Sam Webb

Sketches on life’s highway

Highways I once traveled down
Don’t look the same
Everything has changed
Everything has changed

(Everything Has Changed, Lucinda Williams)

Introduction

From time to time I will post sketches of my experiences over a life approaching its 80th year. I hope some people might find them of interest — and who knows — maybe even bring a smile to their face. But I have no conceit that lots of people are anxiously awaiting my written words, sketching out different moments in my life. After all, the field in this genre of writing is crowded and competitive, filled with many writers with a far higher profile and far better writing skills than I possess.

If a few people find something that resonates with them, that’s a start. If more than a few, even better.

In any case, I enjoy writing these sketches for my own edification. Socrates famously quipped, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Sketch 1: On joining the Communist Party

Mine was a long journey to the Communist Party. And, lord knows, it didn’t quite turn out as I had expected. Far from it!

But isn’t that the case for many of us whose lives take unexpected turns, landing us in mental and geographical spaces that we never thought we would inhabit. Meanwhile familiar faces, landmarks, ideas, and hopes that we had embraced, sometimes tightly, for much of our lives fade into the background.

If my arc of political engagement in the Party began unremarkably in Portland, Maine, “the beautiful city by the sea,” it ended uneventfully nearly a half century later in Kingston, New York when I resigned in a brief phone call to John Bachtell, then chair of the Party. Never in my wildest dreams did I think this was something I would do anymore than I thought a half century earlier I would join the Communist Party. But I did, and in both cases there was nothing hasty about either decision. Each was considered and contained a logic rooted in experience and consequent shifts in my thinking and values.

The past is prologue

I grew up in Hallowell (pop. 2000), a small town in central Maine. It wasn’t, as you would guess, a backwater of radicalism nor a dynamic center of post World War II capitalism. Anything but! There I lived with my family of five. We were not poor; we were not rich either. Frills were few. Second hand gifts found their way underneath the Christmas tree. Going out to dinner was rare. Television was a late arrival to our living room. Wage labor was our bread and butter. And church — Catholic — was weekly, “dreaded” confession was mandatory, and guilt was deeply embedded in the package.

As for politics, it was a no show in our home. Who my parents supported in presidential elections at the time is still a mystery to me. Silence, not political conversation, was our default position at the dinner table.

Unlike my two older brothers who did well academically and were elected class presidents in each of their four years, my high school resume and report card were — how to put it — thin. Not one a parent would proffer in conversation with a neighbor.

On my good days, I was an average student who found school a perfect site for daydreaming, misbehaving, glancing at girls in the corridor, and watching the clock in its slooooow march to dismissal time. Occasionally, I was invited to meet with the guidance counselor to discuss my “attitude.”

I don’t know if, like Springsteen, I learned more from a 3 minute record than I ever learned in school, but I do recall that in my senior yearbook in 1963 my favorite saying was “I find every book too long.” That sounds more like a clever editor putting words into my mouth, but even so, it did succinctly capture my attitude toward book learning at the time.

As for music, it was hard not to like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Martha and the Vandellas, Bill Haley, Little Eva, and Little Richard. Each of them seemed to be singing to me and my cohort of friends. The early rock and rollers gave us permission to break free from the social and moral strictures of the 1950s and shake rattle and roll, especially when fueled by a bottle or two of Narragansett’s Giant Imperial Quart (GIQ).

If I read anything at that age, it was the sports page of the local newspaper. Every morning at the breakfast table, I poured over the box scores of the Red Sox or Celtics or Giants or Packers, depending on the season.

Of course, my Bible was Sports Illustrated. It arrived in the mail, like clockwork, on Friday. As soon as I got home I devoured it with the same enthusiasm that I devoured the jelly donuts from a local bakery that my parents picked up on their way home from work. What better way, I thought, to start the weekend!

If I knew any Marx, it was, not Karl, but Groucho. His weekly TV show, “You Bet Your Life” was a hoot! If it was a choice between 30 minutes with Groucho or doing an assigned reading such as Dickens or Shakespeare or George Eliot, the choice was an easy one for me. Groucho by a mile!

As for my parents, my father dropped out of high school at 15 in order to help his family financially. He landed in a shoe factory that paid notoriously low wages. But with the help of a boyhood friend who had climbed up the corporate ladder in the utility industry, he was hired several years later by Central Maine Power Company.

There he worked as a lineman until he retired in 1968, as the Vietnam War was escalating abroad, rebellion was breaking out at home and worldwide, the sun was setting on “the Golden Age”of U.S. capitalism. And his youngest son’s politics — to my father’s regret — were trending left, his hair was growing too long, and his friends were a raggedy bunch, clearly going nowhere.

At CMP, he climbed electrical transmission poles that wove their way through the woods of Maine. Not an easy or safe gig any time, but especially in the winter when snow and bitterly cold weather blew in, sometimes with such fury that it brought nearly everything to a standstill. Except for “essential workers,” like my father. He as well as coworkers had no choice but to go to work.

Easing this gig a bit was his union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, that provided him and his workmates with liveable wages and pensions, paid holidays and vacations, job and safety protections, and health care for him and our family. If only most workers in Maine then and now enjoyed the same package of wages, benefits and protections that my father did, the state could confidently claim that living there is “the way life should be.”

At home, my father was kind, quiet, and modest to a fault when he was sober. When he wasn’t, it took only one drink, that’s it, for him to transition from a gentle father and husband into the dark world of a mean drunk. My mother and later my step mother were the immediate targets of his drunken anger and unhappiness, but no one escaped his wrath; everyone in our home was fair game. One Christmas in 1968, for example, he turned his anger on me at the dinner table. It was the last straw for me. I left the table, packed my bag, and, before leaving angrily announced to everybody that I would never come back home for another holiday celebration. And I never did. That night I stayed at a friend’s house and the next morning I jumped on a bus to Portland, Me., only an hour away. I got a room in the YMCA and the next morning grabbed a ride from a close friend back to Connecticut where I was living and working at the time.

Like most mothers in that era, my mother did the lion’s share of household labor as well as provided expressive love and emotional ballast to our family. Contrary to the mythology of the stay at home housewife in the 1950s, my mom, like many working class moms, didn’t fit into that category; it wasn’t a choice on her part. Going to work was a necessity. If she had any relief from the pressures of work and everyday life, it was playing the organ in the church, the piano in our living room, and bridge with her friends.

A high school graduate, she was anxious, like other parents of her generation, that her children go to college and “make something of themselves.” Nearly every night she read to us in our early years as well as enrolled us in a book club, even though money was tight. But then out of the blue, she up and died while working in her beloved flower garden on a sunny day in late July, 1954. She was 48. I was barely 9 and my brothers were 3 and 4 years older.

We were devastated. My world and the small world of my family imploded. Its connective tissues were shattered.

My father, as much as he tried, was unable to step up to the role of primary caregiver. Filled with guilt, overwhelmed by his single parent status, and worried about making ends meet, he took a nosedive, while my mother’s name and memory went unmentioned in our home.

My father’s evenings with the “bottle” became more frequent. On more than one occasion, he came home so drunk and so out of control that my frail and sickly grandmother, who was in her eighties and had moved in when my mother died, called my uncles. They hurried over, reined him in, sometimes wrestling him to the ground, and put him to bed. Not a pleasant sight at a young age.

Two years after her death, my father, lonely, depressed, and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of a single parent, remarried an old friend from his teenage years. Her name was Molly Malaney and she worked at the state capital in a low level supervisory job.

Molly had no children from two earlier marriages — her two husbands died — so her decision to marry my father with his three young sons must have been a bit of an existential leap for her into the unknown. But she never gave me or my three brothers that impression.

Like my mother, she did the lion’s share of the domestic work and steadied the ship of our home. Unlike my mother, she didn’t provide much emotional support to me or my brothers, but as the years passed and from my own experience, I have come to believe that filling that space is probably too big an ask, too steep a climb for most step parents.

Bringing some laughter and relief into my life at that time were my close boyhood friends, Joe, my cousin, and Clarence, a neighbor and classmate. Through no doing of their own, they grew up on the other side of privilege. Like me, both had difficult childhoods. Joe’s mother divorced his alcoholic father and left town, when Joe was an infant, never to be seen again. Clarence, faring no better, lived in deep poverty with his parents who paid more attention to the “drink” than to him.

Both, I believe in hindsight, experienced trauma at a young age. Joe didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to rebound from that trauma. Indeed, his life was nothing but turmoil and he died in a violent drug encounter in a bar in New Hampshire many years later. Clarence experienced hard times too.

All of which brings to mind the words of a poem, written by 18th century English poet, William Blake, “Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless nights.” Joe and Clarence knew the latter all too well.

Obviously, at that age I wasn’t “woke.” But somewhere in my young and mixed up head, I sensed that life had unfairly dealt the three of us a poor hand and that each of us played it as best we could.

Of course, there is no straight line that connects our childhoods to our adult life, but growing up as I did, I believe predisposed me to running against the wind.

That disposition was reinforced when, upon graduating from college (entering college I figured my study habits or lack thereof had to change and they did), I took a job in Connecticut at a residential treatment center administered by the Catholic Church. The residents were ages 10-18 year old boys. Most came from one or another city in Connecticut. Some had run into legal scrapes while others experienced problems in their home or school. Nearly all grew up in poverty and many encountered racism in their day to day lives. Roughly a third were Black or Puerto Rican. It was a multi-racial setting of the poor and neglected.

There were quarrels and fights among the residents, for sure, but seldom were they driven by racial tensions. If the latter arose, and they did, they mainly manifested themselves in interactions between the residents of color with the largely white, untrained supervisory staff.

In the course of my two years there, I came to believe that the cards of success were stacked against these young boys and teenagers. Even if they had bootstraps to pull themselves up, it seemed to me that surmounting the many structural obstacles in their way would prove to be a too steep a climb for them. Indeed, their lives marinated in poverty, racism, inadequate schools, and a war that sucked money from domestic priorities. No one captured this contradiction between the country’s declared aims and actual practices better than Martin Luther King in his speech at Riverside Church in Harlem.

I didn’t come to this understanding the first day that I began work there. In fact, I was a know-nothing in many ways. But the combination of actual experience on the job, my turn to reading radical literature at every opportunity, and some prodding from Kelly Sweeny, an unkempt, long haired socialist-hippie from Toronto, shifted my inchoate politics to the left.

More to the point, I became radical. Though much time has passed and much has happened since then, I remain radical today, though, I hope, with a dollop more political experience and depth than I had then.

The League: Gateway to the Party

My habit of running against the wind, however, only took organized political form when I joined the Young Workers Liberation League (or League/YWLL) in the fall of 1971.

At the time, I was hunkered down in a “back to the land” commune in Portland Maine. Yes, back to the land! And, yes, living in a commune! Inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing’s book, “Living the Good Life,” our mission was to buy land in rural Maine, farm organically, forgo meat and fish, make our own beer, smoke pot and live simply and harmoniously with other living things and Mother Earth. Still not a bad idea!

But, by the time we had enough money in our communal bank account two years later to buy that patch of earth in western Maine, my passion for communal living in a rural setting had waned. In my head, I had migrated from subsistence farming in a rural setting to socialist revolution in an urban one.

It wasn’t as if communal living no longer appealed to me. It still did, and I loved my fellow communards, but I figured changing the world in that setting where the deer were nearly as plentiful as people would be a difficult gig. It might have worked for Mao, but I wasn’t Mao — who is? — and rural Maine wasn’t rural China. So when it came time for us to move from Portland to West Peru, Maine, I took a pass and stayed behind in Portland.

Luckily I found a cheap apartment — such existed then — on Munjoy Hill, an old working class neighborhood — Irish, Italian, and African American — sitting on a rise above Portland’s downtown and Back Bay on one side and overlooking beautiful Casco Bay and its ring of islands on the other. I suppose there were better places to live, but few came to mind then or even now, although like other urban landscapes and neighborhoods the “Hill” has been gentrified in recent years, making it unaffordable for anyone with a thin back account.

Not long after settling into my apartment, “extravagantly” furnished with an old mattress and chair, plus a pot or two and a little silverware, I was hired by B&M baked bean company. Maybe the name sounds familiar? Its beans, after all, are found on shelves in food marts across the country. Family owned at the time, the early 20th century built factory sat on the edge of Casco Bay too, only a short bus ride or walk from my apartment.

This brick edifice was rectangular in shape, four stories high, and eye catching in its own way. It employed roughly 120-150 workers depending on the season. To my good fortune, it was unionized by the Bakers and Confectionery Workers out of New York. The benefits were relatively good, but the wages were still low enough that after a weekend of drinking at the Beer Barrel, a local Irish neighborhood bar in Portland’s West End, equipped with what is rare these days — a good jukebox — my pockets were near empty, my head was pounding, and I was scrambling financially to get by until the next pay day.

Had I not been a member of the YWLL, I surely would not have ended up at B&M “walloping” — cleaning — huge bean pots, the size of a bath tub, but circular in shape. But I was and we were urged to work in industry, which I was happy to do.

Nearly sixty years later I still have no regrets in that regard. My career horizons, after all, never included a prestigious and well paying job and societal respectability.

What I gained from the experience at B&M were new friends as well as a deeper appreciation of the challenges facing working people in securing a good life, a concrete sense of the imbalance of power between workers and corporations, and the necessity of a larger progressive grouping in my local union (and elsewhere) if one hopes to be a change agent.

Or to put it differently, I learned that one or two radicals can make some noise, but they can’t change the music in a plant or union, not to mention on a broader scale. Such changes take a crowd. Don Quixote is a heroic figure for sure, but he isn’t a reliable change agent in any age.

Admittedly, the bean plant was a far cry from the assembly lines of Detroit’s auto industry or the steel mills in Gary, Indiana where workers are concentrated in large numbers and possess considerable economic and political power if they choose to use it. Nevertheless, it was still industrial work and a good place to hang my hat, gain some sorely needed experience, effect change on a smaller scale, and, not least, meet a good hearted and hilarious cast of characters, but that’s another story.

Joining the Party

In the early going I wondered if the YWLL was a good landing place for me. It seemed a little too structured and stiff, but as I got to know its members, acquainted myself with its politics, and participated in its activities, it grew on me. It also became my gateway to joining the Communist Party about a year later in the summer of 1972.

When asked over the years why I joined the Communist Party, given the anti-communist atmosphere in the U.S. — the red baiting — at the time, the short answer, usually to the surprise of the questioner, is that it was no brainer. I didn’t have to do a lot of mental gymnastics or career calculations before signing up and paying very modest dues. I had no desire, after all, to live a conventional life nor make a lot of money. As for the FBI it wasn’t on my radar screen.

Or if it was, I couldn’t care less.

At the time, the world, to me and many others of my age, was turning upside down and spinning out of control, familiar landmarks were disappearing, long held truths were dissolving, and a new world filled with new possibilities seemed within reach. At more than one national meeting of the Communist Party during those years my new comrades and I would chant, with complete conviction and without a trace of irony, “CPUSA, socialism in our day.”

While that may seem to you fantastical at best and pure delusion at worst, it didn’t feel like that to us back then. As we looked out at the world — a simpler world in many ways than today’s — in the early seventies, antiwar actions were surging. Other social struggles, articulating new needs, values, and rights were grabbing the imagination of young people.

Meanwhile, across the globe, it seemed like all hell was breaking loose and trending in a socialist and anti-imperialist direction. The Vietnamese were winning their struggle for national statehood and self determination, notwithstanding the efforts of Johnson followed by Nixon and his Secretary of State, the “renowned” statesman, Henry Kissinger, to flatten and incinerate Vietnam and neighboring countries in order to “save them.”

The Portuguese people overthrew their fascist regime that had ruled that country for five decades. The Chilean people led by Popular Unity — a political party — and the great socialist leader Salvador Allende won by popular vote the presidency and seats in the Congress, a feat that rattled (or should I say, scared the shit out of) Kissinger especially.

In Europe, the Italian and French Communist Parties were large in size and powerful in influence. Both had a presence in parliament. The Communist Party in Italy, in fact, was also within reach of becoming the ruling party via the electoral path. This scared the shit out of Kissinger too, probably by an order of magnitude.

Moreover, in the Global South, anti-colonial movements, usually with the propaganda of arms, were successfully challenging their colonial “masters.” South African apartheid wasn’t overthrown at that time, but it was facing some stiff challenges that would come to fruition two decades later when the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandella forced a peaceful transition to a free and democratic South Africa.

In short, “the times were a-changin,” sang Dylan, who uniquely captured the zeitgeist, turmoil, and contradictions of that period for many young people, although his voice was never singular. He was joined by many others — Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Neil Young, Chambers Brothers, Joan Baez, Hugh Masekela, Pete Seeger, Mercedes Sosa, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and more. The world, it seemed in those years, was like putty in our hands.

Little did we realize that the curtain on this surge was coming down and political initiative was passing in large measure to right wing extremism, neoliberalism, and financialization at home and counterrevolution and corporate globalization internationally. But before that became apparent to me, I signed a membership card and began paying dues to the Communist Party.

Looking back, I have concluded that had the Sixties been no more than a continuation of the Fifties I would never have landed in the Party or a baked bean plant or a back to the land commune. Far more likely, I would have chosen a more conventional career and life, much like my two older brothers did. Maybe a high school teacher or basketball coach or a professional economist or who knows! But a communist? No way!

Which goes to prove that the path we travel isn’t one that we have complete control over. As Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

More than one ship

The Communist Party wasn’t the only ship in the harbor at the time that I joined. The harbor, in fact, was full of ships that were leaving with socialism as their destination, but none of them seemed to have, to me anyway, a leg up over the Party.

While differences — arcane to most people — existed among organizations on the left, what most shared was a sectarian political disposition and practice. The Party too wasn’t exempt from its own magical thinking and inflated sense of its own size and influence. But it felt more grounded, informed by a measure of political realism, and its membership and leadership more reflective of the working class and people of this country than its competitors on the left.

The younger members of the Party like myself were not prisoners of the silly notion to “trust no one over 30.” Indeed, the Depression era generation that led the party nationally and at the state level at the time were inspirational to new members like myself.

Other young radicals, as you might expect, didn’t share my view. In their eyes, the Party was old, tired, and passe, not even yesterday’s news. It didn’t spell revolution with a capital R. And its political DNA and history were tarnished and compromised.

Worse still, it was uncritical of the Soviet Union, while at the same time, too ready to give the Democratic Party a free pass.

None of this really registered in my mind. In fact, if I felt anything about the Party in the early going, it was feeling of being a bit out of my league, intimidated by people who seemed wiser in matters of theory and practical politics than I was, not to mention far more rhetorically nimble. Nevertheless, it felt like the right fit for me, notwithstanding the fact that I barely uttered a word in my first months in the Party, fearing that I would be tagged as a political imposter and light weight. Why speak and run the risk of revealing my shallowness, I thought. It was only later that I comfortably engaged in discussions.

I wasn’t alone in making the Communist Party my home. Truth be told, lots of young people — Black, Brown, and white, women as well as men, young workers as well as students, gay as well as straight (although gay members, with a few exceptions, hid their sexual identity because of the homophobic posture of the Party at that time) were making the same choice as I was. Many were inspired by the person and example of Angela Davis, who at the time was a member and remained so up until the split in the Party in 1991.

So I signed up, began paying my dues and attending club meetings every two weeks. The club I joined was small, but included people with uncommon energy and commitment as well as connections to the larger community. It seemed like every night something was going on and, at least, one day of the weekend. An old friend of mine reminds me, nearly every time I see him, of the day he shouted up from a nearby street to my 3rd floor apartment on a summer day, saying that the day was too beautiful to spend inside writing a political report. The beach, he said, was beckoning us to set everything aside and enjoy the day. I took a pass. At the time it seemed that everything we were doing carried such an urgency that a day in the sun on a beautiful beach paled in significance. Ugh!

To be fair, life in the Party wasn’t one compulsory drill after another. We had moments of laughter and fun. While most of my comrades were not as eager a beer drinker as I was at the time, they weren’t stuffy, didn’t love to hear themselves talk, nor boast about who they knew. Politics for them wasn’t performative and self aggrandizing, but practical and concrete.

With many of them I remain friends 50 years later. One is Larry Moscowitz who was the League and Party leader in Maine at the time. Like me he is no longer a Party member, but back then he was the “most serious communist” in the room. Larry once sat me and another comrade down and diplomatically suggested that we were spending a tad too much time in the Beer Barrel. We listened attentively to Larry’s pep talk and in the moment took his advice to heart. But it didn’t last.

By day’s end we were back in the Beer Barrel, sitting on our favorite stools, drinking beer, and dumping coins into the aforementioned jukebox.

On another occasion at the Beer Barrel I and another club member were assigned at a club meeting to meet with two young working class women. Our mission was to persuade them to give up smoking pot and join the Party. As agreed, we met up with them a few days later, but we miserably failed in our mission. Long before last call, the four of us were surreptitiously huddled outside and did exactly what we were supposed to convince them not to do: smoking pot. And damned if we didn’t enjoy it. At the following club meeting we sheepishly admitted that we had failed our assigned task.

More seriously, I gained a wealth of practical experience and grew intellectually, thanks to my party club. Of the many things that I learned, one was the imperative of coalition politics, of uniting the left with progressive, liberal, and centrist political constituencies.

In contrast to the Party in some other states at the time, we spent little energy attempting to build what were called left forms and organizations. We figured, correctly, that expending our energy initiating and sustaining them rather than participating in mainstream organizations, such as local unions and labor councils, NAACP, and neighborhood and peace organizations was a poor use of our time. We also had close working relationships with a number of progressive Democratic legislators at the city and state level. Two of them were political titans and moral exemplars in the community and in the state legislature — the late Larry Connolly and Gerry Talbot.

What’s more, our rule of thumb was that the point of unity of a coalition of organizations and movements wasn’t the demands of the left, but the best demands of the broader coalition. This seems simple enough, but not everyone subscribes to this way of thinking on the left either then or now. It served us well though, giving us a reach and a wealth of experience that went way beyond our small numbers.

Much more could and will be said about my years in Portland. I remained there until the fall of 1977 and reluctantly left and moved to Detroit. But that is another story for another time END

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