Closing Out the 1970s

1977

As the year 1977 opened Sandy Bevis had been president of the ITU since 1974 and Leon Olson continued as President of SF Typo Local 21 with Morris Goldman as first vice president and Arnold Sears, second vice president. As we fought the ravages of the changing technology of newspaper printing by trying to maintain job opportunities for our members through continuing training programs we got the companies to provide us and at ths same time maintain our pay and benefit standards as well as provide us job security, the battle got tougher and tougher and the future didn’t loom all that bright as the union continued to decline in numbers throughout our jurisdiction in both US and Canada. But we struggled on. By this time we had phased out our old ITU fraternal pension (1908–1966) which only paid out $100 a month and now operated under the jointly-negotiated and administered IPP industrial pension plan to which the employers contributed. It was a continuous daily battle in trying to maintain our own. But we wouldn’t be able to go it alone as a craft union by ourselves without merging into a larger entity for our survival. In 1977 we opened up merger negotiations with The Newspaper Guild which wasn’t a large union, either. I questioned the wisdom of such a prospect as we needed to merge with a much larger industrial type union with ample resources. The joint ITU-Guild merger negotiations were terminated by 1983 without success.

1977 BOSTON MARATHON

I continued my interest in long distance running and race walking. I was determined to do the Boston Marathon in April of 1977. I wasn’t fast enough to qualify as an official entry but I and many other Dolphin South End Runners took out membership in the American Medical Joggers and Striders which ran the same course at the same time which had no qualifying time limits to get into the “Big BM” through the back door. Running entrepreneur Jack Leydig chartered us a plane from San Francisco to Boston for the event plus hotel reservations. Few of us were MDs but all of us were obligated to wear the colorful AMJS tee shirts in the race. Special busses took us to the starting line at Hopkinton, Mass. for the point-to-point 26+-miler. I felt in condition to do a decent time if I kept to a doable pace. I felt being part of some pageantry in this hallowed event as we started out in the cold gray morning. I was running alongside a tall young bearded guy as we approached the Wellesley College campus where its co-eds were flanking us on both sides of the road, grabbing all us male runners by the asses as we braved their gauntlet. “I love it, I love it, I love it!’ exclaimed my running pal as we felt our flesh being mangled at the back by the comely Wellesley lasses. “Let’s go through it again,” I urged. We turned around and went to the beginning of the gauntlet to get another taste of the feminine ass-play. We passed a nursing home along the way where the seniors sat in rocking chairs tapping their canes in applauding us on. Finally, we hit the notorious Heartbreak Hill around Newton. What! After experiencing the hills of San Francisco, I saw Heartbreak as a gentle piece of cake. I made no attempt to adjust my pace. Big mistake! when we hit the top of the hill we could see the Prudential Building high rise in the distance at the finish line. But I also started to cramp! Again I had thrown moderation to the winds. I struggled down hill little by little until I saw an attached garden hose on the side of the road and flopped down then and there to recuperate, drink the water, massage my legs and do stretches. After about 20–25 minutes I got up, rubbed my legs and found I could move again. I walked slowly onto the street and began to cautiously plod toward the finish which couldn’t have been that far away. I picked up my walking pace and kept on going without pain or impediment. I must have been a half-mile from the “Pru” when I broke into a run, a little wobbly but OK. I was passing people painfully crawling along and crossed the line with a flourish! Miraculous recovery! I finished in about 5 hours and 20 minutes and needed no meat wagon to haul me in. The Big BM was mine!

GROWING A BAY AREA ANARCHIST MOVEMENT

Upon returning from the UK, I was all fired up to try to help grow a lively anarchist presence in the Bay Area. Thing seemed pretty quiet in that respect here in early 1977 to my knowledge. The best-known anarchist-founded institution was the Walden School in Berkeley that had been founded in 1958 by some New York area pacifists, war resisters and anarchists who were 1946 New York city expatriates, such as Audrey Goodfriend (1920–2013) and her partner union electrician David Koven. Walden, a K–9 private school, was founded on the libertarian principles of the Modern School inspired by Spanish anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer (1859–1909), that still exists at 2448 McKinley Ave. About that time a newly-minted anarchist named Ed Clark had moved here from New Orleans, a former SDS Progressive Labor Party activist who had soured on Leninism and where he had edited a mimeographed ‘zine, “The Louisiana Worker.” Meantime, I had started an occasional newsletter I called “Free Socialist” offering subs for a $2 donation ad infinitum. My French workmate Chronicle printer Pierre Lanneret who married Linda Stevenson had had his fill of the International Socialists, taken over by a predatory Trotskyist clique that expelled all its more reasonable democratic elements joined forces with us in starting something new. Although with his own earlier Trotskyist politics in which he had lived a perilous underground existence as a youth in WWII France, Pierre was not that sympathetic to explicit anarchism but was more in line with Castorides’ Socialisme ou Barbarie, and Maurice Brinton’s Solidarity. I widely circulated Brinton’s excellent newsprint broadsides of the pamphlets “As We See It” and “As We Don’t See It,” still a fine introduction to Solidarity’s theses on libertarian socialism. We drummed up enough interest to hold planning sessions toward a large Bay Area conference of like-minded groups which would meet at my apartment at 106 Sanchez Street, all younger radicals dissatisfied with existing Bay Area left politics. So we decided to hold a Saturday conference at Walden School which was kind enough to loan us a large classroom. Actually, the conference with a couple of hundred attending proved a flop in itself. Too many disparate elements for possibilities of cohesion. Some were seekers of another Marxist truth and there was much quarrelling. A couple of distinct groups did emerge: One called “World to Win” included Pierre, bookseller Darryl Van Fleet and his partner, masseuse Sandy ????, Ed Clark, IWW’s John Coelln and for a time me. I also coalesced with the established anarcho-pacifists Audrey Goodfriend and Dave Koven, and a young Sacramento couple, plus Jean Pauline who worked at Modern Times Books collective. World to Win became a cozy insular Sunday night living room discussion klatch which I left when Pierre and Darryl, a former IWW delegate, expressed hostility to the Wobblies.

Audrey, Jean, a young anarchist RN named Adraenne Bernstein, Debby Kapell, Dan Due (a Kropotkin scholar), John Coelln, Ed Clark and me and later others formed a Sunday night anarchist discussion group which met successfully for years at a Mission District coffee house. We publicized our meetings in the British anarchist paper Freedom so we had numerous European visitors over the years. Although Ed Clark had abandoned Leninism, he was still more democratic centralist doctrinaire than libertarian so found a group more organizationally structured than our coffee house crowd was. Young gay anarchists like Joey Cain and Tom Alder of Bound Together Books joined our Circle A Coffee House evenings. I believe our efforts helped build the more vital, thriving anarchist culture that continues to energize the Bay Area today.

MAMMA CLINGS TO LIFE

Now in her 83rd year Mamma’s health took a precipitous downhill turn. I was planning for my trip to Sweden and Finland for two months of athletics and all arrangements were made. Would I need to cancel? I flew to LA and saw she probably wouldn’t last long. She was a very old 83. She was still coherent and able to talk. But physically Mamma was too feeble to move much and mentally very depressed. Her letters to me only spoke of her wish to die, that she was a burden on everyone now. She pleaded with me not to cancel my trip on her account and just wanted to be left to die in peace. Mamma did agree for me to record an audiocassette tape with farewells to her remaining younger sister and brother and their families. All she asked of my sister was to be cremated. There wouldn’t be any funeral services as she knew no one in LA. All her old Finnish friends in Berkeley and Massachusetts were gone. At this stage there was little I could do for her. Some weeks later on the eve of my departure, Irma phoned me that Mamma was in an LA nursing home, had developed pneumonia and wouldn’t live long. So again I flew down and she was delirious and no longer recognized me. So I discussed the situation with Irma and agreed that after she was cremated that her ashes would be sent to Westminster, MA so she would be laid to rest along with Pappa in our family plot in Woodside Cemetery. I gave Irma an address where I could be reached in Sweden to tell me of her passing. So with heavy heart, I left for Göteborg for the trip. A few days after arrival in my World Championship dormitory on the outskirts of that city I received a letter from Irma that Mamma had died in her sleep on August 3, 1977. That evening I wrote a long poem about her life as my quiet farewell and tribute to the woman who had brought me into this world and helped raise me.

1977 WORLD MASTERS ATHLETICS CHAMPIONSHIPS

I reconnected with my Finnish running friends at Göteborg had met in Coventry the previous summer in Coventry, and then some. In fact, an entire charter bus full of Finnish veteran athletes had come to compete in this “old timers’ olympiad,” including thousands more women and men from around the world. So I reconnected with Matti Rutanen and the Laiho brothers and met many others like Sakari Siitonen, a Helsinki city architect my own age, and perhaps a distant relative, with whom I ran as partners in the marathon. In Sweden I had signed up for the 5000m racewalk at Ullevi Stadium, a 10K road run, and the marathon. As expected, I finished somewhere in the middle in the racewalk and 10K and somewhere toward the tail-end of the out-and-back marathon along a walking and biking path, as again I had gone out too fast with Sakari at the start, and had taken a considerable stretch break shortly after the half-way turn-around, although I finished unscathed.

Gothenburg (Göteborg) was a sizeable industrial city that featured a Volvo automobile plant that employed a lot of Finnish workers. Payday evening in the city saw plenty of inebriated Finnish Volvo workers staggering around the streets although the Swedes were no slouches with the bottle, either. (That could have been me many years before.) What disturbed me most was the thousands of Swedish youngsters, as low as the mid-teens who were passed out blotto on the streets of the city during a Saturday night boozing orgy, lying in their own vomit. A scene I saw many times over the years among Finnish youngsters of both genders passed out on the pavements around the Helsinki Central Railroad Station on similar evenings. Alcoholism is a dilemma for all ages in the Nordic countries to this day.

Since there were a few seats available on the Finns’ charter bus after the meet my friends said I should ask the driver if I could ride with them back to Finland as I was bound there anyway. His only comment was: “Onko 50 markkaa liikaa?” (Is 50 marks too much?) So I had a great ride across Sweden with Finnish pop CDs playing on the bus radio the whole time. (My seat partner was Mikko Hietanen, who I had seen finish second in the 1947 Boston Marathon. Mikko, now in his 60s, had also run the Masters Marathon in Gothenburg. As a young man, he had been several times Finnish national marathon champ, as well as European titlist.) To avoid Stockholm, we crossed Sweden to the Northeast to the ferry port at Kapellskar at the tip of the Gulf of Bothnia, where the whole bus was loaded on the ferry for the overnight trip south to Naantali, Finland near Turku. It was a warm and balmy night so we tried to sleep outdoors on some cushioned reclining benches above decks. Sleeping was a problem as the ferry was a party cruise boat with non-stop boozing and gambling and dancing as it proceeded South. Finally around 4 AM a last drunken wail was heard and it was possible to sleep. Waking up, we were proceeding in the early morning fog of the Aland Archipelago, nearing the port of Naantali where the charter bus tour terminated. Mr. Anthoni, the 40-year-old Finnish overall winner of the Göteborg Marathon and I were the only passengers who took a local bus to Turku where we could catch the express bus to Turku.

The summer went fast in Finland where I stayed in Eastern Helsinki mostly with my Uncle Eino and Aunt Helmi. Their next door neighbor was Paavo Saira, a Finnish masters racewalker who had competed in Sweden in the 55–59 year age division, the group just older than mine. Through Paavo, once a top European walker, I met a retired Finnish military general my own age Väinö Kangaspuro, who was an internationally accredited racewalk judge who I met several times over the years. I did my train trip around the country to see all my relatives and worked out with Matti Rutanen’s running club Karhu Kopla (Bears’ Clique) an informal group of older runners. Matti and I and his younger friend who was then Finland’s heavyweight boxing champion but not a fast runner, participated several weekends in distance running races around Finland, including at Seinäjoki and Tampere. In Seinäjoki I was interviewed by Simo Nikula, sports editor of the city’s daily newspaper for a feature article as a Finnish-American masters athlete. Simo had also competed at the World Masters as a runner. But for me one of my memorable experiences of the trip was meeting with Finland’s young anarchist group at Helsinki, who I had contacted before the trip. I got to know Antti Rautiainen as a young student who is well-known today as a Finnish anarchist journalist and author who spent years as a student and activist in Moscow, until expelled more recently by Vladimir Putin. Also, Reko Ravela, now an activist in the Left Alliance Party and a mail carrier. I was the first Finnish-American Wobbly they had met and they were trying to form an IWW Branch in Finland. I helped translate the IWW Constitution into Finnish for them. After an initial flurry of interest that effort petered out although Antti and Reko continued as individual members for a long time. In my numerous subsequent visits to Finland, I’ve maintained my contacts with the Finnish anarchists.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

My last hurrah for 1977 was my second attempt in running the Lake Tahoe 72-mile ultra in the fall. This time I played it smarter, alternately jogging, walking, resting and stretching. I think we started off with 18 runners at Tahoe City. The first ten miles I was safely ensconced in last place until I started to pass the dropouts one by one, those who had inadequate training miles or weren’t prepared for the mountainous altitudes. The top ultras had long ago gone their own way up ahead and I was out there almost alone, swapping last places with a 23-year-old Chinese-American lad from Truckee. I would grind past him on the upgrades, and he would take the lead on the down slopes. Finally I passed him a little before turning left on the Incline Village Road for good. Occasionally when I rendezvoused with my driver, I had him go back to see how my competition was doing. Apparently he wasn’t gaining any more despite a steady downhill grade for several miles. At northern shore of the lake I met my driver in a recreation area in the moonlight. I was in the middle of my shoulder stand doing my reverse bicycling when the highway patrol pulled over and flashlights in one hand and the other on their sidearms they walked over to see what was going on. We explained we were part of a race and they smiled and walked away wondering about this crazy 51-year-old California jock on the loose. I finished in Tahoe City in 17 hours and 18 minutes this time, finishing 8th out of 9. I was told the kid from Truckee had come in about 45 minutes later. I never repeated that distance again but probably did further permanent damage to my knees with all that pounding.
 

1978

GOLDEN GATE RACEWALKERS

In 1978 since there was no racewalking organization to represent the non-elite walkers in the Bay Area, I came up with the idea of organizing the Golden Gate Racewalkers, as I had been a member since 1974 of the Dolphin South End Runners, a popular running club for the ordinary plodder as well as the “hotshots” as founder Walt Stack called them. So seven of us, including the late Lori Maynard, Otto Somerauer, Roger Anawalt and a couple of others met for a group walk at the Polo Fields parking lot in Golden Gate Park in September, 1978 on a Saturday, and the GGRW was born. To avoid conflict with the DSE Sunday runs in which some of us participated regularly, Saturday mornings became the time for us “pedestrians” to howl. With me as its first president and newsletter editor, GGRW grew quite rapidly in several venues in the Bay Area: including Lake Merritt in Oakland, De Anza College initially in the South Bay, and Blackie’s Pasture running path in Marin County. In a few short years we grew to about 200 members. The West Valley Track Club had an elite racewalking group, with whom we cooperated on a regular basis. The majority of us weren’t that interested in serious competitive walking, but it was a weekend fun thing for us, always followed by a post-walk breakfast at area restaurants. A coaching session was part of every meeting to instruct newcomers in the basic technique requiring a straightened knee in the supporting leg and continual ground contact with at least one foot or the other in the progression forward. I assumed that role in our San Francisco branch and taught a couple of hundred people the technique over a number of years. Some of us seriously competed for a number of years and won regional and even national championships. One of our great success story was Jonathan Matthews, then a PhD student at Stanford who in his 40s was one of the country’s fastest 50K racewalkers. In our earliest years, Bonnie Dillon, a mother of three young sons, from the South Bay, was one of our elite women walkers who represented the United States abroad in a couple of important international women’s events. We sponsored coaching clinics led by national figures like Martin Rudow and Howard Jacobson, author of the book “Racewalk to Fitness.” We held a couple of clinics in racewalk judging, led by Bob Bowman, then of Oakland, who was international known as an IAAF judge in world championship and Olympic games. The late Lori Maynard was also prominent on the world judging scene, as was Ron Daniel, who lived in the Bay Area for a number of years.

We never did achieve the mass popularity of running, and eventually faded away as some athletes in their aging lost the legal walking form and could no longer straighten their knees. The last functioning GGRW alumni consists of a few old-timers who still stroll around Lake Merritt in Oakland on Saturdays, before a hearty breakfast.

VALLEJO TIMES-HERALD STRIKE

Our Typo Local 21 was hit hard with the Vallejo Times-Herald strike in 1978 which lasted for five years before we had the throw in the towel as a lost cause. This venerable North Bay daily newspaper had served its community well as a union newspaper, until it was taken over by the notorious anti-union Donrey Media group. It boasted there were no union papers in its chain and declared it was willing to spend $5 million and five years to rid the Times-Herald of its union shop. With no other choice, on June 20, 88 members of the Typos, Guild, Graphic Arts, Mailers and Pressmen’s unions walked off the job in a unified strike. The strikers’ main weapon was an alternative five-day-a-week newspaper they founded, the Valley Independent Press, that the striking union members produced to undercut Donrey’s scab-infested operation. Operation of the VIP took away a million a year from the ratted paper for over five years. Many of us from Local 21 spent many volunteer hours in travelling to Vallejo to support our beleaguered brothers and sisters. Besides picketing, we spent hours at strike headquarters helping wrap up the strike paper for community delivery. But by 1984 the union effort petered out and the strike lost. A quick check shows that the Vallejo Times-Herald still publishes as the only daily newspaper in the city, undoubtedly computerized from start to finish.
 

1979

I JOIN FINNISH KALEVA LODGE 21

Since Mamma’s death in 1977, had only been peripherally involved in the Finnish community, except for maintaining of subscription of the newspaper Raivaaja which had been coming into our family since 1915 when both parents immigrated to the United States. Although I was a socialist and internationalist politically I still much identified with being a Finn culturally. I wanted to retain my ancestral language skills and wanted to continue to be involved in the community of my ethnic heritage. Although I had been around the United Finnish Kaleva Brothers and Sisters Lodge 21 which owned the historic Brotherhood Hall at 1910 Chestnut Street I hadn’t bothered joined since it hadn’t been a priority with me. So in 1979 I took the plunge and applied and was accepted for membership.

Since I lived and worked in San Francisco I was not a regular in hall affairs. Up into the 1970s the Lodge had staged Finnish language plays. The first generation Finns were dying off, so the second generation made a valiant attempt to continue the Finnish language play traditions led by Paul Makela and Liisa Suominen but the effort died out until I made brief foray to produce them in the 1990s. The Lodge still had a chorus when I joined but its folk dance group expired as its members aged and their Finnish costumes grew too tight for them to wear, according to Aini Tossavainen. The main activities that have continued to the present day have been the annual Vappu or May Day celebration in one form or other to the present day and the Finnish Independence Day program the first Sunday of each December.

In more recent years the Hall is known as Kaleva Hall due to the recognition of the need to support gender equality as times have changed and the name Brotherhood Hall has fallen out of practical use. Kaleva Lodge started out as a mutual benefit society in 1911 to provide some sickness insurance for members before the days of health programs and Medicare, At that time Chestnut Street Hall did not exist and the Lodge met at the original Finn Hall built in 1908 on 10th Street near Hearst by Finnish immigrant socialists which was known as Toveri Tupa (Comrades’ Lodge). The Tenth Street workers hall had its first schism in 1914 when its IWW members left in the national dispute between syndicalism and political socialism. After the Russian Revolution thousands of Finnish-American socialists saw the new USSR as a practical workers’ utopia and affiliated with the CP-run Workers Party in the 1920s, while others elected to stay with a social democratic politics. These splits usually meant the building of new halls by the losing factions, except initially in Berkeley. The pro-soviet politics grew to dominate at Toveri Tupa. Yet the Kaleva Lodge continued to meet there through the 1920s. But when the Third Period of Kremlin politics rose to the fore foolishly, predicting early world revolution. and condemning democratic socialism as “social fascist,” the then hard line ideological pro-CP faction of the Berkeley hall’s majority expelled the Kaleva Lodge, and its social democratic elements in 1929. The non-political Kaleva Lodge 21 built a the new hall on land donated by Finnish-American city councilman Walter Mork, owner of the Walter Mork Sheet Metal Works, at 1970 Chestnut Street which opened around the winter holidays of 1932–33.`The second-generation Finns at Tenth Street Hall, operating as the Jack London Club, had a rapidly-declining membership and were forced to sell the property in the 1970s. It still exists as an official state historic site and is governed by a non-profit board of trustees. Both halls depend on rentals for their continued existence with Kaleva Lodge membership usually running at a little over a hundred members. It had a count of over 300 when I joined in 1979.

1979 FINN FORUM TORONTO CONFERENCE

To further reinforce my return to Finnish-American community life, I signed up to attend the second Finn Forum conference organized by North American Finnish academics along with their Finnish counterparts in Toronto November 1–3, 1979. I had kept in touch with my old YPSL comrade Niilo Emil Koponen (1928–2013), then homesteading with his wife Joan on Chena Ridge above Fairbanks, AK and he also signed up for Finn Forum. I hadn’t seen Niilo since early 1974 in Chicago when he and his growing young family stopped by on their return to Alaska from the East Coast. He was also deeply into his Finnish “roots.” The first conference had been held at the University of Minnesota in 1974.

Scholars from the United States, Canada, and Finland read papers at Toronto which we found an exciting experience dealing on the theme of the Finnish immigrant Diaspora to North America. Auvo Kostiainen, professor in the General History Department was one of the prominent lecturers. I don’t recall whether Dr. Reino Kero of Turku was among those included. Dr. Michael G. Karni of Minnesota, editor of the periodical Finnish-Americana was one of the organizers and lecturers, as well as scholar Marianne Wargelin of Minneapolis. as I recall. Dr. Michael Loukinen, sociologist and filmmaker from Northern Michigan University, was also featured as was Dr. Marsha Penti who read an excellent paper about Finnish immigrant cranberry growers in southeastern Massachusetts, being a daughter of one of these families. Sirkka Tuomi Holm talked about her life growing up in the Finnish-American hall theatre tradition in Warren, Ohio and Baltimore, Maryland. She had studied and worked in theatre as a younger woman in New York which was of great interest to both Niilo and me as we had spent our childhoods seeing Finnish theater either in Massachusetts or in New York City where Niilo was raised. It was a rich experience participating in this forum. Among those attending were Sävele Syrjälä, editor of the newspaper Raivaaja in Fitchburg and his young protege Jonathan Ratila, a Fitchburg native who had recently graduated from college in Vermont. (Jonathan worked for years as Raivaaja’s business manager and curated his community’s Finnish archives for decades. We’re still in touch.) The Toronto forum stimulated my interest in further independent study as a labor and socialist historian, which has been at the forefront of my intellectual pursuits ever since, these Memoirs being their culmination during my 90s.

End of Installment 26