway, his course dealt with all ofwhat was known then of the distributions ofhuman types in the Late Paleolithic and theNeolithic, all through the Mediterraneanarea and north Africa. And he got me veryinterested in the whole aspect of Africandevelopment. His view was at a time whenAsia was still the cradle of mankind.[laughter]

I have here a Communist Party pamphletI discovered on chauvinism or racism inwhich there is a section—a lot of this wasfrom 1949, 1950—talking about the origins

of humankind and race. And it was very goodon race, you know, quoting Boas and the mostrecent thinking of the time about the factthat we had to get away from the old classifi-cations. And all that was just beginning tohappen, so they were advanced there, butthen saying, “And mankind originated inAsia.” So, you know, this is the background Icame to the class with, and then I found thatthat was pretty much the prevailing view.

So there was this great resistance toaccepting Africa as the source and for all thereasons that have been written about ad nau-seam since, you know. Certainly an aspect ofEuropean orientation was that it couldn’t beout of Africa. It had to be from noble Asia,where the Garden of Eden was or from theRiver Thames—Piltdown. [laughter]

But McCown’s class was a magnificentsurvey of all the various cultural emergencesover the period from the Late Paleolithicthrough the Neolithic, into the Iron Age, etcetera, and very open to the idea of influ-ences from Africa south of the Sahara. Andhe was always very cynical about theEgyptologists and Egypto-centric views. Hetalked about the trade relations and constantinteraction of Egypt with East and South andWest Africa.

You know, at this time when this washappening, very few others were talking likethis or had this kind of orientation. It was avery liberating course in that sense for me,because it gave me also the connection be-tween my interest in Africa and racerelations. It gave me this Mediterranean-African background, in those days whenpre-history, human evolution were very mucha part of cultural anthropology as well. That’swhy later on, when I taught introductoryanthropology, half the course was this kindof material.


Well, it just seems that because of the nature-nurture . . . I won’t say controversy, butdialogue or focus on the influence of environ-ment versus genes has always been a central topicin anthropology, but that there used to be moredialogue between the fields on that. [laughter]

Well, in anthropology at the time,anthropologists in a sense, saw themselves asrepositories of all of human development, notjust contemporary peoples and the under-standing of the range of human culturalexpressions, but also of human history. Thatwas just taken for granted. As an anthropolo-gist, you accommodated this breadth ofknowledge in your field.

Well, there’s no doubt that it’s gotten toobig for anybody to do that today, or damnfew. But in those days, people like Kroeber—and if you read his book, it’s justmarvelous—if you’ve ever looked in his textbook, I mean, it’s wild. He covers everything.I mean everything, the whole universe, youknow, because anthropologists then felt theycould do that. That amount of data andamount of speculation that they had aboutthe development of human beings impingedupon their notions of contemporary culture.Human evolution was cultural evolution.

And I took that with me when I wasteaching, all through my teaching. I neverwould yield to the idea of separating intro-ductory anthropology into three or fourdifferent courses. It’s finally happened, be-cause it’s had to. But when I came and starteddeveloping this department here in the Uni-versity Nevada, I was determined that it wasgoing to be a four-field department. Noanthropologists should come out with anM.A. or Ph.D. in anthropology without hav-ing touched every damn corner ofanthropology and related fields.

Well, that’s become a little bit old fash-ioned, I suppose, although the argument goeson and will go on. It’s getting so one won-ders how it can be done. It’s just that peoplewho are involved in the sub-fields of anthro-pology feel they’ve got to go and leaveanthropology and join related departmentsthat are closer to their interests. It’s just toodamn big.

Anyway—Washburn’s course and myrecollection of how Dart’s material was tak-ing so long to get into the picture.

So it struck you then at the time that there was asort of an inexplicable resistance?

At the time I don’t recall what my atti-tude about that was or where my position was.I guess it was pretty much the position of myprofessors. Except I remember that it was astimulating idea: What about South Africa?What if that were true? Because any goodprofessor—and I think Washburn did—would raise the question about what thiswould mean. It would alter our whole viewof the development of the various types fromthe Far East, you know. It later becameaccepted that the so-called Pithecanthropuserectus and Homo erectus types were really outof Africa. At that time, nobody really tookthat kind of view seriously.

Now had Washburn done his baboon work yet?

I don’t think so. He might have been inthe middle of it. And you know, his studentwho did the work on the Bushmen. Oh, I’mforgetting these names.

Lee?

No, not Lee, the other one. Lee andDeVore. Yes, DeVore. I met DeVore when I


came back to Cal in the late 1950s. He wasthen a student of Washburn’s. So no, I don’tthink Washburn was doing the baboon workthat early, but he may have, I don’t recall.

Yes. I just wondered how that was . . . .

I don’t remember. I don’t know enoughabout Washburn’s development and back-ground. But anyway, the McCown coursewas, to me, a high point, just like the coursefrom John Carter in English.

I was thinking how interesting your exposure tothe sociologists teaching about the impact of themovement of people on nations . . .

Yes, yes. Migration.

. . . and how that would resonate with con-cepts in deep-time, you know, populationsmoving and . . . .

Sure. All those things. You know, at thatstage in your life, these things come togetheras illuminations. “Oh, wow.” And I was justfull of wows at that time. Yes, “Oh wow! Oh,wow!” Have I mentioned Kenneth Stamp inhistory?

No, you have not.

Well, Kenneth Stamp was another greatinfluence during that time. I think I only tookone semester from him, but god, I have hisnotes still. And I have in the past gone backand looked at them. This was on the CivilWar and Reconstruction.

And I tell you, this man was remarkablein the detail, the insight, the knowledge ofeconomic change and development, theunderstanding of the political and economicforces of the pre-Civil War and Civil War.

His lectures on slave-owning and on slaveryand the slave-owning class in which he wasshowing how reasonable and logical it all waswere brilliant.

This is how it worked, and that’s why itwas so hard for the South to give it up.Although it was already falling apart by thetime of the Civil War economically, theSouth was not going to be able to give it up.Slavery was no longer the great bonanza ithad been. Nevertheless, intellectually andculturally, it was deeply ingrained as a sys-tem that made sense. And he’d always talkabout the irony of how something so terrible,so inhuman could make sense to so manyhuman beings, you know.

I mean, he was wonderful with bringingout these ironies of the human condition.And yet, he didn’t make a lot of that. Hewould just say, you know, “Here we havethousands and thousands of people whoselivelihood and whose way of life and whoseemotional connection with the world andwhose intellects depended upon this systemand were forged by this system and acceptedit as nature.”

And the impossibility of any middle ground. Youwere either for it or against. I mean, there wasno way to accommodate . . . .

Well, not if you were going to change thesystem. That was dangerous. That was crisis.I mean, it was like blowing up the world:“What’s going to happen now?” Which hap-pened during and after the Civil War.

He was able to paint this poignant pic-ture of the decay of the South and whathappened with people and their ideas, theiremotions. And then the horrors of recon-struction and what the new capitalistbourgeois North was doing in advancing onthe gravy, eating up all the gravy, you know,


of the South. It was a highly destructiveperiod.

And yet, he was very sympathetic, youknow, to the Northern cause. Nevertheless,he had this ability to point out the poignancyof social change. And no one could just takea position and say, “You know, this is wrongand this is bad.” But you understood all theforces at work and what it meant to the livesof human beings, good or bad. Things werehappening which were deeply powerfully,traumatic to the whole society.

And his view was it is not going to end;it’s going on. I think I took that from him,the idea that race relations and racism is theprofoundest underlying theme in Americanlife and will be for a long time to come. Henever said it that way, but it always came backto that, that this was something we wouldnever soon resolve. It’s going on and on andon. I had a greatly positive view of that manand his course.

Well, so you probably took the class because ofthe subject that he was teaching.

I’m not sure. I had a lot of friends whowere taking it. I probably had heard about

him or knew about him. He was a well-knownscholar of the Civil War. But I undoubtedlytalked to people, and I probably was takingcourses that were part of the track of a lot ofmy congenial friends, you know, along theway. And this one was certainly the jackpot.

Notes

1. Anthropology 207A-B was Lowie’s mostfamous graduate seminar and dealt with the his-tory and theory of anthropology. He continuedto teach this seminar until 1957 each spring. “Asignificant part of the theoretical position ofmost anthropologists who took their Ph.D.’s atBerkeley stems from this course.” http://dynaweb.oac.cdlib.org:8088/dynaweb/uchis/public/inmemoriam1959 . . . . 10/23/2003

2. The Piltdown skull, discovered inBritain in 1912, wasn’t exposed as a fraud until1953. Raymond Dart’s discovery of the first aus-tralopithecine was in 1925. He described it asan upright, small brained ancestor of Homosapiens. Louis and Mary Leakey’s discoveries ofadditional australopithecine fossils began in1959.

78PICKET LINES

HILE I WAS going to school, thislast part of 1951, and for the lastyear since I had left the water-

was an entirely different kind of work expe-rience than I’d had.

I was working here with people who werehospital workers, most of them were women,and most of them were black women. So itwas an entirely different look at the laborfront as against what I experienced in mari-time. And I ended up writing leaflets, ofcourse.

I wrote a number of leaflets for them inwhich I outlined the problems that they had.The problems were that the wages of blackworkers were lower than white workers, num-ber one. Number two, nurses’ aides weredoing an enormous amount of work becausethere was such a shortage of nurses. They hadasked for higher wages and relief in terms oftheir hours and were totally ignored by thehospital administration.

Were they unionized?

Well, they were just unionized. I fortu-nately remember that, United PublicWorkers Orderlies’, Nurses’ Union, local 722.And they had just been organized, and they

Wfront, I had transferred over to the partyorganization in the East Bay, and I was in atrade union section of the East Bay Commu-nist Party. I was there, obviously, because Ihad come out of the waterfront.

And most of our discussions and prob-lems and activities had to do with variouskinds of labor issues on the East Bay. Therewas a tremendous amount of activity amongthe waterfront workers on the coast and theteamsters and the various groups that wereworking in the warehousemen’s union. Anumber of strikes and confrontations weretaking place, and one of them that I foundmyself involved in was the strike of the nursesand nurses’ aides in Herrick Hospital.

The nurses aides, who were mostly blackwomen, though there were some men amongthem, were appealing for help through thetrade unions and whatever party memberswere among them for aid in their strike. So Iwas assigned to work with them, and that was,to me, a very interesting period because it


were looking for help. So I got involved inthat for a number of weeks while I was goingto school and while I was working at theliquor store.

When I look back, I must have had anenormous amount of energy, because I seemedto be able to do it, but it was getting to meand I was spread too thin. I had too manydifferent concerns all the way from the stuffthat I was working on and reading in schooland getting very excited about it and tryingto keep up there and at the same time work-ing almost a full-time job. It was a good jobbecause I could take time off or arrange myschedule to fit other things—party work andmeetings.

Then the strike came up which I was in-volved in. So I spent a lot of time down thereon the picket line with the hospital workersand trying to understand the full basis of theirbeefs and demands, and writing leaflets. Andthe leaflets were pretty good. They werewidely distributed.

I had this experience before, a kind ofdéjà vu. Somehow or other in a weird sort ofway, I would think of my grandfather writinghis little religious tracts warning of the endof the world and the coming of the Lord, etcetera. And sometime when I was, I don’tknow, twelve, thirteen years old, I was help-ing him put them into readable English andhelping him distribute them on the streets ofOakland. Not being religiously involved, butdoing it for him because he was very insis-tent, because he needed help, and I was theonly one in the family that would pay anyattention to him.

And so here I was writing and passing outleaflets at Herrick Hospital in the same gen-eral region as myself and my grandfather hadmany, many years earlier. And it was a kindof an irony which I enjoyed, as I remember.Nevertheless, it was a very rough strike, a long

one, and it was a good example of, again,communist influence in these unions. Oneof the major educational tasks within theunion itself was chauvinism, helping thewhite nurses understand and get along withthe black nurses’ aides who were really a veryinteresting and committed bunch of people.

Their jobs were on the line. They werealso very scared and worried about their jobs.And they had some problems in getting alongwith the white nurses, particularly the whitemale nurses, who sometimes felt that theywere superior to everybody else.

And there were a lot of these inner con-flicts which, again, the two or three partymembers that were in that union, I admiredthe kind of work that they did. They wereable to help these people in little sessionsgetting together and talking about their prob-lems of attitude toward one another, how itwas going to interfere with them winning thestrike.

And you know, I felt very good aboutbeing involved on that score. I didn’t domuch of that kind of work, because I wasn’tin the union. But I worked, really, as a kindof helper.

Was your role as a helper primarily as a unionmember—not a member of that union, but Imean as a member of a union?

As a trade unionist, yes.

But not overtly because you were a member ofthe Communist Party there?

Well, except I think in those days it hadnot gotten to the point where people likemyself felt we had to hide it if somebodybrought it up to us. We didn’t go around pro-claiming it, but if somebody said, “Are you acommunist?” I would have said and I guess I

681PICKET LINES

said a number of times to different people,“Yes, I’m a member of the Communist Party.”It didn’t come up that often, so it wasn’tsomething that you had to deal with all thetime.

But, you know, there was a lot of savvyamong working people. They knew that therewere lefties in their union, and they eitheradmired them or hated them, I mean depend-ing on what kind of job they had done. Butalso, in a time of strike and labor difficulties,you know, any old port in the storm.

I mean, if anybody’s going to help, fine.And I was out on the picket line every day,and I was helping to make picket signs withthese people. And we’d get together and dothis.

There were a lot of good, highly open andconvivial discussions. People were enjoyingthis kind of community feeling and at thesame time were very worried. A lot of thesewomen had families and they had kids.

Sometimes they had to bring their kidswith them on the picket line, and sometimes,you know, 100 or 150 nurses, nurses’ aidesand all the trade union people coming in tohelp and take turns on the picket line, thosewere the times when there were some verygood kinds of experiences of that sort.

And so I felt very obligated to be in-volved, and I did a good job with leaflets. Idid two or three major leaflets, which werepassed out which I was proud of. And I evenwent to the extent of paying out of my ownpocket the printing of some of them, whichdidn’t cost much in those days at some littleprinting outfit.

And again it reminded me, déjà-vu, mygrandfather having his own tracts printed atsome little place down in Oakland. And thiswas one of those silly kind of connections.

Nevertheless, that went on for a numberof weeks, and it was getting very tight and

people were getting tired. And there is thatfeeling at some point during a strike whenthey don’t know if they’re going to win oreven prevail as they were.

And the hospital was doing everythingit could to disrupt the strike by sending intrucks. And I can remember going out andwaiting, with my teamsters card, because Iwas a member of the teamsters at the time. Ihad my book with me, and I remember goingup as these drivers were going in and saying,“Are you a teamster, for god sakes?” And I’dhold up my book and say, “Why are you go-ing through our picket line?” And a numberof guys would turn around and leave, somewould go through.

That’s when the hospital called the policesaying that we were interfering with the sup-plies coming into it. Because actually it wasfairly successful. Most of the drivers wouldnot go through.

Oh, there were always some small-timeguys coming through in little trucks, andthey’d say, “The hell with you guys,” and gopushing through. And I remember a numberof the women would get so mad that theywould stand in front of the trucks or jump onthe hoods of the truck and hang on. And itwas getting kind of nasty toward the end.

I felt very badly for these women, becausethey’d gotten into this situation, and theydidn’t know how to get out of it. So theyreally relied upon some of the leaders of theunion to negotiate. And I think they didnegotiate something of an improved contract,but it wasn’t anything near what they shouldhave gotten. And there were repercussionsagainst them once they got back to work lateron. I heard that these things happened. I’mnot sure of that.

But nevertheless, one day I was out thereon the line, and this great big truck came in,and there was a guy in there that I had rec-


ognized, and he was a truck driver—I didn’tknow him, but he was in the union. I says,“You’re not going to go through there, areyou?”

He says, “I’ve got to. I’ve got a job to do,damn it. What are you . . . ?” You know, “Getout of my way, for god sakes.”

And I said, “Look, you can’t go through,”and I was beginning to get mad, because heshould know better. And so I stood in frontof his truck, and he kept moving, inching inon me, and I finally got up on the truck. Well,then the cops came. They were just waitingfor something like this, particularly me andsome of the people that they considered theoutsiders, the provocateurs, you see.

And I don’t know, about four or five copscame and grabbed me and put handcuffs onme, and they took two or three others too. Ithink they took one of the women and acouple of other guys. Anyway, four or five ofus were taken somewhere in Berkeley to oneof the police stations. And they lined us upand held us there for two or three hours. Andas I remember, I sat there with handcuffs on,and the press was in there, and somehow thatbothered me the most. Here I was in schooland all that sort of thing.

However, you know, that’s the way thecookie crumbles. So then they interrogatedeach one. They were letting each of the oth-ers go, and then they finally got to me, andthey said, “Are you so and so?” They had somekind of record on me—I don’t know what.They had my name down in some way, andthey kept pressing me about why was I there,what was I doing, where did I come from, didI even live in this area, didn’t I come fromLos Angeles and all that.

You know, I could tell they were as mixedup as anybody. Nevertheless, they had someidea they were going to do something specialwith me. And I just denied all that and just

said, “No, I’m here to support the strike, andI have every right to do it,” whatever it was.And finally, just after giving me a lot of hasslein this way, they let me out.

In the meantime, it got into the press,and the next day in the . . . oh, in all thelocal papers, there was this short little squibabout, “Altercation on the picket line andWarren d’Azevedo was arrested for interfer-ing with supplies going into the hospitalwhich were much in need. Patients were inneed, and these people are preventing thepatients from getting proper care,” and all theusual stuff. Well, that was all right, except-ing I know by the way people talked to meon campus, a few that I knew, some whowould disapprove of what I was doing, thatthey had read it. And I won’t name names,but one or two of my professors, you know,said that, “How do you have time to do somuch activity?” Things of that kind. [laugh-ter] So I had the feeling that I had donesomething.

But mainly what I was concerned withwere my poor parents. It had gotten into theModesto papers as well. And I felt terribly,because of my father, who had been helpful.I began to get a new look at my parents. Youknow, the struggle that I had gone throughto get away from my family and to dissociatemy whole life from them and to forge, in asense, a new direction, that caused me to seethem as, in a sense, obstructionists, and thatthey had created a lot of my problems andthings of that kind.

A lot of this, I think, all adolescents orpre-adolescents go through this, and youexaggerate the difficulties that you had withthem and you caricature them, in a sense.And so I knew that I had done that.

I was getting a little wiser as I got older,but then I wouldn’t take back much that Iearlier said about my father and his remote-

683PICKET LINES

ness. And yet he had never done anythingreally unkind—well, up to that point—to mebut had just not been a father for whateverreasons, which I have some idea about butare irrelevant here.

But anyway, I got a call from him saying,“I have been reading the paper. And don’tyou think that this is hard on your mother?”

And by the way, at this point, my motherwas ill. She was ill from what was suspectedas cancer. She was getting chemotherapy andthings, but she was progressively beingaffected by whatever it was. In fact, she lastedanother two years, actually. But we didn’trealize how serious it was at the time.

Nevertheless, he says “Don’t you realizewhat this does to your mother? She was veryupset by this.”

And then I talked to her, and she says,you know, “Can you imagine what this meansto Joe. His friends are coming to him andsaying, ‘Is that your son who has done this?’”

And I realized what a perfect picture ofconflict between generations, number one,and number two, between class orientations,you see. I was still feeling a little cynical aboutthem and their class position and their atti-tudes even though they were probably moreprogressive and more open politically thanmost of the parents of that generation ofpeople that I knew. Nevertheless, I saw them,you know, as in that class structure whereanything like this they could not possibly bepositive about but only see it as churlish onmy part and as unthinking and all this sort ofthing. And then a communist on top of that.

Oh, I was going to ask you if they knew youwere . . . .

Oh, they knew. I told them. In fact, I sup-pose one of my ways of defining myself tothem so that they would know what I felt

and where I was in the world, was to tell them,knowing all the time that it would be hurt-ful. But I guess I rationalized it was better totell them and have them know than learn itfrom others.

But again, they were very careful aboutthat, and they would express their feelingsabout it now and then, but they never gaveme a bad time about it, never withdrew orsaid, you know, “Don’t bark at my doorstep”kind of thing at all.

So I had never given them really creditfor that, though now I do. I mean, I see thatas against a lot of people that I knew, for godsakes, they took a lot of flack, and they didwell with it. Although I had every right tofeel the way I felt about the kind of upbring-ing I had and the kind of conflicts in thefamily.

But nevertheless, so here my mother istelling me, “You know how all of his friendsand patients are saying, ‘Is that your son? Ishe doing that?’” What I admired, he nevertold me that, but she told me that.

Anyway, that was where that was. So Ifelt badly about that. On the other hand, Ifelt, “This is my life. I have to do this. This iswhat I’m going to do.”

And so anyway, there was the Herrickstrike, and . . . .

Were there any other students involved in thatstrike as supporters?

Not in the strike, no. Oh, there weretwo . . . yes, there were two or three studentson the picket line, people I didn’t know butgot to know. A couple of them were mem-bers of the student section of the party, but Ihadn’t known them personally. I got to knowthem on the picket line, but not well. Youknow, everybody had different jobs and dif-ferent things to do.


On campus, the people that I knew, fel-low students, the few that I knew thoughtthat it was great that I had done this. Therewas a lot of strong left-wing sentiment oncampus at that time. And on campus, thereare always a few crazies like myself and othersaround. And most of the friends that we hadin the arts and in professions and on campusthat we had known for years, they were veryfriendly and positive about this kind of thing.They expected me . . . or they would havedone it if they could, if they had time orthought about it, they would have done it.Going down and taking part in picket lineswas the thing most good people did in thosedays. [laughter] I mean, it was a thing youdid. And you never crossed one, for god sakes,ever, you know. I still have that feeling to-day, even if I know it’s a phony picket line,like a few years ago, these damned AF of Lpicket lines, and they get out three old guysthat they hire a couple of bucks an hour togo out and picket back and forth. I’m think-ing, you know, “This is a phony picket line.It’s not worth a goddamn,” and yet I won’tgo through it.

There was a picket line in front of a bar-bershop at one time, oh, many years ago herein Reno. And many of the barbershops hadthese poor old guys from off the streets pick-eting. You know, the real members of theunion wouldn’t dirty themselves by goingdown on the picket line. [laughter]

And that always makes me very angry.You have a feeling it’s for the birds. But Iwon’t go through a picket line like that. Idon’t think I ever have. I may have inadvert-ently a couple of times in my life, but I neverhave purposely gone through a picket line.

So anyway, in those days, that was takenfor granted among our set of people, of peoplethat we knew. You just didn’t do it. And bythe way, when I come to think of it, my folks

also didn’t, because they just had this roman-tic connection with their parents and otherswho were down-trodden people.

They had to feel that it was legitimate,or they would just go right through and makenasty comments. But nevertheless, they wereaware. They’d come from immigrant back-grounds, my mother from a working classbackground. She was aware that there wassomething there, something important go-ing on, but she didn’t understand it very well,and it bothered her and was too complicated.And then, of course, with her son messingaround with this stuff, it was even more com-plicated.

At the same time, my mother, I think ina very begrudging and buried way, admiredone doing something like that, and I felt that.I knew that. At the same time, it was pain-ful, because there was a life she was living,the kind of world she was living in. So I wasfeeling much more benign about my parents.This bothered me, but I couldn’t do anythingabout it. That was that.

And then, of course, at home, Kathywasn’t against me doing these things, but itreverberated on her. Not in the highly re-fined nursery school situation she was inwhere most of the people would have beenfriendly about this, but there were others whoreacted.

The kids, now they didn’t really have toface much of this then, because it didn’t getaround that much. It wasn’t that big a deal.Nevertheless, Kathy legitimately worriedabout that in terms of the kids, and I remem-ber she and I discussing it with the kids. Butthey were very little, and we had to do it in avery special kind of a way, a careful way.

And oh, at the same time, we had rentedout a little shack in the back of our house. Itwas a little funny two story house in back, akind of a little shack with two rooms—two

685PICKET LINES

rooms with plumbing and all that—that hadbeen rented out in the past before we movedin there. We needed money, so we heard thatthere was a couple that wanted it. Well, theywere a mixed couple. Their name were theGoodwins, I think. And he was a student, avery fine guy, very bright, very smart and hiswife who was Jewish, a white Jewish woman.And they had a kid or two. So we rented itto them.

Well, the kids got their taste of racism,because some people across the street, theneighbors, had lodgers—there was a lodginghouse across the street. Erik used to play withsome of the kids in the backyard. And it wasa strange lady who ran it. She was almost likea madame who ran this house, and we got abig kick out of her. She was quite a lady. Butwhen we rented our place, she got very coldwith us, and one or two days in a row wefound eggs smashed against our door.

Well, now was the man black?

Yes, he was black, Jim Goodwin. Ithought I said it was a mixed couple.

Yes, and in those days that was unusual.However, in Berkeley it wasn’t too bad, butin that neighborhood, obviously, it was. Sothere was across the street a kind of changein attitude, and the kids felt that. The kidswere aware that something had changed.And I wish I could remember that woman’sname. They had liked her. She was verybountiful with the kids, but then she wouldmake comments, and then we would find thisstuff on our front door and all that.

So that was about the same time all thesethings were happening, and I thought a lotabout that, you know. It’s not like bringingyour kids into the revolution with you.

I mean, they’re living in another world,and you have to help them accommodate to

what you are. And it can’t be a direct thing,because they’re not living that life. I wouldtalk to them a lot. They would know the kindof ideas I had and what I was doing, but itwas a different world from them. They weregoing to school, they knew kids from fami-lies who were mostly professionals or doingother things.

And on the other hand, I don’t remem-ber them being too disturbed by it, but I wasdisturbed, and Kathy. We were worried aboutwhat it meant to them. So that was anotherstrand of things going on.

I just felt I had to be . . . I was driven atthat time. I was feeling, I suppose, strangelytorn from the waterfront and from the unions.There and a kind of nostalgia and a little guiltfor not being there. Things were happeningover there.

The screening process had gotten verysevere, a lot of my friends weren’t able to getjobs. The job situation was terrible and alsothe anti-left feeling activity had developedto the point where if you had any kind ofrecord, you were screened, and there wasnothing you could do about it. Taft-Hartleyand the Smith Act and all that were beingbrought to bear. It was the beginning of theMcCarthy period.

Oh, it started, again in the unions; ourunion was turning right, reactionary, and alot of the Left were being drummed out withthe help of a guy like Curran and the help ofthe ship owners, seeing this as an opportu-nity. And certainly the government and theTruman administration weren’t helpful onthis. In fact, just the opposite. It was gettingvery tough for anybody to get jobs, much lessa left-winger.

A lot of my friends had gone to the EastCoast, the ones who wanted to stay at seaand were going to stay at sea were trying toship out of New York because there was more


shipping. And a number of people that I hadknown on the front went out of the NMUand went into the ILWU which was a safehaven—a union that was accepting of theLeft especially those who had been long-shoremen, or had been longshoremenpart-time and now went in full-time. PatTobin, a very good friend of mine, went intothe ILWU.

So all that was churning and going onover there. It was a dismal scene, and I feltbadly about it.

Did you stay in contact with that world?

To the extent that I’d go over now andthen and see these guys I knew. But I wasn’tinvolved directly in the union itself. I mean,I had withdrawn from the union. There’snothing worse than opening up your big yapwhen you don’t pay out book and all that.Then you would be the outside commie com-ing in to cause trouble, you know.

Nevertheless, I was involved at the laborschool and various events that were takingplace. Went over at the May Day marchesand things of that kind and saw friends ofmine frequently. And a lot of them came overand visited us frequently in Berkeley.

And so I kept in touch with the seamen.In fact, I have discovered that I kept a num-ber of letters that I got from guys that I usedto ship with who were now either in NewYork or had taken jobs throughout the coun-try. I won’t name names, because I don’t knowwhat these guys are doing now, but I had veryclose connections with them. There was aguy who I had shipped with, in fact even onthe last trip that I had made, and two or threewho had been with me on Union Oil shipsand who were now trying to maintain a kindof left activity in the midst of all this ruingoing on.

Some had gone down to the Gulf. Oneguy had gone down to the Gulf to help orga-nize, primarily to bolster up the anti-Currancaucus forces. The Curran forces were ex-tremely reactionary and basically racist. Someof them were for getting rid of the foreignseamen, getting rid of the Puerto Rican sea-men by going along with the Smith Act idea,and any left-wing black was out of luck. Imean, jobs first to white seamen and all that.So some of these guys were down there orga-nizing in various ports trying to bolster theleft position in the union.

“Pat Tobin, a very good friend of mine, went intothe ILWU.” Tobin, the Washington representa-tive of the ILWU, in San Francisco in 1976.

79A GROWING FIRE STORM

OR A NUMBER of years, one or twothat I had recruited into the party orhad been partly responsible for it, saw

Right, and that they could understandwhat was going on around them at least inthe working world. And this was terriblyimportant to these guys, so their letters werereally a litany of their doubts, and they wouldapologize and say, “Oh, you’re probably go-ing to say I’m a revisionist or a phony, buthell, look what happened at the meeting thatday, and I don’t think our guys,” (meaningthe party guys,) “really understood what washappening. And they’re losing the member-ship,” and on and on.

And this critique of the Left was goingon within the Left not only by those in thetrade unions, it was going on all through theLeft in the country, because it was under siege.And when that happens, things begin to fallapart and people begin to look at what they’redoing with new eyes.

And I remember what now in a way I’ma little embarrassed about. I found myselfwriting letters jacking them up and tellingthem, you know, “There’s still the struggle.We’ve got to do this, and we’ve got to dothat.” And I wasn’t sure myself at that pointwhether I could handle anything. I mean, I

Fme as a kind of an intellectual guide, which Ireally wasn’t, but saw me as somebody whowas solid in their views about the Left andworking class struggles and the like. And sothey would write me talking about theirtroubles, the difficulties they were havingabout the party, about trade unions, aboutjobs, about their personal lives. I have a num-ber of such letters, and when I look at themnow, it’s heart-rending, because I was in noposition to advise guys like this. And when Ilook back, they were admirable. Some ofthese guys with the worst goddamn back-grounds that you can think of in this world,the trade union movement and their role inthe Left and in some cases the party had, in asense, given them a sense of identity and ofempowerment and of personal worth andvalue. They saw this as evidence to them-selves that they could do something.

Right, and engage in their society in meaningfulways.


was in the midst of all this other stuff goingon. And yet I felt very tied to these guys. Sothat went on all through this early 1950speriod.

Well, you used the word driven, but, I mean,you were also still very committed to the causesthat the Left . . . .

Oh, yes. I felt and still do that the Com-munist Party at that time with all its problemswas the major spokesman for a conscientiouspolitical orientation on the part of any think-ing people, and certainly of working people.

But it seems among your school colleagues, any-way, that you translated that more than othersinto direct action. Is that fair to say?

Well, I don’t know about more . . . .

Than your other colleagues?

Oh, I don’t know if that’s so. That wouldbe an over-simplification. I mean, I knew alot of people, and many of them were activ-ists as I was, in different ways. I knew somewho were activists in professional fields—lawyers, artists—who were active in theirfields. But it’s an entirely different world. Imean, that kind of activism is important, it’seducational, and it’s part of a politicalstruggle. At the same time, it’s not the sameas a working-class struggle.

But no, everybody I knew was in one wayor another an activist or a potential activist.And then I knew a lot of people who werejust liberal social democratic people whoseheart was in the right place and who weresupportive of left-wing policies and all that,but with limitations in their own minds aboutwhat they could do.

I’m just trying to get a picture of how you iden-tified still with the working-class and how thatdid or did not integrate for you as a student anda potential . . . .

No, I felt . . . . Oh, I see what you mean.I’ve had problems with that. I felt that I wasnow again immersed in what was thenthought of as the bourgeois world, you see.And I had a lot of feelings about that. As Isaid, wearing a shirt and tie to class or a jacket,you know, to seminars and things of that kindwas embarrassing to me. I felt these are insig-nia of another class. And when I look back,that’s terribly naive and almost embarrass-ingly so. Nevertheless, it had meaning andreality at that time.

I can remember when some of my oldshipmates would come over and visit inBerkeley, and they’d see me getting ready togo to school with my briefcase, you know,and laughing at me. “Hey Whitey! HeyWhitey! Hey Whitey, where are you head-ing? You’re gonna go up there among all thosephonies now,” and all this kind of thing. Itwas all well-meant and all that.

Nevertheless, the kind of hard-hatMarxist I had been meant that when youmove into a new economic situation in yourlife and your goals change then your identi-ties change, and one has to watch that, youknow. Where is this taking me? Oh, I wasgoing through a lot of this at that time. I stillam, but then it was crucial.

These were crucial concerns. Peopletalked about them. We had discussions aboutthem back in the party sections in the meet-ings, because there were a lot of the peopleof the middle-class in the party in the EastBay, along with trade union people. Even inthe trade union sections, questions of class-identity came up all the time in discussions—


how one watched for the effect of one’s workand one’s level of work on one’s thinking andall that sort of thing and the identity withthe working-class as against the identity withwhatever other class you’re connected with.

All of which I think are very real andimportant kinds of thought and conceptseven today. I mean, they’re diagnostic con-cepts. They’re concepts of how youunderstand where you’re at. At the sametime, they can be restrictive and they can beover-burdening; they can be wrong too.

But as I remember back then, this was avigorous, positive kind of ferment that wasgoing on. But things were changing. The Leftwas under real siege. There was a real attackgoing on all over. You could see it. I couldsee it on the waterfront, they could too. Therewere no jobs, the Left was being attacked inthe press, being attacked politically andlegally everywhere.

Did you see it intellectually, I mean on campusin content of classes?

I think on campus . . . I can’t really ana-lyze that. I think . . . well, yes, loyalty oathswere going on for academics, and a fightagainst loyalty oaths. On campus, however,there was enough of a left orientation, a pro-gressive orientation, where you never felt lost,because there were always people who sup-ported either a resistance against any attackon freedom of speech and . . . .

Well, in fact, here is a leaflet that waspassed around widely by the EmergencyCommittee of Artists, Scientists and Educa-tors. And a good many of the people I knewwere sponsors. I would have been on it had Ibeen around to sign it, but [reading] evenMark Shorer was on the list, Giacomo Patri,the artist. Let me see, Holland Roberts, whowas from Stanford University and had be-

come the head of the labor school in SanFrancisco, Robert Machesny, a painter weknew, Gina Phillipsborn, the old therapistwho was the mother of all those marvelousdaughters, Leonard Ralston, the composerthat I had known a long time, Robert Brady,the economist, and oh, god, Paul Radin wason the list. [laughter]

And what year is this?

This was 1951 or 1952. It was not dated,but I know that’s the period. And OrvilleWells. I see a number of members of the Com-munist Party, but I also see a great number ofjust progressive people, left-oriented people.

Was this specifically against the loyalty . . . ?

Mimi Kagan, the dancer, [laughter] EarlKim, the composer. What’s that?

Was this specifically protesting the loyalty oathsor . . . ?

No, these were protesting the raids onbookstores for so-called salacious literature,which included not only what was consid-ered . . . .

Who was doing the raids?

The police. That’s what we were protest-ing and the Hearst papers coming out callingfor it. The Hearst press had succeeded in ral-lying the support of various questionablegroups and individuals throughout the nationto close down bookstores for material whichis “degenerate and obscene,” as well as left-wing literature. And a clerk in a SanFrancisco bookstore was arrested for the saleof a widely circulated book, et cetera, etcetera. I mean, a lot of this was going on at


the time. So at least in the circles that Iworked and lived in, in Berkeley in the aca-demic circles, you had a friendly atmosphere.There weren’t many people who were reac-tionary right-wing who spoke up in thosedays. But they were there.

They were silent. [laughter]

Yes, the silent majority . . . the silentmajority. That’s why, you know, universitieswere considered to be the hot beds of radi-calism and communism, et cetera.

To some extent, that was partly true. Imean, they were bastions of liberal thoughts,more so than they are today, I would say. Butnevertheless, universities tend to be that way.My god, people thinking! [laughter] I mean,their job is to think!

You’re even paid to think.

They have time to think. They havetime, and they have to worry about not get-ting into ivory towers.

Did you think in terms of overtly educating yourchildren about these ideas, or was it just sup-posed to happen because of the environment theywere growing up in?

We never pressed our kids on this. I mean,we never sat them down and lectured to themor anything. However, when they raised ques-tions, they would get our kinds of answers.And, of course, the kind of people that al-ways came into our house, they heard theconversations, they heard the way theythought, the way they felt.

Sometimes they would ask questions, butI don’t ever remember them being disturbedby it. This came later when the FBI came toour house—this was much later when I was

at Evanston. And then my daughter, who wasolder—they were just little kids at this time,you see—later on when she was, you know,eleven or twelve, thirteen and heard thingsand was interested, that bothered her a lot.She felt fearful about those things, and forgood reason.

And then, of course, we talked at lengthabout it, and she certainly knew my viewsabout things and Kathy’s views. But no, wenever did anything, as I remember, in anyorganized way. Actually, the world they livedin, the people they knew all had these valuesfor the most part. Those that didn’t stuck outlike sore thumbs, and they’d see that, like thatissue with the attitude toward the couple inthe back of our house. They were irritatedand angry about that and also wondering andhurt, because they had had good relationswith these people. That was an experiencewhere they learned something, they learnedhow deep these things can be.

So anyway, these relations with old bud-dies of mine went on, and they were veryimportant to me, but also in a sense disrup-tive and agonizing, because I felt I wanted tobe part of that, and I wasn’t. And I guess itpartly drove me to do more activity, moreactivist work despite the fact I was so tied upand wanting to spend more time at schooland I had these jobs. But I felt it extremelyimportant that I do it.

It wasn’t enough to be involved in groupactivities. For instance I heard about JackLondon Square. That was when the first com-mercial intrusions to Jack London Square inOakland were pending, announced in thepaper, by a group of Oakland citizens. Thecity was going to commemorate Jack London.They were going to create a square with shopsand restaurants and all that sort of thing inthe old area around the waterfront inOakland where that First and Last Chance


Bar was that London supposedly had hungout in. And they were going to collect themoney to remodel that whole area.

Well I remember reading that they weregoing to call it Jack London Square, but therewas not one word in the press about JackLondon himself. I was still writing—I waswriting poetry and trying to write a novel. Infact, I think at that time on top of everythingelse, I had this back-burner novel that I wasworking on, and I had published two or threeshort stories in small mags. So it was still aburning issue. And suddenly here is JackLondon being ignored and treated like a com-modity, you know.

Well, all my Marxist genes began to getexcited about this. [laughter] So this was inApril of 1951, in fact. Yes, before some ofthese other things happened. And I talked itup among some of my friends and said, “Weought to do something about this, particu-larly the writers group of the arts, sciences,and professions.”

And oh, they were very interested andall that, but it wasn’t to them an urgent mat-ter. They had other things they were doingthat seemed more important. But this seemedterribly important to me. [laughter]

Jack London had been one of my heroicfigures when I was a kid. Just as some of myfeelings about problems in the class structureof the country came out of Upton Sinclair,my feelings for certain kinds of rugged indi-vidualism and seagoing and all that camefrom Jack London. He had been a socialist, aleft-wing guy. Unfortunately, his daughterand Harry Lundeberg seem to have gottentogether and become Trotskyites. [laughter]

That was the story, anyway. So I decidedI had to do something, that I wasn’t going tobother other people. And so I wrote a longleaflet entitled, “Statement Presented to theSponsoring Committee of Jack London

Square Dedication Ceremonies on MayFirst.” This was my May Day activity.

In this leaflet, I pointed out Jack London’sactual history, what an important guy he hadbeen, how he’d been this active socialist, howhe’d supported all of the highly progressiveprograms not only in this country, but he wasinternationally known as a progressive, as asocialist. He had been a worker living underthe worst conditions in Oakland, California,and had written about this and talked aboutthe corrupt and terrible conditions in whichworkers had to live. All of this is what thisguy stood for, and this certainly should bepart of this commemoration, a recognitionof who he was, not just using his name, butwho he was.

And I remember there were all these oldOakland matrons and old guys in their tiesand their business suits. And there must havebeen around fifty people all out for kind of aspring outing. There was a little wooden plat-form, and the mayor was speaking and allthat.

And I had got up and said, “I would liketo say a few words.”

“Well, we don’t have your name; you’renot on the agenda. We don’t have time.”

I said, “Just a few words.” And I pushedmy way in and to the mike, and they weren’tused to this kind of thing, and I was. [laugh-ter] And I just said, “I have here a statementon behalf of Jack London, a man who I havegreat admiration for. Who was a writer and asocialist and a worker in this area. And I amgoing to be passing this out to anybody whois interested, and I would thank you to giveit some attention and to try to give JackLondon his due, especially if you’re going tocommercialize him,” you know.

And I felt so good. These are the kind ofthings that kept me from being really in the


dumps in this period. And I went on andhanded out . . . .

Particularly being on May 1.

On May 1, because there was the MayDay march going on in San Francisco that Icouldn’t get to, so I did this instead.

I must have had 200 copies of this, andeverybody wanted one. I gave it to allthese . . . there must have been, oh, fifty toone hundred onlookers, and they had set upchairs, and all. They mostly were uppermiddle-class Oakland people. Some of themvery brusquely took it, you know, and othersthrew them on the ground. [laughter] Youknow, that kind of thing . . . the usual sortof thing.

And I stayed there for about an hourwhile these ceremonies were going on, pass-ing it out to passers-by, just like, again, déjàvu, my grandfather. [laughter] And I passedout about 200 altogether, to people as theywere going by.

Well, this got into the press, and I wasvery proud of that. I put the name of theorganization, but I didn’t put my name, be-cause I didn’t want to be a grandstander. Thatwasn’t acceptable—the Left, you sharedthings. And then the People’s World printedthe whole thing the next day.

So I felt, well, even one person can dosomething, as part of the views that we had.Sometimes it only takes one, you know. Justdo it. And I felt I had done something forJack London and my own principles. [laugh-ter] So that was going on on top of everythingelse.

And this is the same period Robeson hadbeen beaten . . . not been beaten up but hav-ing a hell of a time getting in and out ofPeekskill . . . the Peekskill festival and riot.Do you remember that? Outside of New York?

No.

Oh, a big gathering. This was a sort of apre . . . . What was the late 1960s event? Therock and roll . . . .

Oh, Woodstock.

Woodstock. This was pre-Woodstock.This was Peekskill, where there had been aconcert you know, left-wing labor songs.There were masses of people. On the EastCoast, they could really get masses of peopleon. And Robeson had been invited. Robesonby this time had begun to be vilified by thepress as a guy who had gone to Russia andwas a communist.

And by the way, he was not. He wasfriendly to . . . he even had a close friendwho was one of the leaders of the party,Benjamin Davis, and he was very friendlywith many people who were communists, buthe himself was not. He was very friendlyabout the Soviet Union, he was angry abouta lot of things going on in this country, andboy, did he get negative press.

In fact, I would say, from the period ofthe late 1950s, Robeson had been so effec-tively vilified by the Right in this countrythat you could never hear his voice on theradio. You never heard Robeson’s songs.Before that in the 1930s and 1940s, youwould hear Robeson, his little records werearound.

He was blacklisted. He was one of theearliest performers to be blacklisted. And it’sonly recently, just in the last couple of yearsor so, you begin to hear Robeson’s stuff com-ing back, and evaluations of his work. Everynow and then you’d hear something about itin the last twenty years or so, on KPFA inBerkeley, these small left-wing kinds of sta-tions. But never, on a major broadcast, did


you hear Robeson’s music that I can remem-ber. So that was going on. And here wasRobeson, a guy that I had tremendous admi-ration for. I had seen him, as I had mentionedearlier, on the waterfront, and he sang to thegroups and . . . .

Was the Korean War . . . ? Is this brewing?

Korean War was just beginning to brew.I don’t know the dates now. Yes, it was aboutto happen. Gulf of Tonkin and . . . . I don’tknow. I have to check.

All this was going on. Penny, isn’t thisenough? [laughter] I mean, Julius and EthelRosenberg had been indicted.

Yes. Oh, that’s right.

And I forget when they were killed; theywere sentenced to death. And of course a lotof us . . . most progressives, not just partymembers, were terribly concerned about that.It looked like a set-up deal. Regardless of whatwas really going on, the kinds of evidenceand the kinds of . . . oh gosh, of lynchingattitudes that there was at this time, I mean,there was a real lynching mentality. The pressalmost unanimously had them convictedeven before there was any kind of trial oranything of the sort. And, of course, the Lefttook their side.

I have no idea to this day—I think thereis some literature available—but I have noidea what their role was and what they werereally . . . . They were accused, of course, ofselling secrets, taking or giving militarysecrets to the Soviet Union.

But it was like the Hiss case. There hasbeen so much controversy, I don’t know whattheir real role was. They denied it, of course,and there seemed to have been good reasonto defend them on this basis. But anyway,

they were whisked off and killed, and thiswas a great shock.

All these things were coming on at once,and it was very depressing and very deeplyunsettling to, I think, anybody with a pro-gressive orientation. It looked like fascism.

And you had just gone through the war.

And by the way, the accusations, thecharges of fascism that were going on seemedvery real to me and many others. I mean, thiswas like fascism. And, of course, as McCarthybegan to be a major spokesman for the Right,I think some of us were convinced that thiswas a real expression of a deep fascist orien-tation in American life. And by the way,there is a very good reason to see real fascistsinvolved in this, but I think we might haveoverstated it ourselves in our own mind.Nevertheless, when I look back, there wasevery reason to feel this way. We’d just comeout of a war against fascism, and then we havethis kind of activity in this country.

Well, you made the point before that so much ofour overseas aid money was going to fascists.

Japan and Germany and to . . .

Well, Greece.

. . . right-wing dictatorships and reallyreactionary governments. We were trying toget their support, and we felt we could havea liaison with them, because it was . . . oh, itwas just terrible. All this was a reality.

At the same time, what was happeningto a lot of us was an attack upon our patrio-tism and the charge that we were membersof organizations that were out to overthrowthe United States government by force andviolence. Loyalty oaths were being applied


to make us confirm yes or no on these things.We were said to be anti-American and pro-Soviet, which was infuriating, because thatisn’t the way it was. There may have beenmembers of the Communist Party or otherparties in this country that felt that way, butI didn’t know any of them. The people I knewwere Americans and felt like Americans. Asfor the question of force and violence, thatemerged from early Bolshevik literature,Lenin and others, about how it was neces-sary at certain stages in human developmentfor there to be a forceful overthrow of exist-ing governments and all that. Well evenLincoln had said that, you know. [laughter]But we didn’t see that as happening in theUnited States. We saw a slow and consistentdevelopment and press towards socialism,towards more socialist oriented economy andgovernment, which I still believe in.

Whatever socialism means in the thou-sands of interpretations one can give to it,there are certain fundamental underlyingprinciples that I am for and have to do withthe restriction on unrestricted gain, greed,and accumulation, and a more equitable dis-tribution of wealth. My god, if that’s socialistor communist I’m for it, and I still am andprobably will always be.

Then the idea of struggle in the party, thatthere must be a constant struggle for classinterests. It’s the class aspect that got thenegative reaction, of course, exploiting classdifferences. The party was accused also ofexacerbating and creating racial disagree-ments. It was the party that was responsiblefor the way blacks felt about whites. The partycreated that. And you see, the Left wasaccused of causing the very things the sys-tem had produced.

Yes, the growing fire storm in the early1950s that I see as the heating up of whatbecame the McCarthy period in the next few

years. The charges made against the Left andparticularly the Communist Party weredeeply disturbing and made me and a lot ofpeople I knew very angry. It was insulting thatwe were out to wage a war against theAmerican government and to overthrow itby force and violence.

That metaphor of “force and violence”kept reemerging over and over again andbecame the rallying cry of the far Right andthe Hearst press. Every indication that therewere members of the Communist Party activein unions or in various organizations or inliterature was linked to the notion of over-throw of the government. And it was aneffective thing. You know, American peoplearen’t particularly interested in or certainlynot ready to accept the possibility of forcefuloverthrow of their government.

And that was not the way communiststhat I knew thought about change, or whatwas termed the “struggle for socialism.” In theAmerican scene our view was that by theactive work of an intellectual vanguard andthe working-class within the entire socialsystem, that little by little there would be theemergence of a movement that would be suf-ficient to have an answer to the capitalistcontrol of all the instruments of society as itthen and now exists. And it was seen as aslow, lengthy, and arduous process.

I guess in the minds of some, as I’vealready said, there was the idea that theremust be a revolution in the classical sense. Inever held that. Nobody that I knew was sonaive as to think in those terms. It was theidea of slow and arduous pressure toward thegoal of socialization.

The idea of communism was a long-range, idealistic view coming out of theseventeenth and eighteenth century social-ist thought. It was an idealistic goal and hadlittle to do with the day-to-day struggles to


alter, to improve conditions, to move towardmore equitable concepts and values inAmerican life. That was the thing that wewere working for if we thought at all in thosekinds of big terms. Mostly it was day-to-daywages, conditions, improving the relationsbetween blacks and whites and other minori-ties, education, creating a new set of valuesthat would bring about social change. Andthis constant harassing propaganda that camefrom the Right about overthrow of the gov-ernment by force and violence was actuallyconcretized in the kind of attacks that werebeing made directly on left-wingers.

There was a senate investigating commit-tee on education in the California legislaturein 1951 that held a series of highly toutedhearings. People from all walks of life: peoplelike Holland Roberts, out of Stanford whowas heading up the California Labor School;any number of teachers, professors, labor lead-ers, ordinary working people considered tobe left-wing were called before this commit-tee. The committee’s main thrust was to findout why there was opposition—not only findout why, but to suppress opposition to thecoming loyalty oaths.

The loyalty oaths were already being putin effect in various industries; certainly onthe waterfront with the screening procedures.At universities there was the beginning of areal organized resistance to the loyalty oaths.But wherever there was resistance to the loy-alty oaths, there were these hearings andthese attacks.

And behind it all were the constant state-ments, “Do you believe in the forcefuloverthrow of the government of the UnitedStates?” If you said no, and then were foundto be connected in some remote way ordirectly with the Communist Party, you werethen liable of the charge of perjury, because

everybody knew the Communist Party wasseeking the overthrow of the government byforce and violence. It was a catch-22 situa-tion, and people were deeply disturbed,people that I knew. Well, many Americanswere, of course. So that was going on in 1951.

The proceedings of that committee werepublished in 1952. The names of literallyhundreds of people that were active in tradeunions, in professional organizations, univer-sities, and various schools throughoutCalifornia were on the list. The effect was,these were people with dangerous thoughts.

So this was a published list?

Oh, yes, yes. It was published in 1952.[reading] “The proceedings of the Extraordi-nary Sessions of the California Legislature in1951,” while Goodwin Knight was presidentof the senate, and Harold Powers . . . .

It was inquisition. And when one readsthis today, you can hardly believe it. Thequestions that were asked and the harassmentand the threatening of witnesses was verymuch what came to be the main image thatwe have of the McCarthy hearings later in1953, 1954, and 1955.

So it was a heady time. And aside fromall the other things that I and others weredoing, this was the constant concern.

I don’t think I, personally, was confrontedwith the problem of loyalty oaths at that time.I had always refused to sign them; lost acouple of jobs and positions because of that.But I’m trying to think whether at the uni-versity we as graduate students or whetherour professors were forced to face that deci-sion at that time. I’m not sure. I know therewas a great deal of resistance, a great deal ofconcern around the university and a deepanger about it.


One of the things that you had raised before thatwe didn’t explore was the issue of how that polar-ization, how that identity forced on the Left, kindof denied that left-wing people were patriots; thatdefined patriotism explicitly in right . . . .

Oh, yes. Patriotism was under that pro-paganda umbrella. Patriotism was a totalagreement with and subservience to any ofthe positions taken by the American govern-ment, anywhere in the world, under anyconditions. If you were a critic, you had tobe extremely careful and state your casewithin the boundaries by constantly sayingthat on the other hand, our country and ournation is superior throughout the world andthat we have a right to do what we are doing.Any suggestion that there was any othercountry that has some element in its systemthat we should be looking at—for example,even Sweden or [laughter] the Scandinaviancountries, certainly any of the countries thatwere going through social change in LatinAmerica or elsewhere—to suggest that anyof those movements or any of those ideasmight be positive and should be acceptedwithin the United States was unpatriotic. It’svery hard to explain how overpowering thiswas. The press was constantly pushing it, sothat the Left felt under siege, felt there wasdanger.

Now, that was the point at which therewas the movement going on within the farLeft, within the party, to go underground.After all, six or seven of its leaders had beenindicted, some had gone into hiding, andthere was the feeling among some people, akind of paranoid panic that the moment hadcome for entrenchment, that now is the timeto hold what we have and go underground.

Well, I opposed this; a number of otherpeople I knew opposed it. There were lots of

discussions within party circles about it—“Should we or shouldn’t we?” or “How arewe going to do it? What’s going to be the pro-cedure?” But it went on, and on nevertheless.It became . . . .

Here is where I began to doubt the effec-tiveness of what the party was proclaimingas democratic centralism. It really becamesomething from the top. The concerns go-ing on in the top party leadership—andrightly so, because they were under attack andbeing arrested—were being transmitted downthe line, as the necessity for the local leader-ship to begin to go underground. Well, this Iguess was in 1951 or 1952. I began to havedeep doubts about the organization at thattime—not about principles, but about orga-nizational planning and who was decidingthese things and how it was going to hap-pen.

I don’t want to name names, but I wasworking with three or four what I consideredto be very able trade union people who werenow in the Communist Party section in theEast Bay. And one of them I had great admi-ration for was a Portuguese guy who had beena fisherman and was now a local party func-tionary, and very clear, very sharp, very direct,day-to-day activity, and a good organizer. AndI remember discussions with him about howhe was going to go underground and whatdid this mean?

We had numbers of discussions about this.And there was a period in which peoplestarted doing it, because it was considered tobe an order from the central committee andall that sort of thing. And I can rememberfor about a year I tried very hard to go alongwith this. I wasn’t somebody who had to gounderground, excepting I had to work withpeople who were underground. And therewere three or four party functionaries who


were important section leaders or people whowere involved in larger organizations for thecounties and states.

And the cloak-and-dagger stuff thatbegan to come up—I mean, the planningwas . . . in my view it was ridiculous. I wasamong those who felt people in the party hadto say that they were, had to speak openly,had to take positions, so that people couldsee what our stand was. And if they werearrested, well, then that’s it! It wasn’t goingto wound the party to such a degree that itcouldn’t function, because it wasn’t function-ing anyway. I mean, already a job had beendone on it. Now is the time to proclaim, tostate what you thought, and to be open.

And that position didn’t prevail, really. Imean, I think most of the people I knew feltthis. Certainly the people who had been onthe waterfront felt very strongly that, theyshould be open communists, and if they’regoing to go down, they’re going to go downsaying what they believed openly, and beingwhat they were.

I have never denied that I was a commu-nist anywhere. If I’d been confronted with aloyalty oath that I had to sign, I would haveput it on it, “Yes, I have been [a communist]and I am, but I sign this under protest I dis-agree with it.” I never did that, but I wasprepared to do that if I was confronted withit. A few I refused to sign and took the con-sequences.

And so I can remember a period of timein which I felt more and more dismayed in asense. Here I was studying, going to school,involved in two or three labor activities; Ihad a family, and I had a number friends ondifferent levels. And when I come to thinkof it, I don’t know how one does it. I wasn’talone. I knew people who had much moredifficult times than I did and were much more

involved and much more effective, muchmore meaningful.

And I was small fry. I was never more thanan active trade unionist party member.Nevertheless, I found myself being draggedinto this business of having to take forty min-utes to get to somebody’s house, to go aroundin circles in my car to see that I wasn’t fol-lowed, to stop someplace.

It was so ridiculous. I mean, I felt that wewere being screwy, that it was nutty. And thenthere were two or three people that I met;one of them I thought was a real clod. Ithought, “What is this guy underground for?”[laughter] “He’s totally useless.”

I mean, he was sitting in a little room andgetting fat, and people were bringing himfood and all that sort of thing. He seemed tohave lost contact with almost everything thatwas going on. And I had to bring him mes-sages, and then he sent messages out. Andmy view was that, “If this is the way we’refunctioning, and this is supposed to be some-thing that goes on in the future, we’re crazy.This is not going to work.” And, of course, itdidn’t. And so much of it was a caricature ofan historic moment.

I understand what happens to peopleunder those conditions, that there was a viewwithin the party, and lord knows where itcame from originally. I don’t think it was adirective from the Soviet Union, [laughter]and I don’t think it came from any of theEuropean parties, but maybe because of theattacks upon the leadership of party, it wasthought this was the time to entrench. Well,in my view that was a wrong course. It was asilly thing to do. And that few months whenI was involved in it, and I was going hereand there on top of everything else, trying tobe a really dedicated person, doing the thingsaccording to directives and making sure that


I wasn’t followed . . . my view now is, I’ll betthat there were informers within the partysystem, within the leadership even, that kneweverything that was going on. [laughter] Andhere we were playing this cloak-and-daggergame. I felt silly and embarrassed about that.That was an embarrassing development.

It was demeaning. Now, when I say that,I’m quite aware that there were people whowere within the party then and who may benow looking back, who would look upon myview here as revisionist, as bourgeois, and allthat sort of thing. I don’t care, because I thinkthe people that I knew—and I’m not talkingabout people in the professions or in themiddle class, I’m talking about workingpeople I knew—they were really embarrassedby this. It went against the grain; it was notour view of how an American dissident be-haved; within our system you behaveddifferently.

And this view wasn’t so different fromthe way the Left had behaved in other coun-tries, in European countries, facing head-onwhat happened. In fact, some of those peoplewere heroic figures in our left-wing tradition.Not hiding out.

There are conditions, some situations,where that might be meaningful, but I don’tthink that that was the time in Americanlife to do it. It was a wrong course. It wasgoing to the trenches before the war hadstarted. People weren’t being killed; a fewwere being jailed, but they were able to domore from jail [laughter] and to say more andto be more effective than had they beenunderground.

So you feel, also, there really wasn’t the oppor-tunity anymore within the party for grassrootparty members on the local level to structure theconduct of their own business? They were tak-

ing orders from the top, and people were goingunderground, even though there was a local . . . .

I think there was an element of that.There was a lot of talk about democratic cen-tralism and decisions being made from thebottom, but it wasn’t happening in the areawhere I was working. It wasn’t happening thatway. The excuse would be, if one brought itup, that this was a crucial time, that certainkinds of things had to be short-circuited. Itwas a crisis. We had to do it. But I andothers . . . .

So there wasn’t the leadership representing this“Let’s stay above ground”?

There was a leadership, but it was under-ground, at least the effective leadership. AndI thought that at least on the local level itwas ridiculous, because not only that leader-ship, but those cadres, the clubs on the locallevel, had to be released to talk freely and toact out program. By 1953 the whole party wasin a shambles of argument, of charges andcountercharges, and factionalism of all sorts.People were forming their own groups.

And it was an unnecessary thing. Theorganization could have been kept muchmore solid had things been open and peoplehad something very direct to support and topoint to. Anyway, this friend, this one guy Ihad a lot of admiration for who had been alocal functionary for some time, there was akind of understanding between us. He wasvery clear on all of this. He said, “You know,this is not going to get us anywhere. Thisshows that this phase is coming to an end.We are reaching a point where somethingentirely new has to emerge.”

I felt that too, dialectically speaking, theparty as we knew it had had its day. Now,


when I say this, I want to clarify that I stillthink that it had done an enormously posi-tive job, and it was a tragedy to see thebreakup of this far-left kind of leadership andthinking. And I felt very pessimistic, every-one that I knew did. It was a period ofpessimism.

Because there was so much to be done,and there was so much positive work thatcould still be done, we found ourselves fall-ing apart into little groups. The leadershipwas in essence gone. There was an East Coastleadership that was still making proclama-tions, and the organs of the party were stillcoming out. But it had become empty. Thebase was crumbling, wasn’t there.

And it was hard to be pessimistic. It washard to look upon it in this way. Even talk-ing about it now, I find it hard, because whenI say it need not have been that way, that’salso stupid, because things are what they are,and things take place because of forces thatare much too complicated for any of us todeal with or to cope with. Nevertheless, itwas a sad thing.

And so while that was going on, I workedout some of my feelings about it. I wrote acouple of articles. I wrote one for the People’sWorld. I was trying to find ways to be posi-tive, and I wrote an article on Samuel Green,who was a minister in the 1850s. He was partof the underground railroad in Massachusetts,and his home had been a place where peoplestopped over on their way to Canada, and hehad a son in Canada. It was about the era ofHarriet Tubman and all those great blackabolitionist persons who were involved in theunderground railroad.

By the way, the police had a campaign ofraiding bookstores in San Francisco, takingout texts that were thought to be left-wing,dangerous texts. They had been arrestingbookstore clerks and sometimes closing book-

stores. Along with that, pornography. I mean,pornography and left-wing literature andcommunism were all in a basket. [laughter]They were all equally anti-American; theywere all dangerous.

And so I wrote this article, while this wasgoing on, thinking, you know, here is anexample back in the 1850s of the same thinghappening. Samuel Green’s house was raided,and what did they find? They found a map ofCanada, where unfortunately he had markedthe routes, and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.And that became part of the trial against him.He had a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and hehad a map of Canada. And this was truly dan-gerous.

This was in Cambridge, Massachusetts,of all places, in the mid-1850s. And in thefirst trial he was acquitted. A good, liberalMassachusetts jury, I guess, must have doneit. I don’t remember how the jury was actu-ally composed, but he was finally acquitted,though it was said that he did have this scur-rilous literature there. But, after all, he didhave a right, and they couldn’t prove theunderground railroad aspect. It looked suspi-cious, but this was not enough evidence totry him or to sentence him. So he wasacquitted.

Immediately, he was slapped with anothercharge. A case was made against him for sala-cious literature, Uncle Tom’s Cabin! He hadno right to have that, and so he was indeed aperson who had helped slaves get through,the property of slave owners in the South, etcetera. He was convicted and sentenced toten years. He went to jail and wasn’t releaseduntil the Union forces came through and re-leased him. I forget where he was in jail inthe South, but he was finally released.

But to me that was a powerful story. Infact, I think I even wrote a preliminary paperfor Carter’s course in English on this, but I


changed it and developed it for the People’sWorld, making the connection with raids onbookstores and with the conditions that wewere in.

That made me feel better, doing that.And also this Committee for Artists, Scien-tists, and Professionals put out petitions andleaflets opposing these raids. You know, every-body was trying to do their own thing. Itwas . . . .

Now, is this committee a committee of the partyor a committee of the school?

No, although this would have been calleda front organization, you see. There werecommunists in it, and yet there were a lot of

people who weren’t. I mean, there was a longlist. As I mentioned, Paul Radin was on it,and who else? Holland Roberts, and a numberof people who certainly weren’t communists,but they were progressives. And they weren’tanti-communist; they just weren’t commu-nists. So, it was what the Right would call acommunist-front organization.

And that’s ridiculous because that isn’twhat it was. It was an organization for peoplewho were progressives and who didn’t neces-sarily ever think of becoming communists orwanting to be—might even be opposed. Butthey did have certain values and principlesin common. So that organization put outmany leaflets and petitions.

80MAKING THE GRADE

HAT A YEAR! At the sametime—I guess I was trying todefine my own way of thinking—

friend went on to be a very sound composerat a large university in the East and spentmost of his life doing that, wrote innumer-able songs; a very creative guy, and veryprogressive in his thinking, very much a partof the left-wing political scene. Yet his musicwas referred to by this editor, as I remember,as “formalistic decadence,” “a menace ofcacophony, barbaric noises,” and on and onand on, without once describing the musicas music or giving any kind of backgroundabout it or anything—merely denouncing it.At the same concert there was some stan-dard music, nineteenth-century music, whichhe referred to as “richly endowed with art,with earful melody, considerable warmth anda somewhat tragic cast, and powerful, many-hued,” and on and on.

I felt this was the most sickening kind ofthing that I had read locally, especially withregard to somebody whom I admired person-ally and who I felt deserved at least someconsideration. So I sat down and wrote a longdiatribe to the editor, saying, you know,“What kind of critique is this? What kind ofa Marxist are you? Are you at all aware of

WI was doing an enormous amount of readingin anthropology. I was devouring it like ahungry man. I felt, “This is what I’ve beenlooking for.” So I was doing a great deal ofreading in addition to working my job. I wasdeeply involved in that, and yet all theseother things were going on.

A friend of mine, a composer, had had aconcert in San Francisco, along with a num-ber of colleagues who were composers at theuniversity. Their music at that time was veryavant-garde, sort of Schoenbergian twelve-tone material.1 I thought they were just greatand represented an experimental, new kindof music. They gave this concert under theauspices of some progressive organizations. Iforget who actually sponsored it.

But the next day it was denounced in thePeople’s World. That was our paper. It wasdenounced as “bourgeois idealism,” a “caco-phony of sound.” To me this article by thereview editor of the paper was so outrageousI could hardly believe it. By the way, my

warren d’azevedo: by dead reckoning

Documents