by Jim Miller
The next day, Samantha emailed me a batch of fantastic photos and I finished the article on Las Madres Unidas by the end of the week, adding in our adventures with the vigilantes on both sides of the border. Neville loved it and slated it for the cover of the next week’s edition. He picked a picture Samantha had gotten of Ricardo being shoved by the security guy and entitled the piece, “The High Costs of Cheap Labor.” I was really proud of this one and would have been content to rest on my laurels over the weekend if I hadn’t gotten a call back from the People’s Archive up in San Francisco. I’d left a message on their answering machine asking if they had any material on the Wobblies in San Diego, Bobby Flash in particular. Yes on both counts was the answer, so I got out my credit card and got a ticket on an airbus to San Francisco.
I got there early on Friday and my appointment at the People’s Archive was on Saturday, so I had the whole day to play with. It was a crisp, but clear February morning and I was happy to be in the city. I took the BART to the Muni from the airport and got off the N Judah near UCSF. From there, I walked over to Kezar Stadium to meet Shane who’d come down from his new digs up on the Lost Coast. He was sitting on the steps down by the running track watching the joggers when I found him.
“Hey, what are you doing in the big bad city, man?” I said as I hugged him.
“I’m lost,” he said, smiling.
“How are things in the cult?” I goaded him.
“Fuck off,” he said. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Just kidding,” I replied. “To be honest, I have no idea what you’re doing.”
Shane leaned back and stretched. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “You ever been to Sutro Baths?” I told him I hadn’t but I was game and we started on our way. Shane looked great, healthy and happy. He seemed different somehow, less restless. We crossed the street and headed into Golden Gate Park where we wandered toward the sea going on side trips through the arboretum and around Stow Lake. As always, I enjoyed taking in the lush green of the park that stood in stark contrast to San Diego’s desert dry. Shane and I mar veled at how both the ’49ers and the Raiders used to play at Kezar. I told him about a Hunter S. Thompson piece I read on the subject, which portrayed the Niners fans as mean drunken louts. We laughed and kept on trucking past the Polo Fields and the Buffalo Paddock. I stopped for a second and watched some kids practicing at the fly-casting pools. Finally, we got to the end of the park and Shane suggested we grab a drink at a nice restaurant next to the Dutch windmill. We sat down at a table on the outside patio area. I got a beer and Shane ordered a sparkling water.
“Water, huh?” I said a little taken aback at his newly found moderation. “Are you sure you haven’t joined a cult?”
“We’ve got a bit more to walk,” he replied refusing to take the bait. “I’m pacing myself.” I laughed and let it rest, choosing instead to enjoy my beer and his company. It was one of those sublimely gorgeous San Francisco days and everything looked ethereal in the winter sunlight. I could hear the surf just across the road and a seagull landed on a pine tree branch above us.
“You should come up and visit me at the collective,” Shane said. “We have big parties and people come from all over the place. It’s a great time. Everybody brings a different kind of food, usually food they’ve grown themselves. People stay overnight for a couple days sometimes. It’s kind of a community tradition. I can let you know the next time something is coming up.” I looked at him and he seemed totally earnest, devoid of any hint of irony. It worried me, but I just sat there and listened. It turned out he was part of a collective that shared the profits from various enterprises—farming, fishing, crafts, and a host of other things. He was working with some people who had invited him to help do conservation work for the river estuary. There was a woman who had an idea for sustainable ecotourism that could bring in lots of money. And a retired teacher wanted to start a camp for poor kids from places like Oakland who’d never been out of the city. They could come up in the summer, stay at the collective, go on hikes in the woods, and learn about ecology. This retired teacher he’d met had actually done some research on kids who’d never had any access to the wild and she’d discovered that some urban problems might actually be attributable to what she called “a nature deficit disorder.” I was intrigued. It sounded less flaky than I had initially suspected.
We finished our drinks and crossed the street and walked for a ways until we hit the remains of Sutro Baths, a decadent public bathhouse that had thrived earlier in the twentieth century. Now all that was left were the ruins of the buildings. We climbed around them and took a path that led to a spot where you could see the Golden Gate Bridge spanning the sparkling Bay. I was panting a bit, and Shane put his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re not getting enough exercise, are you?” he smirked. Then he got serious, took a breath and said, “You know, you don’t need to worry about me. I know what I’m doing. For once in my life, I feel like I’m actually building something durable. It’s not just tilting at windmills.” Clearly, he had read the suspicion on my face.
“I believe you,” I said, feeling a little bad about my knee-jerk reaction to his new life. “It’s just not something I ever thought about before.”
“It’s off the grid,” he said smiling.
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it is.”
On Saturday I got to the People’s Archive for my appointment in the late morning. It was located on the second floor of a big loft building in the Mission. I had to call up to get buzzed in and was met at the top of the stairs by Pete, an amiable old fellow with a handlebar moustache. He was wearing an ILWU hat. After we shook hands, he walked me over to the main desk and handed me a stack of things related to my request.
“I think you’re going to be happy with these,” he said. I took the stack and went over to sit on an ancient ratty couch next to a scuffed coffee table that served as their reading room. Pete left me to my business and got back to listening to Ornette Cole-man and reading a mystery novel behind the desk. I settled in and started looking over the material. The first few things were amazing—original issues of Solidarity and Industrial Worker covering the San Diego free speech fight. I read over accounts of the struggle and skimmed through the fragile old pages, looking at the Mr. Block cartoons and admiring the artistic sketches depicting fat bosses in top hats and heroic workers marching into the new dawn. As fascinating as these were, there was no reference to Bobby Flash or Gus Blanco. It was frustrating because they had enough papers to cover the events of that period episodically, but not the entire run of issues. Still it was more than I had seen in one place anywhere else.
After I was done looking through the Wobbly papers, I leafed through an original copy of the anarchist publication Mother Earth with an account of the San Diego affair. There was a lot on Goldman there, still nothing on Flash. Under the copy of Mother Earth, they even had a few I.W.W. posters and some postcards from the Magónista revolt in Tijuana and a poster of “The Pyramid of the Capitalist System.” I was just about to go over and ask about Bobby Flash when I came upon the second to last item, a comb-bound typed manuscript from the early sixties. It was entitled, Black Cat Days: Conversations with Western Wobblies. The word “DRAFT” was stamped on the front cover as well as on the title page. I flipped it open to the table of contents and saw that the manuscript was a collection of interviews with former Wobblies, one of whom was Bobby Flash. I raced to his interview and read:In my Wobbly days, I went by Bobby Flash or Buckshot Jack, but Bobby Flash mostly. I had a couple of other aliases I used once or twice in a pinch, but Flash seemed to stick. I got the name as a kid playing baseball because I was quick to the ball. My born name was Jack Wilson.
Jack Wilson! I stopped, put down the book and said “no” out loud. When I picked the manuscript back up and reread the words, it was still there, “Jack Wilson.” The coincidence was too weird to be true, I thought. I read on:My mother was a fine woman, a schoolteacher in my home-town
of Eureka. She taught me how to read as a boy and cared for my brother and me even as my father was bent on drinking himself to death. Mother died of cancer when I was just 15 and things got real bad. My father owned a little general store in town. My brother Frank and me used to work in the store for Pop and when Mom died he started drinking harder and beating us for every little thing. As things went down hill with his business, he took it out on us. Frank was the first to leave about a year after mother died. He took off on a freight car and we never heard from him again. I stuck it out for another year or two, but Dad got dead drunk when he lost the business, and I decided that I wasn’t about to take another beating so I laid him out with a two by four and he went down hard. I didn’t wait to see if he woke up or not, but I heard later that he survived it. Anyway, I hit the rails like Frank and spent a good amount of time lookin’ for him, though I’m sad to say I never heard a word about him anywhere for the rest of my life. My pop died a year or two after I took off, so by the time I was twenty I was pretty much on my own.
Life on the rails seemed like a big adventure at first. I was happy to be out from under Pop’s thumb and I’d never been anywhere in my life. Back in town, I’d heard stories from some of the timberbeasts that all a man had to do was hop a freight and there was work to be had just about anywhere. Pop had treated us boys like dogs so the idea of hard work didn’t scare me. And, I thought, this way the money I earned would stay in my own pocket, not go straight for Pop’s whiskey. So I can remember sitting on an open car as it went along, staring up at the redwoods with the sun shining down through the trees thinking I had it made. Pretty soon, I learned that those timberbeast tales were a little sugar coated. The sidecars got cold as hell at night and old dirty face (that’s what we called the trains) was a hard place to sleep. Plus, the rattlers (that’s the cars) was full of hijacks who could spot a dumb kid real easy. Well, I got robbed and beat up on my first night and I only avoided greasing the wheels when some other fellas chased off the hijack. “Greasing the wheels” was when a boy got thrown down under the train and mashed to death by the wheels. I saw it happen a time or two and it made me wise real quick.
The fellow that saved me was a good sort and once he heard my story he sort of showed me the ropes. I learned who to look out for and who to trust. Back in the days before the Wobs it was a nasty business riding the rails. The hijacks or the cops or the railroad company thugs was always after you. Well, this fellow also warned me about the labor sharks who’d play up the work in every town and then you’d show up and find out it wasn’t all peaches and cream like he said it was. So, with that rough initiation, I became a bindlestiff or a blanket stiff or a harvest stiff. Whatever you want to call it. Those were all the names they had for the migratory worker. Later folks started to call us hobos, but we were stiffs first.
My first job off the train was as a harvest stiff, helping with a grain harvest up in Oregon. I just about broke my back working the first day and this fellow comes up to me and says, “Look kid, they ain’t gonna pay you a dime more for killing yourself, so why don’t you give us all a break and slow down?” I saw his point when I got my first check. The food we got was rot too and no bunks or decent blankets in the camps either. I remember boiling clothes in a pot of water the first time to get them clean after some fellow taught me that. I couldn’t believe they’d treat men like this. From there on I did a little of whatever I could get. I worked as a timberbeast; I worked in the fields; I washed dishes; I hauled rocks at construction sites; I loaded ships on the waterfront; I worked on a boat or two; I worked on a ranch; I picked just about anything that can grow on a tree; I saw the worst a man can do to another man.
After about two years of ramblin’ about I had seen just about enough of workingmen getting their teeth kicked in time after time. There was a camp I was in where they nailed the men’s plates to the tables so they wouldn’t be stolen and hosed ’em down after we ate, like we were animals in a barnyard. I saw men worked to death, literally. A fellow dropped dead next to me on a construction site out in the desert one time and they just dragged him off and hollered at us to keep working. Not a single word spent or a minute of silence. They just plopped another stiff in his place and kept the machine going. That’s how it was. We were no better than parts, expendable human parts in the capitalist system. Surplus labor the Marxists would call us. It was dog eat dog out there.
After a while, I got pretty damn hard. There was a point when I would have just as soon killed a boss or thug or some other respectable citizen as look at ’em. In the camps there was a whole different world, the jungle we used to call it. Well, in the jungle there were a whole lot of honest hardworking stiffs and there were some criminals too. Sometimes, I admit that I’d hear some boys talking and laughing about robbing some fat cat and I started to think it wasn’t such a bad idea. Why the hell should some lazy son of a bitch sit around and count the money he made off our backs? Now, later I came to realize that a lot of them fellas was just gamblers and con artists who’d just as soon rob another worker as a fat cat, but the anger was settling into me and I can be sure that I would have murdered some son of bitch if it hadn’t of been for the I.W.W.
As it was, I got pretty good at defending myself. I carried a razor and an old spike in case I got in a scrape and word got around that I was no longer easy pickings. Plus, I was quick too if the situation was not in my favor. I first got tagged with “Flash” as a kid playing ball, but later some fellow called me Flash after he saw me catch a freight that was pulling away real fast. The boys on the trains yelled for me to stop but I made the jump anyway and was on in a flash. So the name stuck. I started using Bobby after I got arrested for vagrancy in Washington and was dumb enough to give my real name. That’s how Bobby Flash was born. It was my name as a bindlestiff, riding the rails. And I came to prefer it. It was the name I earned on my own. And the man that nicknamed me was a Wob too. I didn’t know it at first but later he caught a hijack trying to shake down a little fellow who was an easy mark. Well, this fellow, Reno Sam, nails the hijack from behind and cuts I.W.W. on his forehead, real deep, so everyone would know where he got his comeuppance. Pretty soon, we stopped seeing hijacks on that line.
Well that was about 1909. After I met Reno Sam we went together to a job on a farm in Northern California and he organized a strike to get us a few cents more per bushel. The farmer didn’t have a choice since his crop had to be picked soon or it would have rotted. So we got a better share. I had never even heard of a union, so Reno Sam’s little maneuver was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. For once, we didn’t get our teeth kicked in. Pretty soon after, Reno told me all about the One Big Union while were riding the rails. It wasn’t anything theoretical at all. It was, “Why shouldn’t the folks who do all the work get a better deal? Why should the hard workers get slop while the boss is eating pork chops? You ever see a fat man on the rails? Why can’t all the workers get together for their fair share?” It was belly philosophy. You get the picture. After that, I joined the I.W.W. and got my card, which I still have to this day.
Once I was part of the One Big Union, a door opened to a whole other world. The Wobblies used to say that they turned “bums into men” and, in my case, it was true. For me, the I.W.W. represented having dignity. It was about being a human being not an animal. That’s what the Wobblies were about. We were the knights of the road and we were through being pushed around. As a Wobbly, you pushed back and you pushed the right fellows. It wasn’t like my father who beat us boys because he couldn’t fight the folks who pushed him out of business or the criminals who took their revenge on whoever they could. We were there to go after the bosses and, eventually, end their game completely. Slowly, I got to understanding a bit more about the whole philosophy, but I was a Western Wob and Western Wobs was not the real philosophical types. There were different camps. Lots of the city Wobs from the east coast could talk your ear off, but they couldn’t do shit. Out west, the migratory workers dominated the organi
zation and we were more inclined to direct action without much debate.
Still, around the fires in the jungles, we’d get to debating all kinds of things. Some of the organizers were real hard on drinking and talked about how the saloons robbed workers of pay and brought them to ruin. This was agreed to by some, but met with derision by others who say the other Wobs “sounded like the god damned Salvation Army.” That got a big laugh and we’d get along all right despite disagreements on this issue or that. Another topic that split folks was nonviolence. Some of the Wobs was for strict nonviolence as the use of violence only gave the cops and the bosses an excuse. I remember one fellow, “the Priest” we used to call him on account of his high principles, was very passionate about this question. He’d talk about violence being a product of capitalism and how we should have no use for it as we’d mostly just be using it against fellow workers, etc., etc. Some of the other boys would say that that sounded mighty good, but it was hard to practice when you were getting your head busted in. That would get laughs too. Still, as a tactic, I came to understand what they were talking about. And it did work too, sometimes. That same fellow, Giovanni was his real name, ended up dead after being forced to run a gauntlet out in San Diego. Ultimately, I came to see the violence on the other side as so huge, that it was just too much to ask a man to be a saint all the time. We had about as much chance as a rabbit before a gunner sometimes. It made you mad as hell. So we got our shots in too, when the time was right.