“Are your parents here in this country?” asked the garrulous drunk of the Chinese boys. The drunk, a florid, swarthy, affable man holding a big beer can, sat in the back of the 14 Mission bus. I sat to the left of the boys in seats with our backs to the side of the bus. We looked across to people sitting on the other side. It was a little like sitting around a dinner table but without the table.
“Yes,” said one boy. “We’re from here.”
I’d been swapping stories with the boys. They were clearly all-American. We had started assessing taco places as the bus sped up Mission Street on Sunday. A long line waited outside La Taqueria at 25th Street.
“It’s good, but not that good,” I said.
“Yeah,” said one of the boys. “I live in the Excelsior and there’s a great taco place out by Onondaga. The line is shorter. But my favorite is El Farolito.”
I could see this kid was a regular taco aficionado.
“No, really,” said the drunk. “When did you come from China?”
After that, the boys stopped interacting with him. But I couldn’t restrain myself, even though I could see others on the bus would prefer to ignore him. We continued to chat loudly about ethnicities.
“I’m Mexican,” he announced.
“I’m Scandinavian, but way back there,” I said, waving my arm toward ancestors in the distance.
I looked around at the others at our “table.” A young dark-skinned black man with a thin nose sat in the corner on the back bench frowning as he read Dale Carnegie’s How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking. He looked so serious, I wanted to hug him. A young pale woman sitting across from me pretended to float in another universe, looking past me out the window with half-closed eyes. Next to her a beautiful well-dressed Latinx adjusted his ear buds and consulted his phone, multitasking. I knew he was paying nearly as much attention to us as he had to the product on his glossy, curly black mane, but he tried not to look up. He was enjoying the conversation. I kind of wanted to hug him too.
An old Mexican man sitting on my left was the only rider as obviously entertained by the drunk as I was. The drunk had been mostly talking to himself in Spanish and periodically the man on my left would translate for my benefit, then giggle. But the drunk also spoke fluent English. He wanted us to know that he was more than just Mexican. His family was Spanish.
“My grandmother in Spain had blue eyes and everything,” he announced.
“My Swedish grandmother had brown eyes,” I said. “I guess that’s where I got them. The purple hair is all mine, though. None of my people had purple hair.”
The drunk grinned, the Latinx smiled, the old guy sitting on my left giggled. The boys were still quiet, but as I got off at my stop, I thought I could see them smirking.
On the plane, I sit next to an old guy, white hair, who is busily underlining the folded pages of USA Today as he reads. I finally have to ask him why. He tells me he reads, underlines and then gives the paper to his wife so she can read it and they can discuss at breakfast every morning. It’s his ritual, but he usually reads the Wall Street Journal. They had USA Today at the hotel where they were staying in Palo Alto. They had attended his grandson’s Stanford graduation. His wife is sitting across the aisle watching video.
We strike up a conversation. He wants to tell me about the Stanford Experience. I wonder to myself if it’s like the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But no. He paints a picture of privileged seclusion on a beautiful campus. The graduation ceremony was impressive. The mass spectacular.
A Catholic mass? At the graduation?
Well, yes, but there were masses for every religion.
I wonder to myself what the atheists did.
He wants to brag about his grandchildren who are serially graduating from colleges around the country, keeping him and his wife busy this season. They live in Florida on the west side. He was originally from Chicago.
I steer him away from grandchildren, who it seems are all whip smart, super athletes and excel at everything.
Stanford teaches critical thinking skills he says. We agree this is important.
What did you do before retiring?
I made a great career in the FBI, starting as an agent and working my way up. I worked all over, headed the FBI in South Carolina, worked in Washington DC for four years.
Ok, this is getting interesting, far better than grandchildren. He starts by condescending. Read, he says, pointing to the paper he is underlining.
I doubt USA Today will tell me about the FBI, I say.
He smiles. Well, you’re right about that.
Did you start under Hoover? What did you think of him?
He looks me over. His eyes are robin egg blue. You won’t agree with me. I never met him. I think he built a great organization.
What about all the people falsely accused during the McCarthy period whose lives were ruined?
No answer to that.
We start on immigration. He tells me he doesn’t think we should let Muslims in to the US. Their law is different from ours. They should stay in Muslim countries, but they all want to go to Germany. They want the free stuff. He starts to lecture about Shia, Sunni.
But don’t we have some responsibility for creating the refugee crisis? Have you seen the pictures of Syria? It’s a bombed out wasteland. Would you want to be sent back there? How is this different from our sending boatloads of Jews back to Germany to face Nazi extermination during WWII?
He says his wife is Jewish. FDR was an anti-Semite.
What about the Japanese incarceration?
In retrospect? Terrible. He doesn’t see the similarity.
He says he loves the Hispanics. They are Christian, they work hard, they come from a similar culture. They can assimilate. Muslims can’t.
What is your vision? Do you see this as a Christian nation? Is this a war for religious domination?
He wants to change to subject back to Stanford, but can’t remember a word. The problem with an old brain, he says, and I sympathize. He taps his wife’s shoulder to ask. She looks annoyed, pulls out an earbud and answers. We talk more about the Stanford Experience, but I can never get him to explain its essence.
Since retiring from the FBI he has worked as a legal ethicist in private business helping businesses to do the right thing.
Yeah, it hurts the bottom line if you’re getting sued all the time.
No it’s more than that. It’s about morals. He thinks Comey should have been fired immediately after Loretta Lynch had the private meeting with Bill Clinton on that plane. I don’t understand this, but get that he is not a Comey fan, that he thinks Comey was unethical.
Sometime later he is still underlining furiously. I wonder if this is a holdover from his FBI work. The headline on the print-out is “Trump’s Cheese in the Maze Strategy.” It comes from a right-wing site called Big League Politics which refers to the media as the Fake News Media.
You should read what I read, he says.
I ask how he thinks Trump is doing.
He wasn’t a Trump supporter in the beginning, but now he’s on board. Likes his style. Likes what he did with NATO. They have to pay their share. Thinks he sent North Korea a message.
He and his wife go to lectures, read about world affairs. They heard a lecture at the World Affairs Council where the speaker thought we ought to ally with Russia. They are another white country he said.
How does he reconcile this with our war in Syria?
The Kurds are doing the fighting. He likes the Kurds. But then there’s Turkey.
Do you think the Kurds should have their own homeland?
He starts to lecture about the history but doesn’t answer. Mentions Israel, Saudi Arabia.
Why are we selling arms to the Saudis? Those 9-11 guys were Saudi. Why are we so close to them? Are we sending them to war with Iran? Where do you see it leading? Will borders change? No answer to that.
What’s your vision? How do you see it ending? Do you think there’s any possible strategy other than war?
No.
We move to history. He thinks we should have kept fighting in Vietnam. We could have won that war with two more weeks.
What was the point? To open a market for American goods? We’ve done that. Do you think it would have been worth the tens of thousand of lives lost?
Yes, if we’d won. Were you against the war?
Yes, I was a protester.
My wife was too. But she’s come over to my side.
I wish I could talk to his wife. Has she come over in the interest of domestic tranquility?
We agree to disagree. It’s been a polite conversation and we agree we could keep talking for days. I’ve been the one asking questions. He hasn’t seemed particularly interested in me. But he asks me why I’m going to DC. I tell him about the Great Labor Arts Exchange and that my chorus is doing a performance about Paul Robeson. Do you know who he was?
No. The name is familiar.
My wife Holly thinks I should always introduce Robeson as the Old Man River singer. People don’t know who he was. I describe him as a football player, then as a singer and actor, a black activist, a communist.
Ah, he was a commie is all he says.
The FBI and US government harassed him and ruined his life.
We talk about travel. He has been to far more places in the world than I. They have a bucket list and are planning a trip to Israel, Jordan and Egypt in the near future.
The topic turns to health care. Beware single payer he says. The Canadians have to wait in line.
But isn’t that better than no healthcare? Rich people always have the option of paying for faster doctor visits. I’m a big fan of single payer and will work to get it in California.
Do you like Bernie Sanders?
I hesitate, thinking about the rift in the Democratic Party. Well, I consider myself a socialist. Yes.
As the long flight ends and we stand up, the people in seats around us chime in. They could hear our conversation. One says it’s just like her family. I say did it feel like Thanksgiving and apologize. Another says she is passionate about single payer. We introduce ourselves. Her name is Toni Rizzo and she has had a radio show in Mendocino County where she’s talked about healthcare often. The look on her face is pained, knowing. She’s talked to other guys like this.
It’s important to be passionate says the man.
As we wait to deplane he tells me all about his workout schedule, how strong he is at 70. I thought he was older. He wants to know if we need help with luggage. Asserting his physical dominance. I think he wants to arm wrestle. The last defense. I demur.
Sing loud he says as he departs.
I am left chilled by this experience. Here is a guy who claims to be a critical thinker, who claims to care about ethics, but who supports Trump, who believes we must exile Muslims, who thinks we should have kept fighting till we won the war in Vietnam, who thinks there is no answer to world problems other than war. We had a civil, respectful conversation. I really wanted to understand his point of view and now that I do, I’m horrified.
The episode reminds me of a favorite lyric from the Indigo Girls song “Tether”
I kicked up the dirt, and I said to my neighbor We keep making it worse, we keep getting it wrong. He tucked in his shirt, he stood a little bit straighter He said we need a few less words, dear, we need a few more guns
Mom was no communist. There’s no evidence that she even flirted with the idea like so many did during the volatile period between the world wars. It was hard to find a communist in Yakima, Washington to flirt with. Unless you count William O. Douglas, the US Supreme Court justice, whom John Birchers dubbed “the only known communist in Yakima County.”
No, during my mother’s early life, the county was run by racist xenophobes whose mission was to Make America White Again.
In such a reactionary environment, how did my mother turn into a liberal? Trying to understand her politics, I’ve been investigating the history of her hometown, which is also my hometown. Yakima, on the dry eastern side of the state with a population of about 20,000, was a conservative place when my mother, Florence Wick, was growing up in the 1920s and 30s. Today, with about 91,000 people, it remains a red blot in a blue state whose population is concentrated on the west coast.
Eastern Washington is desert without irrigation
Catholic missionaries had settled in the valley and white settlers followed in the 1850s as the US Army drove the indigenous population onto a nearby reservation. The Indians had fiercely resisted in what were known as the Indian Wars of the 1850s. The Yakama (the tribe changed to this spelling) Indian reservation is home to several different groups that were forced to settle there in what we call the Lower Valley, a few miles south of the town of Yakima. The sagebrush country with fertile volcanic soil was partly developed and irrigated by Japanese immigrant farmers who began arriving before the turn of the 20th century.
Florence Wick at school in the 1920s
Researching what life was like in my hometown in this period, I found a book written by Thomas Heuterman, who was my journalism professor at Washington State U. The Burning Horse: The Japanese Experience in the Yakima Valley 1920-1942, documents discrimination against the Japanese community in Wapato, a town on the Yakama reservation where the farmers leased land. In emails Prof. Heuterman told me he had been surprised to find what his research showed: a long history of racism and exclusion in the Yakima Valley.
He wrote: “I went into the project predicting that the Valley Japanese were an exception among all the prejudice of the era. That’s what I remembered as a child from my folks’ attitudes. But, as you know, I found just the opposite. Most of the Nisei (second generation) who have read the book also didn’t know that racism was going on; their folks had protected them from that too.”
Japanese farmers were persecuted relentlessly. Their houses, barns and crops were bombed and burned. Newspapers stoked the fires of racism. Prof. Heuterman’s research focused on stories in the local and state newspapers. Here is some of what he found. These were headlines in the Seattle Star during hearings to determine the fate of Japanese immigrants in Washington State in 1920.
WILL YOU HELP TO KEEP THIS A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY?
JAPS PLANS MENACE WHITE CIVILIZATION
Japanese plans for expansion at the expense of the white race are a deeper menace to Caucasian civilization than were ever the dreams of Pan-German imperialists
In the 1920 version of fake news, testifiers at the hearings repeated lies about the Japanese and weird ideas about racial purity that were then amplified by newspapers across the state. A well-organized American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Anti-Japanese League perpetuated the apocryphal threat of the Yellow Peril. Then the Grange took up the cause. Anti-alien laws passed in Washington were modeled on those of California, which in turn had been promoted by influential Southern whites. The goal in Yakima was to drive all Japanese out of the valley.
Anti-immigrant sentiment reached a peak in the 1920s and 30s in the Yakima Valley and in the entire West. As a child and young adult, my mother must have been aware of it. I was shocked to learn that the KKK held a rally in 1924, which drew 40,000 people to a field outside the town after the state refused to grant them access to the state fairgrounds in Yakima. A thousand robed KKK members marched in the parade.
Farmers welcomed migrant laborers when labor was scarce. But when the economic cycle moved from boom to bust, these workers were targets of violence, forced removal and alien restriction laws. American workers who saw their jobs being taken by immigrants who would work for less were some of the worst perpetrators of racist violence. Racist organizations gained influence after World War I. In the Red Scare of 1917-20 nativism swept the whole country. During that time Alien and Sedition laws were used to deport hundreds of immigrants deemed by the government to be radicals, the anarchist Emma Goldman among them.
In Yakima, terrorism was directed at other groups as well as the Japanese. In 1933, the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) led a strike for higher wages of white migrant farmworkers that was put down by orchardists with pipes, clubs and bats. Then the strikers were marched five miles to a stockade that had been constructed in the middle of downtown Yakima. Some of those arrested were jailed for six months, and the stockade stayed up as a deterrent for a decade. In 1938, 200 men set upon blacks in Wapato, beating them and setting fire to one of their houses. Filipinos also became targets of harassment.
Congdon Castle
I grew up near the Congdon orchard where the 1933 strike took place. The owner’s summerhouse mansion was called Congdon Castle and as kids we thought it was haunted. No one really lived there except caretakers. The wealthy owners had always lived in another state. I have a vague memory of Flo telling us about the “battle of Congdon Castle.” She surely knew about it. The primary industry in Yakima, then and now, was agriculture and agriculture was always big news.
Congdon Orchards label
Probably my mother already knew which side she was on by the time these events occurred. Her parents, immigrants themselves from Sweden and Norway, can’t have felt completely safe. Family lore has her father enduring taunts for his foreign accent from students at Yakima High School where he taught commercial arts. Her father’s thinking surely influenced young Flo. She told me she remembered his troubled reaction to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants whose incarceration lasted from 1920 to 1927. She was 14 years old when they were executed by the US government. Flo’s Norwegian father took the side of the immigrants, who most agreed had been falsely accused.
My mother’s family in about 1922. She is the one on the right with glasses.
This was the Yakima of my mother’s youth, a place where, if you read the newspapers, you could not escape the dominant paradigm. But by the time I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, this history escaped us. Our family often visited Fort Simcoe, the restored Army fort on the Yakama reservation, but I never learned about the Indian Wars as a child. Indians and revolution were scrubbed from our textbooks and xenophobia persisted.
My brother Don remembers as a freshman in high school in 1967 defending the rights of Native Americans in history class. The popular teacher launched into a diatribe against him in front of the whole class. She said Indians had an inferior culture and deserved to be conquered. She said they were dirty, barbaric and uncivilized. She believed it was right of a superior culture to war against them and subjugate them. This was the inevitable march of history, she said. When Don told Flo about it she was outraged. She and the teacher had been friends but that killed their friendship.
The xenophobes in Yakima and elsewhere were able to successfully construct a racial identity, the “white race,” made from hundreds of diverse cultures, people who spoke different languages and dialects, people who had themselves been the victims of oppression, as a way to successfully divide the population. In his book, Irish on the Inside, Tom Hayden posits that Irish immigrants had more in common with blacks and slaves than the white rulers who starved and oppressed them. Before epigenetics became a thing, Hayden made the case that we have all been affected by the plight of our ancestors. “That the Irish are white and European cannot erase the experience of our having been invaded, occupied, starved, colonized and forced out of our homeland,” he wrote.
Hayden wanted to break the assimilationist mold among Irish Americans.“If Irish Americans identify with the 10 percent of the world which is white, Anglo American and consumes half the global resources, we have chosen the wrong side of history and justice. We will become the inhabitants of the Big House ourselves, looking down on the natives we used to be. We will become our nightmare without a chance of awakening from its grip.”
My grandparents had a strong immigrant identity, but the advantage they had is that they were, in the language of the American Legion, of the “white race.” The Legion, the KKK and others demanded to make America white again. I’ve no clue how the xenophobes felt about Southern Italians, but it seems that if you came from Europe you were ok with them. In Yakima, they reserved deepest hatred for Japanese. But they also scorned anyone not of the “white race.” The irony was that these invading whites had themselves displaced indigenous people and it’s difficult to understand how they failed to see this giant contradiction. The trick, of course, was to make them subhuman.
Flo with her precious books
That Flo’s parents identified as immigrants rather than white informed her understanding of the world. Flo was also a voracious reader and certainly was influenced by what she read. She spent hours at the Yakima public library, receiving her first library card at a young age and migrating to the adult section before children were allowed. She was one of those kids who took a flashlight to bed and often read under the covers at night.
Flo’s library card
She was also active in the YWCA, quite a progressive organization during that period just as it is today. Besides championing racial integration, the YW also lent support to Japanese families who were incarcerated during the war. Her involvement in the YW got Flo out of Yakima to meetings across Washington State and in the big cities of Chicago and Columbus, widening her worldview.
Flo’s father, Ben Wick, overlapped with William O. Douglas for a year in 1921-22 when they both taught at Yakima High School. Flo may have known Douglas as a child. She would have been nine years old when he got fed up with teaching school in Yakima and and left to make his fortune in the East. In any case, Flo admired Douglas greatly and I believe she shared his politics, which were shaped by class. He grew up fatherless and poor. When discussing how his personal experiences influenced his view of the law, Douglas said, “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the IWWs who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”
He was no communist either but he did defend the concept of revolution in a 1969 screed. He is famously quoted in Points of Rebellion: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.” He survived two impeachment attempts.
When I asked my lawyer friend Judy Kurtz about Douglas she said, “Legal standing for trees!” He was famous for defending nature and the environment, often in dissenting opinions. She added, “I wish he was still on the court. God help us now.”
Douglas returned to our hometown later in his life and Flo and I ran into him and his wife Cathy in the 1970s. We had decided to splurge on lunch at the Larson Building, the town’s only high-rise, an elegant Art Deco architectural gem built in 1931. We spotted them as we walked into the lobby. “Justice Douglas, Justice Douglas,” my mother entreated as she ran up to him. He graciously remembered her father.
The wartime internment of Japanese did not happen in a vacuum. Finally, after decades of domestic terrorism, the American Legion and its ilk got their way. In June 1942, 1061 Japanese were evacuated from the valley, sent by rail to a processing center at the Portland livestock grounds, and then incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming for the remainder of the war—800 miles from home. Only a few resettled in the Yakima valley.
One of my heroes, the labor organizer Sister Addie Wyatt said, “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.”
This is where we come from. I fervently hope it is not where we’re going. I’m so glad people like immigrants and Americans of color, the Wobblies, my mother, my grandfather and William O. Douglas found the will to resist.
Whenever I visit my friend Madeline Mixer in Berkeley, we usually lunch at the UC Women’s Faculty Club on the campus. Madeline has been a member for decades, although she was never an actual member of the UC faculty. She was invited to join when she worked there as a statistician in the 1950s. No one can argue that Madeline is not a Bears fan. She was active in student government and served as vice president of the student body when she was a student there in the 1940s. Later Madeline worked as the regional chief of the US Dept. of Labor Women’s Bureau where she supported and defended tradeswomen. That’s where we met in the 1970s.
I love our lunches at the Women’s Faculty Club partly because of the great food. You don’t have to order the “salad bar” but I always do because it’s so tempting. I’m the kind of eater who wants to taste every dish, and the bar has so many choices, mostly vegetarian, with free range and locally sustainable everything. My compliments to the chef.
Madeline Mixer
I’ve copied the short history of the club from its web page. The page also includes bios of some of Berkeley’s female faculty leaders. My heroine is Pauline Sperry, the first female professor of mathematics, who stood up to the state and refused to sign the anti-Communist loyalty oath in 1950. For that she was fired. http://www.womensfacultyclub.com/history.html
Women’s Faculty Club menu
The Women’s Faculty Club is the only women’s faculty club in the nation with its own building. It was conceived and formed through the initiative of Dean Lucy Ward Stebbins, the second Dean of Women on the Berkeley campus. In the fall of 1919 Dean Stebbins circulated an invitation to all women faculty to attend a small organizing meeting to discuss forming a group where “we might know all our colleagues better and have more opportunities to discuss our common interests.” This meeting was held at the Cloyne Court apartment of Dr. Jessica Peixotto, first female full professor at Berkeley.
At the time women were not allowed into the Men’s Faculty Club and the women members of the faculty felt the need “for a place of their own, as a refuge from the bustle and confusion on the campus.” After the first meeting the group held an organizing dinner and invited seventy-six women who were either faculty, worked in the University Library or held positions of administrative responsibility. No minutes were taken of this first dinner meeting but the seeds for the club had been planted. By December of 1919 a constitution and by-laws had been adopted and a seven-member Board of Directors elected. Dean Stebbins was elected the first President and the women began work on a financial plan to build a permanent club house.
Photos of groundbreaking female faculty hang on the walls
The women met for meetings and tea in a variety of locations and began to meet with both the representative for the Regents and the campus architect John Galen Howard. Howard was selected as the architect for the building and presented a number of plans. The Finance Committee and the Executive Building Committee were jointly responsible to raise the money and sell stock.
The building was completed in 1923 and after years of hard work the women now had a permanent home.
It is massive, about the size of a small suitcase, with a dark blue padded leather cover now, 70 years later, quite beat up. It weighs 25 pounds. Throughout our childhoods my brothers and I pulled it out, looked through it, listened to our mother’s war stories. The scrapbook is filled with photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, travel paraphernalia and it tells the story of Mom’s two years as an American Red Cross (ARC) “donut girl” in Europe during World War II. With a crew of three other women she drove a clubmobile, a truck retrofitted with a kitchen, near the front lines, making and serving coffee and donuts to soldiers of the Third Infantry Division in Italy, France, Germany and Austria.
Mom was a scrapbook maker and for that I am now grateful as I try to piece together the events of her life. Perhaps she had the idea for the album even before she sailed to Europe on a hospital ship in May 1944. I do know that the act of putting it together when she returned home after the war in 1946 salved her sadness at the deaths of so many and helped her readjust to life stateside where it seemed compatriots had moved on and no longer thought about the war.
When my mother, Flo, died in 1983 at the age of 70, I claimed the album and it’s been stored in garages and closets ever since, occasionally brought out for perusal by relatives or friends with an interest in World War II. For a time it lived in the mold-infected storage room and so it was infected along with other archives. I’ve exposed each page to sunlight in an effort to reduce the mold and that’s helped, but when I really want to examine the book I don a respirator to avoid breathing in clouds of invisible mold spores.
In trying to understand the World War II era, my ongoing research includes reading about this historical period and the books I know Flo was reading during the 30s and 40s. Her saved scrapbooks from the 1930s give many clues to what she was thinking and reading, setting the stage for the advent of the 1940s and the war. I’ve found useful artifacts in boxes saved by my brother Don and my cousin Gail. Don dug out a box of Flo’s essays and letters-to-the-editor from the 1960s to the 1980s that I had thought were lost. We have precious few of her personal letters, but my cousin recently found two letters written to her mother, Flo’s sister Ruth, from Europe in 1944! Don, the family historian, has helped me track down information about Flo’s clubmobile comrades. They are now all dead, but I’m in touch with one of their daughters, who is providing another perspective on the “donut girls.” I’ve read accounts of their experiences, although I haven’t found one that mirrors Flo’s particular journey. And I’ve read the stories of men who served in the Third Infantry Division, to which Flo’s clubmobile was attached.
I’ve dreamed of traveling to Europe to trace Flo’s route through towns and battlegrounds. Someday I may do that but I’m thankful that now I can take a virtual trip right here on my computer.
Thanks for hanging in with me in the two years since I started this blog. When I first started I was expecting to stick to a theme—the history and also the current status of the tradeswomen movement. I’m a long-time tradeswoman activist and acknowledged as the institutional memory of the movement in the San Francisco Bay Area (even though my poor memory is legendary). I figured if I didn’t write our history, no one else would and then it might be lost. In my years of organizing in the anti-war, civil rights, union, feminist and tradeswomen movements I/we have learned much from mistakes as well as successes and I regret that we have been able to create so few institutional paths to pass along our knowledge. We have continually asked the question: how can we help young activists learn from our mistakes and keep from having to reinvent the wheel with every generation? That has been one goal, to tell the history of my generation of women who broke into nontraditional blue collar trades, to share tactics, strategies and also philosophy.
Even after this disastrous election I remain an optimist because I, and my whole generation of feminists, can see how much we have changed the world. Whole new vistas have opened for women in my lifetime, and as a result I’ve been able to choose a life where I’m happy and content and doing what I want to do instead of how I might otherwise feel obligated to live. I emphasize that we did this ourselves. We women. And I take credit for my part in it. I helped change the world so that my own life could be better. That doesn’t mean we needn’t fight like hell to keep what we’ve got and expand the reach of our movement.
With Flo’s World War II scrapbook
I do intend to write about these things. But first, my mother. If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that I’ve been discovering all sorts of interesting things while going through Flo’s old scrapbooks from the 1930s. It’s been so much fun to think about what my mother was like as a young woman, to parse out her dreams and the evolution of her thinking. The 30s was an interesting decade with many parallels to our present period in history. I want to keep exploring the 30s through Flo’s eyes, and now I want to move on to the 1940s. I’m about to embark on a most daunting project—telling the story of my mother’s time working as a Red Cross “donut girl” in the European theater in WWII. Flo left a giant scrapbook, which I’ve always been planning to document. Now is the time.
Just as I want to draw lessons from the history of the tradeswomen movement, I also hope to learn from my mother’s own personal history as an informed person engaged with the world of her time. I invite you to come with me on this journey.
In my world of tradeswomen, unions, building trades, apprenticeship and worker safety, the appointments made by governors and presidents matter. The people who actually do the work of government, the staff that we community-based organizations seek to partner with, influence the success of our missions and the strategies we employ a great deal.
Me and Amy Reynolds posing as Rosies at a Rosie the Riveter event
In the week after the election, comparing Trump to the one-time California governor, my good friend suggested that Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t so bad after all. He was pretty bad, I said.
My friend hadn’t had to work with people in the state government during the Schwarzenegger administration but I did and I know what happened in our state. It wasn’t just that our governor was accused of manhandling women and fathered a child out of wedlock with his maid. I would certainly prefer that men who have so little regard for women not be elected to office. But I’m most concerned with the people they appoint to government positions and the policies they promote and enact.
Before our Democrat governor Gray Davis was overthrown by a Republican cabal financed by Daryl Issa, I had been working with people in the Division of Apprenticeship Standards (DAS) and its parent the Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) to help women enter the construction trades through union apprenticeships. We rejoiced when one of our own was appointed to head the DAS, Henry Nunn, a black man who had been the apprenticeship director for the painters union. I had met him when we were interviewed together on a public TV program. By that time, Tradeswomen had been fighting with the DAS to pressure them to enforce state affirmative action regulations for decades. We had even filed a lawsuit against the department in 1981, which got us little. But Henry Nunn understood the necessity of overcoming the sexist racist hiring practices in the building trades and he brought on a staff that really cared about these issues. Our nonprofit, Tradeswomen Inc., built a great working relationship with these folks who took seriously their pledge to make working people’s lives better.
During Davis’ administration, we proposed to the DAS staff that we work together on projects promoting apprenticeship around the state. State regulated union apprenticeships offer the best training and highest paid jobs in construction. Among our joint projects was an apprenticeship fair for high school students that included women and girls that the DAS planned to roll out around the state.
After Governor Davis was recalled, Henry Nunn and his staff lost their jobs. Schwarzenegger, an actor with no government experience, essentially replaced department heads with the previous Republican governor Pete Wilson’s people. Republicans, in the state and nationally, have shown little interest in our issues or in enforcing affirmative action regulations. Under Republican administrations working people and tradeswomen have suffered.
When Jimmy Carter was president, tradeswomen were optimistic that new affirmative action regulations would increase our numbers, and they did. It turns out having the federal government in your corner is a huge advantage. We had reason to hope that women would soon achieve a critical mass in the construction trades.
Sister electricians at the Women Building the Nation conference
And then came Reagan. At a recent exhibit of his photos of striking fruit pickers, journalist David Bacon reminded us that 40 percent of union workers voted for Reagan. Talk about voting against your own interests! Reagan had made his reputation as a union buster, so it was no surprise when the first thing he did was start busting unions. He also immediately began to dismantle and defund job training and affirmative action programs.
Tradeswomen saw that women and minorities were being targeted but still we attempted to work with the administration. At one point in the early 1980s, plumber Amy Reynolds even arranged for us to meet with Reagan’s Department of Labor representative, a guy named John Fox, who sat down with us in our tiny office in the Tenderloin. He seemed proud that he had had no prior experience with labor issues. He had been a basketball star (he said) who had worked on Reagan’s election campaign. Fox, and others in Reagan’s Labor Department we later met with in Washington DC, made it clear that their priority was to disempower unions. Because apprenticeship programs are joint projects of unions and industry, they intended to rid the system of union influence. They referred to construction jobs as “men’s work.”
Now, a month after the election of Trump, I suspect my friend is past hoping that he “won’t be so bad.” His appointments are looking far worse than Reagan’s. It’s fair to say that Trump’s appointments violate every ethical standard and it’s easy to predict that women, minorities, working people and all Americans except the 1% will be the losers.
I had given up finding out any more about my mother’s admirer, Edna L. Then, looking through a box of family photos and letters that my brother Don had taken with him to Vancouver BC, I found another scrapbook made by my mother. This was mostly high school-era, 1920s-1930 (Flo had graduated in the class of 1929½). But Flo had tucked mementos from other decades into it. Among the high school graduation notices I was delighted to find another note from Eddie (as she sometimes signed her name) in her now familiar diminutive handwriting. It was an invitation to a party during the Columbus YWCA conference. It said:
In the Wick and Lauterbach den
On Wednesday night at half past ten
We hope you’ll join us for a spree
To give us one more Council memory
Then there is one of Eddie’s cute stick figure drawings—two skirted figures with F and E written underneath. At the bottom it says, “Just to be sure that my roommate will be here to act as co-hostess with me.” While they were roommates Eddie could never keep Flo at home it seems. It was written on the Neil House stationery and dated April 27, 1938.
I had found Eddie’s last name—Lauterbach—the one thing I’d been searching for in the scrapbooks, the one thing I needed in order to find out more about the woman with a crush on my mother! I was so happy I danced around the house singing her name.
Googling her name got me to the Edna A. Lauterbach scholarship fund for the education of nurses. She was a nurse who championed home care. Then I started making up stories. I imagined Edna was an important historical figure, an organizer. Perhaps she had been a speaker at the conference. I imagined she traveled around the country on speaking tours seducing women in every town. I wondered whether Eddie had had lots of lovers, or no lovers at all. Was she the archetype of the lonely lesbian who never found her mate? Was it hard to seduce women in the 1930s?
I wrote to the scholarship fund to see if they could provide more biographical information. The marketing director got right back to me saying it was a different person, as the age didn’t match up. This Edna Lauterbach was not even born until after the meeting in Columbus took place. Scratch her and all my associated fantasies.
Then Don and I got on the computer and looked at census records. We found an Edna R. Lauterbach, born in 1900 and died in August 1979 who lived her entire life in Brooklyn, NY, after 1930 in a 43-unit apartment house on 88th Street. I found pictures of the building, built in 1926, online. The apartments now sell in the million-dollar range, so I’m guessing the neighborhood was gentrified long ago. But when the Lauterbach family moved in, this would have been a working class neighborhood. Edna had two sisters, one named Gertrude. This was a deciding clue, as her sister Gertrude had been mentioned in one of the other notes found in Flo’s scrapbooks. Don found records for Edna in the 1910, 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses. In all, she was single and living in the family home. By 1940 their father (a truck maker whose parents had emigrated from Germany) had died, but the three sisters were all still unmarried, in their thirties and living at home with their mother. A household of old maids! Perhaps all the sisters were lesbians.
According to the census, Edna worked in advertising. She was there for the Mad Men era, although she would have been 60 years old in 1960. I imagine her as the staid older secretary who runs interference for her philandering boss while correcting his spelling and grammar and making him look good. She may have worked in the industry until she retired, possibly at the same job. Had she remained a closeted lesbian all her life? Was she part of a lesbian subculture and if so, where was it centered? No doubt the environs of New York City afforded more possibilities than those of smaller towns. But I’m imagining big lesbo parties through the decades at the apartment on 88th Street in Brooklyn on the parents’ bowling nights.
It turns out Edna R. Lauterbach wasn’t anybody famous. I couldn’t even find a funeral notice for her, although we did learn that she is buried in the famous Brooklyn Greenwood cemetery with some 560,000 others. She was a workingwoman, a stenographer, who managed to keep a job through the Great Depression. In 1939 she worked in advertising 44 hours per week and 52 weeks in the year. Her income was $2040 that year.
Her parents were ethnically German and my guess is they were not Jewish. The YW is a Christian women’s organization, but it did work with Jewish groups against anti-Semitism and to prod the government to increase numbers of Jewish refugees allowed into the U.S. during the Nazi era. Jewish women did join the YW, but usually as members of the Biz-Pro groups or associated Jewish organizations.
Edna Lauterbach and my mother were two of the thousands of workingwomen who benefited from their membership in the Business and Professional Women’s organizations under the umbrella of the YWCA. One benefit was being able to make friends with other workingwomen from around the country.
Eddie surely had a giant crush on Flo and my heart aches as I read her letters. My mother never revealed that she’d had a sexual relationship with another woman but when I came out to her in the 1970s she did confess that she had known lesbians. And the name Edna Lauterbach is vaguely familiar to me. Did Flo tell me about her? I can’t remember. But it seems as if they kept up the friendship for some years at least. What was the nature of their relationship? They were certainly close friends, and possibly lovers, although I found no conclusive proof.
I have no evidence that they ever saw each other again after 1941 when Flo traveled to New York to visit Eddie. My mother returned to her hometown of Yakima, Washington where (after a stint in Europe with the Red Cross during WWII) she married, raised four kids and lived the rest of her life. Edna L. lived out her life in her family home on 88th Street in Brooklyn.
There is so much more I want to know about my mother’s admirer. Did she frequent the lesbian bars in Manhattan? Was she involved in the blooming lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s? Did she continue to be active in the YWCA? I do know that, even if she and my mother were lovers, the affair would have been long-distance and periodic. And perhaps Eddie’s attentions were not returned at all.
Dearest Eddie, I hope you found love in your lifetime. I hope you found a woman who could love you back.
Among the many questions I wish I could have asked my mother: When did you first have sex? Were you ever attracted to a woman?
We came of age at very different times. My mother turned 20 in 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression. I was 20 in 1969, the zenith of the Countercultural Revolution.
As close as we were, there were things her generation just didn’t talk about—private things. My generation talked about everything, even things that probably should have been kept private.
Whether or not my mother was ever attracted to a woman, I have found evidence that at least one woman was attracted to her. After I discovered the letters from Edna L., my mother’s ardent admirer, I searched in vain for her last name and any identifying information in Mom’s scrapbooks. They had roomed together in the Neil House Hotel in Columbus, Ohio for the national YWCA convention in April 1938. But “Eddie” (as she often signed her name) suggests in one note that they had met the previous year at a YW conference in Chicago.
“It has been fun to continue our friendship begun in Chicago (or even earlier) and I hope we shall be friends far into the future,” wrote Eddie.
I can’t imagine what Eddie means by “even earlier.” I didn’t think Flo had traveled east from Washington State before the Chicago trip, but I have one piece of evidence that suggests otherwise. She gave me a small painting and wrote on the back, “Bought at Dayton’s in Minneapolis in the 1930s. Sent to daughter Molly in San Francisco 2/82. Flo Martin.” So perhaps there had been previous meetings where they connected that Flo had not recorded in the scrapbooks. Had Flo and Eddie schemed for a year to room together in Columbus? They must have planned ahead at least.
So, my new obsession: Edna L. Reading her love notes to Flo warmed my heart and I began to identify with Eddie who slyly references “baths” and late-night “tuckin’ in” (her quotes, not mine). From reading her notes, I conclude she wanted to seduce my mother. Did she?
Some things I know about Eddie: She lived in New York. She was participating in the YWCA conference, so she could have been active in a Business and Professional Women’s Club, as was Flo, or in the YW. Chances are that Eddie was older than Flo, who was only 24 when they roomed together in Columbus. One clue I found in Eddie’s letters: they are literate with perfect spelling and punctuation. This suggests that she worked in an office and not a factory.
What did she look like? My mother’s scrapbooks from the 1930s are filled with pictures, but as far as I can tell there are none of Eddie or the YW conferences. But who knows? Flo didn’t caption anything in these early scrapbooks. In trying to imagine how Eddie looked, I could not even assume that she was white. Even in 1938, the YW strove to include racial minorities.
Participating in these conferences must have felt to my mother and her comrades like early feminist gatherings did to my generation of feminists. The meetings were focused on making institutional changes to give women and minorities more comprehensive rights. These women were leading a movement for social change, just as we did. The artifacts Flo saved in her scrapbooks show that many of these women built loving friendships with each other. The warmth expressed in their greetings illustrates deep feeling. From receipts she saved, I see they sent flowers to each other as thank yous, a practice I wish in retrospect my generation of feminist activists had adopted.
The Columbus conference was a continual round of meetings. In her love notes Eddie grumbles about not getting to see Flo back at the room until late at night.
“Aren’t we having a good time even though I have to sit up nights and wait for a chance to see you?”
“I certainly am enjoying being with you—even if I don’t have that opportunity ‘cept in the wee hours mostly, after I’ve tucked you in. I’ll be tuckin’ you in any minute now when you get back from your meeting on findings…”
Apparently the meetings went long into the night. Another participant noted, “Here’s to more 2am meetings.”
Flo had saved the banquet book from the YW convention and its inside covers were filled with inscriptions from attendees. Altogether there are 27 signatures. Nicknames were popular and they seem to have nicknamed Flo “Cricket.”
They all signed their full names, except Eddie who signed “Love—Eddie.” It’s an indication that their relationship was special, but disappointing for me because Eddie never signed her last name.
In the banquet book Eddie wrote: “Dearest Florence—You are one grand girl and a swell pal! These interludes of Council and Convention will always be happy memories because you shared them with me. I hope you’ll “bother” me “for years to come” and some day I’m coming to see you in the Northwest! Love—Eddie L.”
Did Eddie ever visit the Northwest? There is nothing in my mother’s scrapbook to suggest that she did. But items she saved show that Flo visited Eddie in New York in 1941. There are menus from the Swiss Village Inn and Struppler’s (next to the Cordova 917 Grand Ave.) I found a cocktail napkin from Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Bar and Cocktail Lounge, “Meeting Place of the World.” She kept a newspaper article citing record heat in NYC, a humid 91 degrees on the hottest Sept. 10 in a decade. There’s also a receipt from Sweden House Inc. (Swedish decorative arts) at Rockefeller Center for $1.53 dated 9/10/41, and a receipt for a single person at the Taft Hotel, 7th Ave at 50th St. NYC, and a menu from the Taft Grill.
The Taft Hotel, a 22-story high-rise built in 1926, was one of New York’s premiere tourist hotels with 2000 rooms right on Times Square at Radio City in Midtown. My mother, a small-town gal from Yakima, Washington, must have been thrilled to stay in such a glamorous big city accommodations. I bet she had a great view from room 1045.
How could my mother afford this trip? Had she been saving pennies for three years while working full time and helping to support her family? I could never afford to stay in hotels as a young working person, nor could my family afford hotels when I was growing up. On vacations we drove to the Cascade Mountains and pitched a tent. When I traveled I always arranged to stay in the homes of friends or comrades. It made me wonder if Eddie had chipped in to pay for the room at the Taft Hotel. Or maybe Eddie sprang for the hotel while Flo paid for the train trip. Perhaps she and Eddie had been corresponding furiously for three years, planning this tryst.
Flo also saved a Christmas gift card in its envelope from Macy’s New York. It is signed “With much love to you, Wickie dear—Edna L.”
There’s another note on a card with a monogramed L with no date: “My best love to a very good pal—Edna L.”
Then there’s a note that reads “Florence dear—Just got tickets for Watch on the Rhine—only chance it seems—Gertrude (my sister) will be joining us—will call you about meeting for dinner & theater tomorrow night. Edie L. (The play, by Lillian Hellman, won the New York Drama Critics prize in 1941).
Did Flo travel to New York just to visit Eddie? I can’t find any evidence of meetings of the YWCA or Biz-Pro in NYC in September 1941. Did she stay in a hotel and not with Eddie because she and Eddie wanted a place to be alone?
Painting bought in Minneapolis
From the evidence, it looks like Flo travelled to New York by herself. In those days you could take the North Coast Limited on the Northern Pacific Railway all the way from Yakima to Chicago. Then you transferred to the Pennsylvania Railroad for the final leg to New York. Of course, by this time Flo was a veteran train traveler, having already been to Chicago, Columbus and Minneapolis.
As much as I’ve fantasized about my mother’s lesbian affair, I think the evidence is mixed. It wasn’t just that Flo had had lots of boyfriends, or that she married a man. That’s a story many lesbians tell. While I never married a man, I spent a decade experimenting with heterosexual sex before I came out.
Flo’s inscription on the back of the painting
My mother definitely struggled with homophobia. As liberal as she was politically, Flo had difficulty accepting that my brother and I are gay. He came out first and she felt justifiably burdened by the widely accepted Freudian theory that mothers are responsible for sons’ homosexuality. Then, when I came out a few years later, she at first chalked it up to a phase I was going though. Could that be because she went through a lesbian “phase” herself?
I made up all sorts of sensational stories about Eddie and Flo from the information I found in the scrapbooks. But since Eddie’s last name remained unrecorded, I gave up learning any more about her. Whatever happened between Flo and Eddie, I’m sure my mother had to wrestle with her own internalized homophobia and that of the dominant culture. At that time, in the 1930s, homosexuality was highly stigmatized and even in the big city of New York, lesbians stayed closeted to protect their jobs and reputations, meeting mostly at private house parties.
There remains the possibility that Flo was deeply in denial about her attraction/affair. I have some evidence to support this theory. My mother’s sister, Ruth, also had gay children and, while much more politically conservative, Ruth took a stand when her Presbyterian church excluded gays. She was proud of her gay kids and publicly quit the church in support of them. But she complained to me that she could never get my mother to talk about the issue. She couldn’t understand why Flo, her closest sister, had shut her out, especially with regard to a subject they both shared. I never understood this. I just assumed it had to do with Flo’s avoidance of the personal like so many in her generation, but perhaps my mother feared that her own sexual past would be revealed.
Did Flo have an affair with Eddie? I’ll never know for sure. If she were still alive, I think I could ask her now. When she died in 1983 at the age of 70, I still felt restrained from asking personal questions that I knew she would refuse to answer. Then again, maybe she never would have revealed the truth. She believed some things are best kept private.
The 2016 presidential election disturbed me deeply as it did my friends and family, but it was only when we began driving away from San Francisco on Friday that I got in touch with just how deeply.
Holly and I were making our annual trek to the San Francisco Mycological Society’s mushroom foray at a rustic camp near the town of Mendocino, a trip we always enjoy even if we don’t find edible fungi. We look forward to the peaceful quiet of the redwood forest and quirky company of the fungi crowd at the old WPA-built retreat.
But as we drove further and further into the country I felt my anxiety rising. I began to feel vulnerable in a way that reminded me of how it felt to be gay in the 1970s. Even in San Francisco gay men and lesbians were being attacked and murdered on the streets. We warred with the cops, who invaded our bars and gathering places. We certainly couldn’t count on them for protection. Just holding your lover’s hand in public required courage, but we were young and (I speak for myself) confrontational.
This sudden unsafe feeling made me ask myself how long I had been feeling safe. It had happened so gradually I hadn’t even noticed but the past 40 years have brought changes in San Francisco, and I venture to guess around the country, that have combined to make us feel safer. Gay people, as a result of our own activism, now hold public office, run influential organizations and businesses. We no longer feel the need to be closeted in order to keep our jobs. We are such a part of our city’s civic life that we no longer can claim to be outsiders.
But we live in a blue bubble in the dense coastal cities. Already friends in rural areas and red states (how did the Republicons steal the color red too?) are posting stories of anti-gay attacks.
I’m not a crier, but by the time we got to Booneville I was weepy on my way to hysterical. Standing in line at a cafe I struck up a conversation with the woman in front of me who was black. I told her I was glad she was there. I was feeling that somehow the presence of this black woman would create a safe space. I was just thankful that I was not surrounded by white men, Trump’s people. I know. Completely irrational. The woman I spoke to was with her husband, a white man. She assured me that he is with her. She told me she is a counselor for kids and that many of the kids are terrified that they or their parents will be deported. Tears streamed down my face as I babbled incoherently about how we need to protect the undocumented. We need to re establish the networks we built during the Reagan wars in central America. We need to immediately develop institutions to keep people safe.
I weep for all people in my country who are vulnerable to attack in the new era of Trump. I will do whatever I can to protect you. We must do the best we can to keep each other safe.
tradeswomn musings 