by Jim Miller
Well, it was great for a while, going up to visit Shane and seeing Carla. Then Carla got a chance to work on a big project in New York City and Shane lost his job with the Workers’ Center when the unions who were sponsoring it got into a battle about something and the whole thing fell apart. Shane had liked that work and was pretty bummed when everything crapped out. He ended up doing some odd jobs here and there and looking for more work doing activist stuff, but paying jobs were few and far between. Shane had a period of about six years where he’d get a job, get his feet wet, and then be told the money had dried up for his position. By the time I was working for the SD Weekly, just after the millennium, Shane had worked for two more unions, an anti-sweatshop group, a human rights organization, an antiglobalization group, and a coalition of anti-war groups just after 9/11 and in the lead up to the war in Iraq. That was the thing about San Francisco: even during the peak of the Bush years, there was still plenty of left activism. I used to tease Shane that he needed to move back to So Cal and work in the belly of the beast for a while, be a commie in San Diego for a change. He’d laugh and say, “You’ve got that front covered.” Truth be told, I think he was pretty comfortable in his little cocoon up there in the People’s Republic of San Francisco.
In any event, he finally got sick of bouncing around in the city and took what he thought was a durable, long-term gig up in Arcata. The Green Party had won the elections there and they had an opening for an organizer. So Shane packed up and moved to Arcata only to find out that the job with the Greens wasn’t any more stable than the hit-and-miss gigs he’d been getting in San Francisco. He fell in love with the area, though, and decided to stay. It turns out the great outdoors was a welcome respite from the city. He told me, “It helps me get in touch with something bigger.” More “big self” stuff, but this time there was no acid involved. I came up to visit him and he took me all over the place, hiking through redwood forests, fishing on the Pacific with some cool redneck dude he’d met. He even took up surfing in the icy water near Patrick’s Point. I preferred to sit on the cliff in my jacket and watch, keeping a lookout for shark fins. “What if they think you’re a seal?” I’d tease him. Nonetheless, he seemed happy.
I’d lost track of him for a few months before the letter about the collective, so it seemed to come out of the blue. But, when I thought about it, it did seem to make sense. Shane was always searching for something, really. Even during his darkest days in Oakland, he never totally lost his sense of the possible. I just hoped this wasn’t going to be a disaster. We’d both spent our lives doing whatever we wanted, not worrying about security or savings or health insurance, or any of that. “Death on the installment plan” was what Shane called it. But moving out to some commune in his early forties did seem a little reckless, I thought, even for him. Sooner or later, we were going to have to face reality. We were getting older. What the fuck was Shane doing?
7
Neville loved the Slab City piece and we got a good response from readers on the article I did on the Marine, so it seemed like a good time to cash in and take my week off so I could head up to LA, see Hank, and follow up on Bobby Flash at the Library for Progressive Research. I left early on a Friday, but it didn’t matter and I still got stuck in inexplicable wall-to-wall traffic on the 5 as soon as I got past Camp Pendleton. I looked at the people around me, trapped in their cars, plugged into their various devices. The way people talked into their handless phones made them look like crazy street people talking to themselves. When the traffic did move it sped up to sixty or seventy and then screeched to a halt. There was a frustrated, arrested quality to the movement. I remembered back in my LA days walking downtown around rush hour and glancing down at the freeway intersections from the top of an overpass, marveling at the insanity of it all—the ecological disaster of it, the millions of hours of wasted time, the myriad of heart attacks and ulcers in the making, and the blood red sunsets from the smog. Sometimes, I liked to look back at the eyes of the driver behind me in the rearview mirror. There was a strange intimacy in the act; it was like fishing for humanity amidst the mass of checked-out car zombies. I got flipped off a couple times doing it. People think they can do anything behind the wheel and there’s more murder than mercy in the air on the Interstate.
After a long hard slog, I hit the 110 and the traffic picked up as I cruised toward South Central. I got off at Gage and drove to Vermont and found the library. In the lobby there were posters advertising an upcoming lecture by a former Black Panther and the debut performance of a play by a lesbian Chicana theater troupe. I found the librarian, a gray-haired African-American woman wearing rimless glasses and a bright red Che Guevera t-shirt, and told her what I was looking for before she disappeared behind a monitor for a moment. She re-emerged with two possibilities. There wasn’t anything on the San Diego free speech fight, but there was a file with a couple of references to San Diego Communist Party members and some things on the Llano colony that might have some references to the I.W.W. The first thing I checked was the file on the Communist Party, no luck there. There was a lot of interesting material on a strike in the Imperial Valley and something about Luisa Moreno organizing cannery workers on the waterfront in the thirties, but nothing going back to the free speech fight. I sighed. It was a long hard drive to get shut out. I was not very optimistic about the Llano section, but I did take some time to look over the books and magazines they had on the subject.
All the material noted that the Llano Colony was born out of the ruins of Socialist Los Angeles. After years of intensifying labor conflict between local unionists of all stripes and the Los Angeles Times owner and self-appointed petty despot of LA, General Otis, everything came to a head when the McNamara brothers, two AFL unionists, were arrested for dynamiting the Times building. Holy shit! Interestingly, the same crooked cop who had nabbed Flores Magón found the bombs at the Times building. It figured, I thought. Anyway, the McNamaras’ trial and the mayoral contest, in which Socialist Job Harriman was widely expected to win, polarized the city. On the one side, Otis and his allies wanted to keep Los Angeles an open shop town with an abundance of cheap labor, while on the other side, Harrimen and the workingmen of Los Angeles were looking to break Otis’s stranglehold on the city and push for public ownership, union shops, and bottom-up democracy. It was a battle for the soul and future of Los Angeles. Everything was looking up for Harriman until, just days before the election, the McNamaras confessed and Harriman’s mayoral bid went up in flames. Bummer. The loss set the labor movement in Los Angeles back for decades. Now the owners made the rules. It was the plot of a film noir movie where the bad guy wins.
It reminded me of the movie Chinatown and I kept reading. Apparently, in the wake of his devastating loss, Harriman had decided to “retreat to the desert” and start a co-operative colony that could serve as an experimental model of a socialist society. “In the heart of every man is the instinctive desire to get on the land,” Harriman wrote. I thought of Shane and read on, looking at a map that showed the location of Llano, twenty miles from Palmdale in the Antelope Valley. At the time it had been a barren desert, but within a year over 300 colonists were living there, with thousands of visitors coming every year. The original group were all from Harriman’s circle, but word soon spread in Western Comrade, Llano Colonist, and elsewhere, and socialists, Wobblies, and utopians of various other stripes flooded into Llano. I looked at an old black-and-white picture of the hotel clubhouse made of wood and native stone and a line of adobe stone cabins that housed the inhabitants. At its peak, Llano had a printing press, seventy acres of gardens, a machine shop, a rabbit and poultry farm, a boot shop, a laundry, a dairy, bee keepers, cabinet makers, a fish hatchery, a saw mill, a soap factory, a huge orchard, hundreds of acres of alfalfa, and dozens of other “departments.” It was the biggest, most successful communal experiment west of the Mississippi. They even had an arts studio, literary programs, musical events, and the first Montessori school. And these commies liked sport
s! They had a championship baseball team, a football team, and more. I laughed to myself. Impressive—I’d heard of the place but I didn’t know it had been so big.
Of course, it had its enemies from the beginning with Otis and his crew sending in spies and provocateurs to mess with Harriman. It wasn’t enough to win an election; they had to totally discredit the guy, run him out of the region. So Llano, it turned out, was “democracy with the lid off” as one frustrated colonist put it. Colonists squabbled over work, planning, the decision-making process, and everything else you could think of that would start an argument. Harriman was dragged into court, and the LA papers ridiculed his project on a regular basis. Go figure. Still the thing survived and kept growing for a few years, until Harriman discovered that they didn’t have enough water to sustain Llano’s growth and decided to move the colony to Louisiana, where it survived into the thirties. I looked over a few more pictures in the middle of the book. What struck me most was the incredible social life of the place. They had parades on May Day, concerts, and plenty of visitors despite the hard work of building their dream in the desert.
The next thing I looked over was a bound collection of old copies of Western Comrade and Llano Colonist. I was absent-mindedly skimming through the pages when something stopped me in my tracks. It was a photo of the Llano Sluggers baseball team with the names listed below. There in the second row of players was “Bobby Flash, shortstop.” I pored over the rest of the piece and there was nothing else but the picture. Still, my interest was piqued and I surveyed every other thing on the shelf until I found an old hardcover book, entitled Llano Days, published in the mid-fifties on some obscure press. It had interviews with former colonists and one of them was Bobby Flash:I was there in Llano for a patch in 1915 and back a couple more times in later years before they moved down south. Llano was set up by Job Harriman and some Socialists from Los Angeles after they lost the big election around the time of the Times bombing which was a frame job if you ask me. Well, in any event, there were a good number of Wobblies who passed through Llano along with me. Some folks described it as hard living, but for a Wob, having a place to hang your hat is home.
There was one fella there, Gibbons, who said he was a Wob, but I’d never met him before Llano. Well, this Gibbons gave us all a bad name by talking up a storm about the One Big Union and the cooperative commonwealth of all the workers in the clubhouse and then takin’ sick or claiming to have some mystery injury in his back or leg or some such place. If the work required bending over, it was his back. If it required walking a bit, his leg would be bothering him. Folks got to callin’ it “Gibbonitis” when somebody slacked on a job. Now I never had any problem with a fella putting on the wooden shoe on the job to get at the bosses, but this was other workers he was shamming. So I didn’t have much to do with that so-called Wob.
Some of the other boys I knew from the sidecars or soapboxes showed up and put in their share of work. It was a beautiful thing they built there and I’d have to say that my time there was some of the best days of my life. You could really see what folks working together (for each other and not the bosses) could do. Sure there was a good deal of squabbling in the General Assembly, but most of the folks were more interested in the work of the colony. We had fields for as far as the eye could see and farm animals that we raised and slaughtered ourselves. We lived by the products of our own labor and didn’t hand over the profits to some parasite. I worked washing dishes in the kitchen, helped with hauling rocks to the construction sites, and lent a hand at harvest time. It was good work. We were really building something—a model of what folks could do outside of capitalism.
They also had schools there at Llano. For the little ones, they built the first Montessori school in the country. But they had schools for adults too, which I took advantage of many evenings. We’d talk about different theories of Socialism or talk about some poem by Walt Whitman or a passage in Thoreau. My mother had been a schoolteacher so I was raised reading and writing, but after she died I was never able to finish school, so, being mostly self-taught, I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with folks and try on a new idea or two. I remember a quote by Thoreau that we discussed one evening, about how “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” This was, I thought, what my whole life had been about—not giving up or being resigned to taking it. We had a real good talk about this quote I remember and it stuck with me. The Irish girl who taught the class was beautiful too—full of life. We had a little thing there for a while, but that’s beside the point [laughter].
Maybe the thing I remember most was the May Day celebrations. Folks would get all dressed up in their finest clothes, which wasn’t much in my case. There was a big parade of colonists waving the red flag. Then we had fun all day, played baseball, listened to poems, had a concert, and ate as good a feast as we could. It was really something. I was the shortstop for the ball team so I’d be in the game. I remember the catcher teasing me about my nickname, “Flash,” because I had a bit of a hitch in my stride now after the injuries I got from the vigilantes in San Diego. “You don’t look like no flash to me,” he said. I was still fast enough to play though, and I got to a few tough balls up the middle and even ran out a double. If I wasn’t “flash” anymore, I could sill get the job done sir [laughter].
We had an exhibition game that day, but other times we played other teams from around the valley. The Llano Sluggers, that was our name. I’ve always thought baseball was the best workingman’s game. No clock to keep an eye on and outside in the fresh air. And anybody can play, fat or skinny, short or tall. You know that’s where the idea for the first sit-downs came from don’t you? A bunch a workers had sat down on the field to protest a bad call by an umpire in a ball league in Ohio and they thought, “Hey, this just might work on a factory floor too.” But that’s another story.
I remember one May Day afternoon sitting on a blanket in an almond grove with the teacher, Molly O’Conner was her name. There we were listening to folks reading poetry and then there was music with a beautiful mandolin and a saxophone. And the little ones were running ’round the Maypole. I remember I lied on my back and looked up at the big blue sky and everything seemed possible. Those were good days at Llano, real good days.
I looked over the notes in the back of the book and there was nothing about Bobby except a reference to the fact that he’d been in the I.W.W. and spent significant time at Llano. When the librarian announced that the place was closing, I asked her if she knew anything about the editor of the book, Joshua Cohen. All she could tell me was that he was an old leftist scholar who’d died a few years back. “Lots of these old comrades are passin’ on,” she said. I thanked her and asked if there was a place nearby where I could get a coffee. “Yum Yum Donuts,” she said smiling impishly, “unless you want to drive all the way to USC for a Starbucks.” I headed to my car and drove over to Yum Yum for a large coffee and a glazed donut. On the way in I got a “what are you doing around here, whiteboy?” look from a thoroughly tattooed guy on the corner. I tried to get a hold of Hank on the payphone outside by the liquor store down the block, but he didn’t pick up. After that failure, I decided to find a cheap motel room in a little place I knew downtown on the edge of Chinatown. I took Normandie to Slauson and hit the 110 to downtown, got a room, and had Kung Pao Chicken and a Tsing Tao by myself in a lonely little restaurant across the street from a storefront Buddhist temple. So Bobby Flash had been a nickname, I mused—and a shortstop.
The next day, I got a hold of Hank and we decided to meet for lunch at PE Coles, the oldest bar in Los Angles and one of the competing homes of the French Dip Sandwich. I left my car at the motel and zig-zagged my way there, walking through Olvera Street and some folk musicians playing in the gazebo just outside the main shopping area, before crossing the street and meandering on past Union Station. In Little Tokyo, I looked at a coffee house where the Atomic Café had been and remembered from my reading that it was around here, at First and Los Angeles, where t
he Socialists had held their street meetings before they were banned. I wandered through an exhibit of art based on ecstatic states in the Geffen, leaving time to stop by the Bradbury Building on Broadway near Third. It was based on utopian socialist Edward Bellamy’s esthetic principles, but had also been part of the dystopian future in Blade Runner. I’m not sure what I was hoping this would do for me, but I did wonder if Flash had ever walked these same streets. Here I turned the wrong way and ended up on Hill by Pershing Square where the Socialists moved their open air meetings after being banished from the streets. I got my bearings back and turned down 6th and walked toward skid row until I spotted the neon red sign on PE Cole’s, “Since 1908.”
Inside I looked for Hank, who wasn’t there yet, even though my long aimless wander had made me fifteen minutes late. I ordered a Spaten dark at the bar and strolled around glancing at the black-and-white photos of Los Angeles that adorned the walls. There were shots of this area when it was the financial district, pictures of the old red cars and Los Angeles street life at the turn of the last century. I looked at the people on the street and imagined Bobby Flash or Blanco lost in these crowds, making their way to the Labor Temple or looking for a place to flop. I glanced down at a table top that had been the side of a Red Car before oil and tire money bought the trolley system out and shut them down leading to the empire of the automobile in Los Angeles. In the old days before the gentrification push began, this place had been a kind of an oasis from the rough streets, a good spot to kill time before catching the dog across the street at the Greyhound station. I remember the previous owner had a baseball bat ready at the first sign of trouble, like the time some guy tried to come in with a huge boa constrictor wrapped around his neck. I almost choked on my food when he yelled, “Get that fucking snake out of my bar, asshole!” It was a truly weird moment. Anyway, now somebody had bought Coles and, sadly, was “sprucing it up.” At least they still had all the old pictures, for now.