Lorain Again, West Coast

It was a fair drive from Flint to Lorain under treacherous wintry road conditions, which I reached in the late evening hours and bunked on a couch in Joe and Flossie Dougher’s living room. The next day I found a small furnished apartment in downtown Lorain. I went on and plopped an application form at National Tube again and was rehired with no hitches. There were always large labor turnovers at the steel mills in that early postwar period so getting work was no problem. I requested and got back into the open hearths. I hooked up with my Lorain comrades like Saul and Betsy, the George Edwards family and Reuel Stanfield over the next few days and it was like old times again.

There had been one major change in USW Local 1104. Since the previous summer there had been local union elections and President Paul Schremp and his Murrayite slate had been returned to office. The only exception was the office of Secretary-Treasurer where the incumbent, the only remaining CP-aligned elected officer, had been dumped in favor of a conservative Catholic newcomer who was part of the Phil Murray political machine. The Red witch hunt of the post-Taft-Hartley era had taken an important scalp. I don’t recall whether George Edwards had retained his post as editor of the Lorain Labor Leader since I assumed it was an appointed job.

Fr. Charles O. Rice.

The Catholic Church which was strongly anti-communist had organized the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), whose mission it was to drive Communists out of the labor movement wherever they operated. ACTU was headed by the Rev. Charles Owen Rice of Pittsburgh, (1908–2005) which was a major center of the steel industry. So he was a close ally of Phil Murray’s in that campaign in the Steelworkers Union. I don’t know if ACTU had a Lorain chapter although no one ever mentioned it in the CP branch. But anti-communism wasn’t Rice’s only cause.

Steve Nelson

He was a champion of the civil rights movement and a strong supporter of Martin Luther King, which coincided with Church policy. Later Rice became a strong activist opponent of the Vietnam War and his obsessive anti-Red attitudes abated somewhat. He befriended and apologized to one-time CP leader Steve Nelson for his earlier strident attacks on him. I suspect this came about after Nelson quit the CP over the Krushschev Revelations and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. But in 1948–’49 with his campaigns on union lefties Rice was literally a “holy terror.” ACTU eventually passed out of existence as a relic of the Cold War period.

Life went on as usual with us in Lorain in the Partry branch: union meetings of #1104, social get-togethers, political discussions. trying to get subs for the Ohio Sunday Worker, weekend supplement to the Daily Worker in New York. I did plenty of beer drinking around pay days at the mill. I didn’t have Jimmy around to curb my growing addiction to the pernicious disease of alcoholism. The Party’s new policy of having its college dropout members to seek factory work to proselytize for the cause brought another recruit to Lorain. He was a former college student from Cincinnati I’ll call Cincy who also got hired at National Tube. One annoying aspect was that frequently these industrial missionaries were called “colonizers” within the Party. My dear comrade Betsy especially liked the term. To me this was an insult, to have all these “intellectuals” coming to teach these working class “dumbos” the facts of political life. As if these unwashed proletarians had nothing to teach the “colonizers.” Yet this was essentially the dictum of V. I. Lenin that “the working class can only attain trade union consciousness by themselves but an educated Bolshevik cadre is necssary to lead them to revolution over the exploiting class.” Talk about arrogance! Cincy was a good-natured happy-go-lucky chap who savored of the sauce as much as I did. He didn’t seem to take his party commitment all that seriously, skipped work a lot, as well as Branch meetings sleeping off hangovers. I believe he left Lorain not long after I did early the next summer.

LEAFLETING AT THE MILL GATES

The CP leafleted the busiest entry gates at National Tube periodically usual at shift change time between the swing and graveyard shifts. Only it was never the local people who did the leafletting for personal security reasons, but our comrades from Cleveland who were unknown in Lorain. But it was up most often for local Party activists to write and mimeograph the leaflets to be distributed. Saul, Betsy and I undertook the task once in what seemed as hush, hush as the Partisan underground operations in Nazi-occupied Europe. Saul and Betsy had an older couple of Wallaceite fellow traveler friends who lived on a farm a few miles from Lorain. They had the Lorain Party’s mimeograph stored in a spare room. One evening we drove out there in my car, with cut stencil and several reams of mimeo paper for our printing stock. Saul insisted we wear rubber gloves so we wouldn’t get our fingerprints on any of the leaflets. Paranoid? At the same time it felt romantic, like an anti-fascist underground in Europe except we had no Gestapo prowling around the Ohio countryside. We got the job done and later the Clevelanders did the mill gate distribution.

The CP wasn’t the only Left group that did mill gate pamphleting at Lorain. There was a left socialist group made up in good part of Akron tire plant production workers calling it the United Labor Party. I saw them leaflet at Lorain a couple of times. The local CP considered them a “bunch of Trotskyites,” the Stalinists’ prime enemy. Not true. I learned much later that it was an indigenous working class rank and file socialist group with members in the Akron and Youngstown areas. unaffiliated with any known national organization. It had initially been founded by some ex-Trotskyists and Wobblies around the Akron area rubber and steel industries. I remember a couple of ULP members had shown up at one of our Lorain Progressive Party meetings during the Wallace campaign the previous summer. They had seemed a decent pair who didn’t seem to be an enemy to me as I was not a hide-bound sectarian even then.

PURGE OF ANNA LOUISE STRONG’S BOOKS

Anna Louise Strong (1885–1970) was a Seattle-born CP fellow traveler who had written numerous books on the Soviet Union which she had visited often and more recently on the emergence of Communist power in China. The latter include a book called Tomorrow’s China (1948) which could be bought at the Cleveland CP headquarters book store. Strong was one of those starry-eyed liberal or progressive sympathizers who was a perennial sucker for a Stalinist left hook during those years (like I was during the late 1940s). The Worker was always full of praise for her writing. Until 1949 when she was arrested for espionage in Moscow on some obscure charge. She managed to exit the USSR and lived the remainder of her life in China which she saw through the same rose-colored glasses as she had the Soviets. I went to visit CP headquarters in Cleveland to browse and saw this and any other work she had written gone from its book shelves. Strong had become a non-person in the eyes of the Party as Moscow had barked and the knee-jerk US affiliate saw it was time to banish her from mind and sight forever. I never had read any of her books and don’t regret it as they were the propaganda hackwork of a perennially brainwashed true believer. Although I was a bit puzzled at the time.

PSEUDO-SCIENTIST TROFIM LYSENKO

Ukranian-born agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1896–19776) made a sensational claim in a 1948 speech in which he denounced the concept of Mendelian genetics as a product of Western reaction and propounded his own theory of environmentally induced genetic change that had the official approval of Stalin which cost hundreds of Russian scientists their jobs and sent many to the gulags if they did not capitulate and bow and scrape before this officially sanctioned position, It imposed ideology before facts and even violated Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I don’t want to take the space to develop this debate further and suggest readers follow it in Google and Wikipedia. After Stalin’s death Lysenko’s

Andrei Zakhariov

credibility was exposed and scientific sanity has returned. Late Nobel prize winning Russian physicist and political dissident Andrei Zakharov had this to say about the scandal in 1964: “He (Lysenko) is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views for adventurism or the degradation of learning, firing and even death of many genuine scientists.”

At least Saul, Joe and I bought copies of the pamphlet that included Lysenko’s diatribe and theories. The three of us met at the Doughers’ apartment and discussed it. Saul with his strong background in biological sciences at Oberlin, used his keen mind to analyze Lysenko’s statement for us without praising or condemning it, as I remember. The latter would have caused him trouble if he had done so, as Lysenko’s arguments were now the CP’s official line, handed down from its Kremlin masters. Fred was aware of Party discipline on these matters. Joe Dougher again, who had no academic background in the sciences, of course fulsomely praised it at the time in knee-jerk style as holy writ. I said very little for similar reasons to keep my nose clean. I was well aware of Mendelian genetics as I had studied it in biology class at Michigan State. I had seen it as pure objective science and the Stalinist ideological purgatory that was now its lot bothered me. I still shake my head at Lysenko’s genuflection to his masters in his concluding two sentences of the pamphlet issued by the CP’s International Publishers company which I still have.: “Long live the party of Lenin and Stalin which discovered Michurin* for the world and created all the conditions for the progress of advanced materialist biology in our country.“Glory to the great friend and protagonist of science, our leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin!” (Italics in original text.) This a great scientist? What fools we were then!

INTERNATIONAL WORKERS ORDER (IWO)

Probably one of the most successful CP fronts ever, was the International Workers Order (IWO), a workers fraternal benefit insurance association founded in 1929 appealing to European foreign language groups which provided inexpensive health and life insurance to its members. At its peak around WWII it had about 200,000 members and had an English language group as well as thirteen other immigrant language groups (including a Finnish-American affiliate.) It emerged in a bitter split from a similar Jewish social democratic organization Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) during the 1920s which still exists.  IWO also supported a number of foreign language newspapers, including the Finnish Työmies (Workingman) published in Superior, WI, and Eteenpäin (Forward) in Yonkers, NY. I was told by a veteran Communist that Lorain had thousands of IWO members representing a number of its many ethnic groups, most of their male members working at the steel mill. One of the ironies of the IWO that few of its rank and file members belonged to the CP, but were primarily interested in its valuable insurance coverage. But the national leadership was primarily Party members. So with the Cold War intensifying, the IWO became a target of FBI pressures, being placed on the US Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations in 1947.

During the spring of 1949 I was given an assignment of going door to door with a contact list of its Lorain Italian language lodge’s members to solicit subscriptions for the Ohio Sunday Worker, published in New York. I’ve always been a lousy salesman and it would have been a difficult task at best, but it turned out disastrously. I was well dressed and courteous but at every door I approached the occupants were scared of me, probably thinking I worked for the FBI. So I got exactly nowhere and was excused from pursuing it further after a half-dozen attempts. Some years ago I had a conversation with the late Leo Utter, then a Seattle Finnish community activist who was born a Red Diaper Baby to a pro-CP family in that city. He said that during this same post-war period every regional subscriber of the Finnish language then pro-Soviet newspaper Työmies had been visited and intimidated by the FBI. I’m sure the same harassment was taking place in Lorain at the very time I was trying to sell these subscriptions. The IWO was disbanded by the Feds in 1954 as the witch hunt and McCarthyism peaked.

LABOR YOUTH LEAGUE FOUNDED

The CP’s historic youth organization the Young Communist League (YCL) was disbanded in 1944 and renamed a more euphemistic American Youth for Democracy (AYD) when under the leadership of then effective Party head Earl Browder (1891–1973) had the CP-USA’s name changed to the Communist Political Association to function more as a pressure group than a political party. Reason was that Browder and his organization’s National Committee majority believed the wartime alliance between the USA and Soviet Union to defeat Naziism and Fascism would continue into the postwar period and capitalism and communism could live together peacefully in the world rather than as antagonists. “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism,” Browder had said. But that was not to be. FDR had died and the US-USSR relationship quickly became antagonistic, marking the beginnings of the Cold War. USA had its own ideas of expanding its capitalist empire throughout the world and the USSR had its own state capitalist expansionist interests to do likewise. The Soviets sent a message to its American political subordinate through French deputy Jacques Duclos that the wartime idyll was over, that the reality of class struggle took first priority. So in 1946 through Moscow’s arm-twisting, Browder was expelled and CP-USA was reinstated in name. The name AYD also vanished from the books but nothing replaced it on the youth scene. So young Communists worked inside the new Progressive Party’s youth organization during 1948 and into 1949.

A call was issued through the Party that an organizing conference of a new national youth group to be called the Labor Youth League would be formed at a Chicago Conference during the Spring of 1949. It was to be technically independent of the CP and the broader name would make it more attractive for Left youth outside the Party circles to join. But kid you not, the ultimate shots called would conform to the Party’s line. So Lorain was invited to send young delegates. Cincy appeared disinterested, so our delegation turned out to be Saul, Betsy and me. Off we took for Chicago in my Chevy for a long weekend conference. We were housed in a Hyde Park CP members’ flat and commuted daily to a downtown meeting hall through streets passing the acrid-smelling stockyards of Chicago’s South Side. Several hundred young women and men showed up for the conference. The only face I recognized was that of Molly Lieber of Chicago, my old instructor from the Party school in Detroit during the past January. Outside of general meeting sessions there were panels and high sounding resolutions were discussed and passed as well as a statement of principles. Our conference was called “historic” and was lauded hyperbolically as the beginnings of a mass new youth movement that would sweep America! The conference ended calling for a formal founding convention to be held the next year.

We returned to Lorain and life resumed in its old routines. No attempt was made to form an LYL club in Lorain at least during my remaining weeks in the city. Neither was any attempt made to form an affiliate around Lansing and Michigan State. I’m unaware of what the LYL accomplished into the 1950s after I quit the CP. My Google readings do reveal that the organization had a limited shelf life. That following the 1956 Twentieth Congress revelations and the Hungarian Revolution, the LYL gradually disintegrated in the ideological turmoil that beset the entire Communist world in the ensuing years.

JOE DOUGHER’S DATING SERVICE

Joe Dougher was bothered by the foot-looseness of young bachelors like Cincy and me. He felt that we should marry and settle down and raise a family and become part of the stable steel mill proletarian community of Lorain in which we’d be more effective union and party activists. So he contacted Cleveland Headquarters to see if there were some eligible young women comrades there we could date. So soon after dates were arranged for the two of us and a young African-American steelworker Joe had recently recruited into the Party I’ll call Russ. So early one evening I drove with Cincy and Russ to Cleveland to meet the blind dates he had arranged for us. We parked by a public park and stood outside to wait for the young women. Almost immediately a police car pulled over and began to question us, two Caucasian and one Black man hanging out together, probably sensing there was a drug deal coming down. Somehow we persuaded them that nothing illegal was going on. As the cops pulled away three young white women, our dates, who had been watching the police incident came over to us. It was a pleasant enough evening as we shared coffee and snacks with these attractive women in a nearby trendy café. Whether we exchanged contact information or not for future rendezvous, I don’t recall. But nothing further ever developed from this introduction.

But as an upshot a panic attack gripped me. Do I really want to settle for a permanent life in Lorain? It wasn’t the healthiest environment. The mill community was choked with red ore dust and graphite blanketing homes, lawns, trees, flower and vegetable gardens that we had to breathe 24/7. Working in the mill was no better, thick with the same industrial effluvia. Many steelworkers used chewing tobacco to keep their throats moist on the job and risked cancer. “Johnny Mize, slugging first baseman of the New York Yankees, chews Mail Pouch,” read one placard posted at the cash register of the company cafeteria. Like most Midwest industrial cities it was not the most exciting city to live in culturally or otherwise. Plenty of bars in which to get smashed but there was more to life than that. One evening I heard the

Ella Fitzgerald.

fantastic Ella Fitzgerald sing live in a downtown Lorain gin mill I fell in love with her outsized personality and talent but she was the only black person in the cigarette smoke haze of a club, packed with all-white beefy steelworkers. Racism was alive and well in 1940s America.

I was still very young and wanted more travel, adventure and excitement in my life. My basic anarchic spirit felt stifled in the conformist ennui of Communist Party organizational routine although I didn’t admit that to myself even in thought. Of course, the ever-present doubts of the politics pervading my life kept creeping in. So I needed a breather badly. My only desire was now to hit the road, where, to do what, I had no clear idea. I’d never yet been to the West Coast and I felt the need to be free to do just that. So a few weeks later I cashed in at the mills, and with a few hundred dollars in savings, I bid so long to all, loaded the Chevy with my worldly goods, and headed west toward Toledo.

Go West, Young Man!

I drove on westward, skirted Chicago, and crossed Wisconsin diagonally Northwest, camping out in parks in my sleeping bag, eating cold canned beans, bread and baloney, and boxed breakfast cereals along with milk and fruit for a survival diet. My immediate destination was the Lake Superior region and the cities of Duluth, MN and Superior, WI. I hit Superior first before I crossed the bridge to the port of Duluth. I stopped off at the newspaper plant of the Finnish Communist newspaper Työmies and bought a copy of the current edition of the paper and two Finnish language political books. I talked briefly to a couple of aging staff members in my first Finnish language conversation since my previous winter holiday trip to Fitchburg.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

I slept that night in my car on a street in Duluth’s residential hills which had a spectacular view of Lake Superior when I awoke in the morning. I thought briefly of using my seaman’s card to get a berth on an ore boat on the Lakes but since it was mid-season there probably were no deck or coal passer gigs available. I then drove down town to an employment agency dispatching men into the logging industry of Norther Minnesota and scanned their list of available jobs. I wondered if my late IWW uncle Antti Saikkonen had worked at any of these Minnesota sites during has brief life as an immigrant logger and miner? But, no, I banished that idea for myself as I really wanted to explore the American West before I ventured into the next stage of my working life. So my vagabond’s loose agenda pointed me toward Seattle, reachable via US Highway 10 across the top tier of the America’s Northernmost states. My last Finnish newspaper stop was in New York Mills, MN, home of a conservative Finnish language paper, Minnesotan Uutiset (Minnesota News.) I bought a copy to get an idea of what they were all about. (Incidentally, this paper still publishes as the only predominantly Finnish language weekly newspaper Amerikan Uutiset (American News) remaining in the United States, in the Lake Worth-Lantana region of Florida’s Atlantic coast which still has a sizeable Finnish-speaking populace, recent immigrants or vacationers from Finland during the warm winter months mostly.)

So from that point on it was hurdling ahead over the prairie highway toward the Far West. My odyssey reminded me of Jack Kerouac’s famous foot loose and fancy-free driving in the Beat novel On the Road that was published around a decade later that became an immediate sensational best seller, opening a new phase in American literature. I felt an incredible sense of freedom I’d never experienced before, now liberated from the dull spiritually stifling Party meetings in Lorain. I really needed this! I was a premature Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady tooling with their gas hog used sedans across America freeing themselves from the conformity of the late forties and fifties middle class life.

Crossing into North Dakota, I picked up a fortyish hitchhiker who had been laid off from a truck driving job in Cleveland who was thumbing huis way to Western Montana to give his brother a hand in working his cattle ranch. He was flat broke so I shared my Spartan cold-cuts and bread and other food offerings with him. Bob (as I’ll call him) suggested we could get some work to pick up a few bucks as field hands during the current wheat harvest season around the railroad town of Livingston, Montana. Great idea, I thought, as long as it doesn’t tie us down for good any place. So off we drove toward our target site in Livingston.

LIVINGSTON ADVENTURE

Bob told me that years back when he worked the wheat harvest around Livingston all he needed to do was to hang around some saloon and after a while the ranchers would come in to hire available hands. That we did, nursing a couple of brewskis for hours on end. But no ranchers came. Just a few local idlers sitting around engaging in a perennial low stakes poker game and some broken down elderly cowpokes reminiscing about the great cattle drives in the good old days. Maybe we’d have better luck the next day? So we camped outside that night about a mile out of town. Bob being a skinny little guy slept on the front seat of the car and I stretched out in my sleeping bag in a ditch just outside of a barbed wire fence stretched out along the road. During the night I half woke up a couple of times to some strange stirrings behind the fence next to me. I woke up at the crack of dawn and about a foot away on the other side of the barbed wire stood a horse looking me right in the eye! Startled, I wriggled up as quickly as I could from the sleeping bag before I calmed down. Both Bob and I shared a good laugh over that one.

Next we drove into town to the railroad depot and started to wash up in the men’s room basins enjoying the available hot water taps.  Almost immediately we were confronted by the middle-aged uniformed station master chasing us out, yelling: “These facilities are for paying passengers, not for any of you lazy bums passing through. Get a job!” We hurried off and were finally able to wash up and shave in the ice cold waters of a brook running through just outside of town. Back to the saloon we went for another day of waiting. Finally one of the locals wised us up, saying they don’t use local field hands any more for the harvests. They now have mechanized harvesting combines operated by travelling companies moving up from Texas, ranch by ranch, all the way to the Canadian border doing the work much more efficiently. So there was no point in hanging around Livingston any more unless you wanted to hire as a “gandy dancer” driving railroad spikes all day in the blistering desert sun.  Thanks, but no thanks.

BOZEMAN, FOREST FIRE PERILS.

Driving west over some tortuous mountain roads for a couple of hours, we pulled up in Bozeman, a college town and site of Montana State University. We had only planned to stop to replenish our food supplies, but noted the city was in turmoil with the streets full of people surging hither and yon with loud sound speakers blaring away calling for volunteer fire fighters to come help put out some raging forest fires in Yellowstone National Park to the south of Bozeman. I saw posters calling for cook’s helpers to help man the kitchens in the vicinity of the fires, paying reasonable wages. I went to find the hiring place for the kitchen crews, and ran into some Western old timers sitting on the outdoor veranda of a Bozeman hotel who warned me not to do so. They told me that since I was a neophyte in fighting these gigantic fires in the Western mountains, it would be extremely dangerous It was easy to get isolated and trapped with fires leaping along tree tops into an entirely different direction with a sudden shift in the winds. It could easily be fatal for me unless I had the experience to react quickly to such situations. Not wanting to be consumed in flames on Yellowstone turf, it was time to move on.

So Bob and I took off on US 10 to pursue our westward course. I left Bob off at the outskirts of Helena and headed toward Northern Idaho. I kept sleeping outside in my sleeping bag off the side of th highway but one night in open country I heard the sound of coyotes howling. The sounds kept getting louder and louder. I was fearful of them attacking me and crawled into my car seat to sleep an uncomfortable cramped slumber the rest of the night. But the spirit of adventure and independence along the open road made the way West the most rewarding experience of my life to that point. I never felt lonely and savored of the sights, sounds, and smells as an exhilarating tonic for my life. And so I drove on through Cour d’Alene and Wallace in Northern Idaho, crossed the Washington state line, skirted around Spokane and the Yakima Valley apple country, onward to Seattle and the Coast.

SEATTLE STOPOVER

I finally hit the fabulous port city of Seattle, parked my car in a secure place and roamed the sights as a first time visitor. I took my first deep breaths of the heady Pacific ocean for the first time since starting to cross the Panama Canal to the Atlantic side during the wind-down of my Navy days in early 1946. One of the first things I did was to buy a copy of the West Coast CP paper Peoples World from its downtown office which I perused while eating lunch. I found it much superior to the Daily Worker in layout and design as well as style and content, though it followed the standard Perty line editorially. The DW looked static and stodgy in comparison.

Then, what do next? Do I use my seaman’s papers to seek a berth to some exotic Pacific ports in Asia?? What will it take to get into the Sailors Union of the Pacific, AFL, or should I drive south to see what California is like? I still had some money left, travelling on the cheap. Or should I return to Michigan State and continue studies on the GI Bill? My mind was racing like a motor trying to decide. I was still in my Kerouac moment and would push the gas peddle toward wherever an instant impulse would lead me.

But then my old country Finnish common sense interceded. My mother had an older first cousin Otto Toivanen running a small dairy farm around Astoria, Oregon, which had a large Finn communuity. They occasionally corresponded but hadn’t seen each other since Mamma was a young girl in Finnish Karelia. Spending a few days with them was an immediate practical possibility since Oregon was an integral part of the Pacific Northwest. So within moments I filled up my gas tank and pointed the Chevy southward toward Astoria which was on the south bank of the Columbia River, across the southwestern corner of Washington State.

VISIT ASTORIA COUSINS

First thing putting into the Astoria area I found a Finnish Co-op store on the road to the small town of Swenson which had the ubiquitous Finn Hall as well. Since I figured most long time Finnish area residents knew one another I inquired about where I could find the Toivanen farm. Of course they knew the Toivanens and gave me directions to their farm a couple of miles away and also in Swenson. Both Otto and his wife Helmi greeted me, a relative they’d never met before, with open arms. They were a childless couple then in their sixties and made a modest living with their small dairy farm. So I enjotyed their generous hospitality for the next few days.

Otto and his brother Matti had immigrated to the United States in about 1908 with my uncle Antti Saikkonen as their 16-year-old travelling companion to mining jobs in Ironwood, Michigan. They lived in a Finnish-run boarding house where all three were almost immediately recruited into the IWW. After awhile the Toivanen brothers went their own way working in the mining industry around the United States while my Uncle Antti did the same, only alternating in the logging industry. Otto and Matti eventually moved to Astoria, Oregon where they married and elder cousin Matti and his wife had a son. Otto and Helmi never had children. The brothers bought a fishing boat together and followed the fishing seasons in the ocean just beyond the mouth of the Columbia River. Following the Russian Revolution Matti left the IWW and joined the Communists and in the early 1930s, succumbed to “Karelian Fever” and emigrated to Soviet Karelia to build “socialism” where he disappeared in Stalin’s purges of 1937–’38.

Otto again became a conservative over the years. and told me that he had voted for Dewey over Truman in the 1948 elections because he said Truman was too beholden to the unions. When I questioned him about his early IWW affiliation, he attributed it to “youthful indiscretion.” Elder Cousin Otto said that when Matti left for the USSR he abandoned fishing as a living and he and Helmi settled down on the small dairy farm they occupied during the time of my visit. I never dared tell them of my CP politics which I’m afraid would have ended my visit immediately as they were strongly anti-Communist. (Astoria had had a three story Finnish Communist Hall that had been destroyed by fire and a sizeable Finnish Red community at one time.) They further told me that when Matti left for Karelia his wife had refused to go and shared an apartment with their now adult son in downtown Astoria who worked in the fish canneries which mostly employed Finnish women on the production lines. Their last letter from Matti before his disappearance into the clutches of the GPU complained his pocket watch was in disrepair and it was impossible to find parts in Petroskoi, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Karelia.

I was familiar with the plight of the Finnish emigre communists to Karelia long ago from my parents and their democratic socialist comrades. Yet in my present political incarnation I blocked such thoughts from my brainwashed mind as if the Stalinist terror was non-existent. This may seem impossible to a critically reasoning person, but when you’re in the grip of a hard core doctrinaire secular religion this was a reality not to be challenged with all underlying doubts repressed constantly.

We visited Matti’s wife in Astoria whose name I don’t recall any more than I do her son’s except for the family name Toivanen. He showed up stinking drunk from work and gave me a big hunk of fresh salmon as a present. He had already inherited the Saikkonen-Toivanen recessive alcoholic gene as his Toivanen’s grandmother’s brother was my hard-drinking grandfather Paavo Saikkonen. I was hardly able to store a fresh salmon in the car for my travels, but Helmi saved the day by cooking us some salmon steaks later and packed some sandwiches for me to take with me when I departed Astoria.

So where was I headed next? While lying awake in my second cousins’ spare bedroom, finally a sensible practical idea struck me. Since I still had a lot of GI Bill benefits left, it made sense for me to return to Michigan State and finish my degree program starting in the Fall quarter of 1949. Only I needed to change majors since an academic career didn’t seem likely now. Since I had a talent for writing, I thought of changing majors to journalism when I returned to East Lansing. So I bid adieu to Helmi and Otto and headed East along the Columbia River on the Oregon side.

ON TO IDAHO AND WYOMING

I enjoyed the luxurious drive along Columbia’s south shore passing through beautiful towns like Hood River. I was now humming happily along. having a specific goal in mind for the near future. I passed through the lower belly of Idaho and into Kemmerer, Wyoming one morning after having slept in its outskirts in the car the night before. Kemmerer had an open pit coal mine that was at the center of its economy. It was also noted for having the original J.C. Penney’s department store founded in 1902 which mushroomed into a famous chain. I decided to splurge on a restaurant breakfast in town that morning. Ham and eggs, fries and toast. In those days I was still a carnivore, well before I went off meat in 1973. They also served bottled beer in the café and I noticed a couple of guys who I thought were Mexican working stiffs drinking beer and joined them to hoist a few after finishing my coffee. Turned out they were Native Americans trying to pass as Mexicans as I believe Federal law still prohibited the sale of alcohol to Indians. Apparently the barkeep was savvy to all of this but knew how to play the game as there were few paying customers in the place and the house needed the money. We had a great old time socializing and knocked down more than a few that morning.

Then one of my new buds thought I might like to visit the local brothel within easy walking distance. I’d been sexless following a similar stopover in northern Ohio after leaving Lorain some weeks earlier, So why not a few high jinks for a horny young dude. but we drove over anyway. It was an elegant old house with a full service bar in the large living room. Down the hatch with a couple of more brews for us three until the madam sent along a couple of ladies to entertain us. I paired off with an appealing tall, slender woman in her late 30s called Billy, a great conversationalist with a lot of smarts and knowledge. Before long Billy and I repaired to one of the rooms upstairs for some fun and games.

After we finished, she had an attractive proposition for me. She’d seen the Ohio plates on my car and asked if I was going East. Confirming my intent, she said she was quitting Kemmerer that night and was hired to go to work in another house in Green River the next day and wondered if I could give her a lift there along with her little dog. She would split the cost of gas with me and let me sleep in her room in Green River with no charge for her services for a few days. Perfect, I thought! Since I was still a bit looped she told me to sleep a few hours in the bedroom as she had to pack and run some errands and still work in the Kemmerer joint that night, We’d leave first thing in the morning. I woke up after a few hours, bought supper downstairs and did some dancing to the juke box (or was it a live trio?) I went to sleep for the night early in Billy’s room and she didn’t join me until much later as the house was crowded and she had to entertain some more clients that night.

We exchanged stories about our life experiences in the car all the way to Green River and had a fascinating time with them. Billy told of the time when during WWII she had worked as a prostitute in Salt Lake City, entertaining troops from a nearby Air Force or Army base. She and a girl friend had rented a couple of hotel rooms in that holy Mormon capitol. Everything was wide open there at the time, as the servicemen stood in line down the corridor from the rooms, down the steps to the floor below and further, waiting for their turn. The women were so busy they had to hire a couple of helpers to change sheets and towels for them between tricks. Apparently the law looked the other way as there was a war on and what better way for the Mormon cops to prove their patriotism and “support our troops?”

GREEN RIVER MEMORIES

We pulled into Green River in mid-morning and Billy treated me to what’s now called “brunch” in trendy cities, but more of a hearty basic “stick to your ribs” proposition in Wyoming. (Green River is somewhat of a mining and railroad town known as one of the first US cities to ban door to door solicitation with what is known as the “Green River Ordinance.”) Afterwards we drove to a lower level of the city behind the railroad tracks where a working stiff’s bar and restaurant stood housing the brothel. We met the madam and proprietor who was an old friend of Billy’s and of equally high intelligence. She was in her early 50s and overweight although still attractive in her features. We stretched out on the bed together while they regaled each other over old times and what was happening on the Green River scene at present. I’ve forgotten the proprietor’s name but will call her Mona for the purposes of this memoir. She was OK with my staying with Billy per our prior arrangement.

I recall this was Saturday night and Billy needed to be on hand to entertain as the saloon would be full of railroad workers and others out to drink, dance and have a “sporting time.” I hung around the action for a time during the evening but bedded early and read magazines while Billy entertained. We would have our session after the bar closed or next day after we woke up. Mona had a stout elderly African-American husband in a wheel chair who was a fascinating person in his own right, equally smart as Mona and Billy. who I’ll name Ernest. He had worked lumber-hauling sailing ships along the Pacific Coast earlier in his life about which he enjoyed talking. I showed him my seaman’s ID card, and he told me never to lose it as it could come in handy sometime if I were to ever ship out. It was a joy to get to know him during my Green River sojourn.

But all good things had to end. The local cops who hung out at the bar during the day had asked; “Who’s this guy with the Ohio license plates who’s always parked out front?” Maybe they thought I was Billy’s pimp or something? Anyway, police headquarters was putting the heat about me on them, and they told my friends I should leave town. Next morning I took off expressing fond farewells to my new friends. So this highlight of my trip “Out West” has remained graphic in my memory ever since. (My Inner Kerouac would now have to be put on hold as I returned to my interrupted studies.) I continued toward Michigan with a bald right front tire showing treads the rest of the way, with me not wanting to spend any of my fast dwindling funds on a replacement until my first GI subsistence check came in the fall. It held.
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*I.V. Michurin, Lysenko’s predecessor to his theories.

End of Installment 12