***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator – Leave It To The Professionals 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Those who have been following this series about the exploits of the famous Ocean City (located just south of Los Angeles then now incorporated into the county) private detective Michael Philip Marlin (hereafter just Marlin the way everybody when he became famous after the Galton case out on the coast) and his contemporaries in the private detection business like Freddy Vance, Charles Nicolas (okay, okay Clara too), Sam Archer, Miles Spade, Johnny Spain, know that he related many of these stories to his son, Tyrone Fallon, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tyrone later, in the 1970s, related these stories to the journalist who uncovered the relationship , Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a friend of my boyhood friend, Peter Paul Markin, who in turn related them to me over several weeks in the late 1980s. Despite that circuitous route I believe that I have been faithful to what Marlin presented to his son. In any case I take full responsibility for what follows.        

*******
Dick and Dora Francis were strictly amateurs, very strictly amateurs, if there is such a term, in hard-nosed, rough-edged, seen-it-all professional private investigator Michael Philip Marlin’s eyes. Yes, they were in way over their heads by the time Marlin stepped in to try to unravel what they had knotted and then trace the cold leads to figure out what the hell happened, and who did it. The “what the hell happened” being an unsolved murder, maybe. The jury, no, not the court-room kind, but those who knew what went down, those aficionados who follow such things is still out that one. The only thing for sure was that Dick and Dora didn’t do it, and of course Marlin, otherwise everybody else had reason, had the chance, and the desire to do the deed. And to keep you from suspense the suspected deed was the killing of Charles Wyatt, yes, that Wyatt who invented half the stuff that goes into airplanes and make them passenger- friendly, and who made and lost fortunes in doing so. Lately the former and thus welcome in high society if cared too, and certainly his wife and daughters cared too if he was indifferent. Therefore entered the high society Francis duo.     

Marlin and Dick Francis had gone back a long way, back to the time that he was a Detective Sergeant on the robbery detail for the Los Angeles Police Department and Marlin was just getting kicked off , or left, the force depending on whose story you wanted to believe. Kicked off if you believe that story  about him not being on the take to local hood Marty Breem back in the 1930s and thus a loose cannon for his operations and so he put a  higher up to ditch the troublesome Marlin. Left if you believe, and you should, that he decided that if he was going to face fists, slugs, and every other hazard he was not going to do so on a cop’s pay.

Marlin had thereafter set himself up as a private- eye and every once in a while would wind up working in tandem with Dick on some tough case that the department was ready to put in cold storage. Dick in his turn had left the force, walking away without a regret. The reason for that “no regret” was that he had landed one Dora Sweeney, heiress to the Sweeney lumber fortune started up in Oregon winding up the with next generation in California, Dora, after investigating a robbery at Dora’s home, that second generation in high style home in Bel Air. The robbery was never solved but as Dora said “she liked the cut of his jibe” and that was that. He left the force to “suffer” the tough life of the rich. And that was how Dick and Dora lammed onto (and fouled up) the Wyatt case.     

Dora had been boarding school friends with Elizabeth Wyatt (no Betty or Liz stuff strictly Elizabeth here), Charles Wyatt’s daughter and had kept in touch over the years especially the years before Dora’s marriage. When Charles Wyatt went missing, or had fled the home scene, or had been murdered, or any number of other possibilities once he disappeared without leaving word, or a trance Elizabeth frantically called Dora to see if she and Dick could find some information out, find it out on the quiet. Especially on the quiet since the current Wyatt fortune was at stake, and Wyatt Industries was just then in a precarious position in the markets and such news made public might tip things the wrong way. (And tip the family lifestyle, especially being able to hand with the country club set with its horde of eligible young men).       

The reason that Elizabeth beseeched Dick and Dora was because in their little rarified circle Dick and Dora had developed a reputation for solving some society crimes, you know, which servant ran off with the family china, or how did, and with whom, the chauffer crash the Smith’s automobile at two in the morning, or other little squabbles like that. Kid’s stuff really, even though Dick had once been a pro, stuff to do while they were waiting to have children to take up their spare time. Dick and Dora agreed, agreed too that the important thing was to keep the thing hushed up, hushed up big time. No sense in letting the riffraff in on the family problems.

Of course while you are trying to hush things up, and not offend anybody by being so crass as to ask pointed questions of one’s social set, you are going wind up with dust. For example there had been a rumor, a persistent rumor, that Wyatt was having an affair with his secretary, Gladys Pitts. They had been seen together at odd working hours hanging around Spider Greb’s Club Deluxe over in Malibu, and at other watering holes. Gladys had also not been seen for a couple of weeks, although she had cashed a check at her bank drawn on Wyatt’s account a couple of days before Dick and Dora were handed the case. Naturally nobody wanted to upset his long-suffering, unknowing wife, Liz (not Elizabeth, just Liz, in that more democratic generation) and so no question was directed that way and none answered, period.         

So the weeks passed and Dick and Dora were spinning their wheels, trying with might and main to not get to Charles’ whereabouts, or what might have happened to him despite the mounting evidence that he had either fled the country, alone or in company, or somebody had done him harm. That last part was not excluded when another sizable check was drawn from Wyatt’s account the day after he was last seen. They were at an impasse and that is when Dick cried “uncle” and called in his old pal Marlin.

Marlin, to his credit, agreed to work the case but with no promises and with the right to walk away if he got stonewalled by the society crowd. But even Marlin could not work miracles, except one. He found Gladys out in Fresno in about two days just by looking up her employment application information. Yes, I know. What he found out was that Gladys had quit Wyatt a few days before his disappearance and gone back to her husband the next day, all verifiable. As for the affair she mockingly laughed at the idea since Charles Wyatt was a drunk, crazy, and obsessive about his work. That was why they had spent time at the Club Deluxe and other watering holes. Overtime that she bitterly complained he never paid her before she left. As for Charles Wyatt there is a reward out for information about his whereabouts but Marlin has by then walked away from the stone cold case muttering under his breathe “leave this stuff to the professionals.” Yeah, that’s right.        

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION

COMMENTARY 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. Lenin needs no special commendation.  I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier so I would like to make some points here about the life of Rosa Luxemburg. These comments come at a time when the question of a woman President is the buzz in the political atmosphere in the United States in the lead up to the upcoming 2016 elections. Rosa, who died almost a century ago, puts all such pretenders to so-called ‘progressive’ political leadership in the shade.   

The early Marxist movement, like virtually all progressive political movements in the past, was heavily dominated by men. I say this as a statement of fact and not as something that was necessarily intentional or good. It is only fairly late in the 20^th century that the political emancipation of women, mainly through the granting of the vote earlier in the century, led to mass participation of women in politics as voters or politicians. Although, socialists, particularly revolutionary socialists, have placed the social, political and economic emancipation of women at the center of their various programs from the early days that fact was honored more in the breech than the observance.

All of this is by way of saying that the political career of the physically frail but intellectually robust Rosa Luxemburg was all the more remarkable because she had the capacity to hold her own politically and theoretically with the male leadership of the international social democratic movement in the pre-World War I period. While the writings of the likes of then leading German Social Democratic theoretician Karl Kautsky are safely left in the basket Rosa’s writings today still retain a freshness, insightfulness and vigor that anti-imperialist militants can benefit from by reading. Her book Accumulation of Capital alone would place her in the select company of important Marxist thinkers.

But Rosa Luxemburg was more than a Marxist thinker. She was also deeply involved in the daily political struggles pushing for left-wing solutions. Yes, the more bureaucratic types, comfortable in their party and trade union niches, hated her for it (and she, in turn, hated them) but she fought hard for her positions on an anti-class collaborationist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist left-wing of the international of the social democratic movement throughout this period. And she did this not merely as an adjunct leader of a women’s section of a social democratic party but as a fully established leader of left-wing men and women, as a fully socialist leader. One of the interesting facts about her life is how little she wrote on the women question as a separate issue from the broader socialist question of the emancipation of women. Militant women today take note.

One of the easy ways for leftists, particularly later leftists influenced by Stalinist ideology, to denigrate the importance of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought and theoretical contributions to Marxism was to write her off as too soft on the question of the necessity of a hard vanguard revolutionary organization to lead the socialist revolution. Underpinning that theme was the accusation that she relied too much on the spontaneous upsurge of the masses as a corrective to the lack of hard organization or the impediments that  reformist socialist elements threw up to derail the revolutionary process. A close examination of her own organization, The Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, shows that this was not the case; this was a small replica of a Bolshevik-type organization. That organization, moreover, made several important political blocs with the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the defeat of the Russian revolution of 1905. Yes, there were political differences between the organizations, particularly over the critical question for both the Polish and Russian parties of the correct approach to the right of national self-determination, but the need for a hard organization does not appear to be one of them.

Furthermore, no less a stalwart Bolshevik revolutionary than Leon Trotsky, writing in her defense in the 1930’s, dismissed charges of Rosa’s supposed ‘spontaneous uprising’ fetish as so much hot air. Her tragic fate, murdered with the complicity of her former Social Democratic comrades, after the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 (at the same time as her comrade, Karl Liebknecht), had causes related to the smallness of the group, its  political immaturity and indecisiveness than in its spontaneousness. If one is to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of any political mistake it is in not pulling the Spartacist group out of Kautsky’s Independent Social Democrats (itself a split from the main Social Democratic party during the war, over the war issue ) sooner than late 1918. However, as the future history of the communist movement would painfully demonstrate revolutionaries have to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities that come their way, even if not the most opportune or of their own making.

All of the above controversies aside, let me be clear, Rosa Luxemburg did not then need nor does she now need a certificate of revolutionary good conduct from today’s leftists, the reader of this space or this writer. For her revolutionary opposition to World War I when it counted, at a time when many supposed socialists had capitulated to their respective ruling classes including her comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, she holds a place of honor. Today, as we face the fourth year of the war in Iraq we could use a few more Rosas, and a few less tepid, timid parliamentary opponents.  For this revolutionary opposition she went to jail like her comrade Karl Liebknecht. For revolutionaries it goes with the territory. And in jail she wrote, she always wrote, about the fight against the ongoing imperialist war (especially in the Junius pamphlets about the need for a Third International).  Yes, Rosa was at her post then. And she died at her post later in the Spartacist fight doing her internationalist duty trying to lead the German socialist revolution the success of which would have  gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution. This is a woman leader I could follow who, moreover, places today’s bourgeois women parliamentary politicians in the shade. As the political atmosphere gets heated up over the next couple years, remember what a real fighting revolutionary woman politician looked like. Remember Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the Revolution.      

 

 

The Boston Globe GRANT program

) . Posted by:

"Bruce Macdonald"

Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:15 pm (PST

1

To friends and supporters of Veterans For Peace and Smedley D. Butler Brigade (Ch. 9):


The Boston Globe is launching an initiative called Boston Globe GRANT (Globe Readers and Non-profits Together). GRANT distributes gift checks to existing subscribers through the mail and subscribers make the checks out to a non-profit organization and return the check. The non-profits will then be granted advertising space to promote their organization based on the total amount readers have donated to them. See www.bostonglobe.com/grant for more information.

If you are a Boston Globe subscriber, would you please name Smedley D. Butler Brigade, Inc. (AG Account Number 022110) as your selected non-profit and send your check back to the Globe as soon as possible. Those of you who are familiar with us, know that we are tireless in working to end war and striving to promote peace. For those who might not be as familiar, please visit our national website, www.veteransforpeace.org, and our local chapter website, www.smedleyvfp.org.

If you and many others name us as your selected charity, we will have an opportunity to place free ads in the Globe promoting our common goals – Peace and Justice.

Please forward this message to your mailing lists and friends - and thank you for your support!


Bruce Macdonald
Vice-Coordinator
Smedley D. Butler Brigade (Ch. 9)
Veterans For Peace
Boston, MA

Reply to sender . Reply to group . Reply via Web Post . All Messages (1) . Top ^

2

Stop Senate Bill 1881 - No more sanctions on Iran

Mon Jan 20, 2014 5:05 am (PST) . Posted by:

"Pat Scanlon" patscanlonmusic

Smedleys,
Please contact Senator Markey and Senator Warren's offices and tell them no new sanctions against Iran. They have both indicated that they will not vote for S 1881 but we need to keep the pressure on.
Senator Warren, Boston office: 617-565-3170
Senator Markey, Boston office:617-565-8519
Thanks,
Pat

Message forwarded to you from PDA
Don't Let the Senate Screw Up Peace with Iran!

Dear Patrick,

As you know, Secretary of State John Kerry has signed an interim agreement with Iran that holds the promise of ending 34 years of enmity, suspicion, economic warfare and the ever-present threat of a horrific new war.

     Like most Americans, I hope that the IAEA will verify the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program and that this agreement will lead to the removal of sanctions and the normalization of relations with Iran.

      But even as we thank our lucky stars and each other's efforts for these small steps toward peace, the U.S. Senate is taking up S 1881, the so-called "Nuclear Weapons Free Iran Act of 2013", to impose new sanctions on Iran in violation of the interim agreement Secretary Kerry negotiated and signed in Geneva.

       Such action by the Senate would confirm all Iran's doubts about our good faith, strengthen hard-liners on both sides and undermine our two countries' first fragile steps toward peace. This failure of diplomacy could then become a pretext for new threats of US or Israeli aggression against Iran.

       We can't let the Senate screw up this chance for peace! PDA has drafted a new action alert that you can use to call and/or write to your Senators to tell them:

       Give Peace A Chance! Vote NO on S 1881!

        For more on Iran's nuclear program, please read former CIA analyst Ray McGovern on "Divining the Truth about Iran."

       On the diplomacy in Geneva, Trita Parsi asks the fundamental question we all have to answer, "Do We Want a Deal Or a War?"

       For parallels with Iraq in 2003, please read my HuffPost article, "Homer Simpson and the WMDs in Iraq...(Doh)...I Mean Iran."

  In 2013, our country finally took some baby steps toward peace.  At PDA, with your help, we hope to make 2014 the year we really begin to turn the tide on the misbegotten "war on terror" and the most expensive unilateral military build-up in the history of the world.  We'll be contacting you soon about a new campaign to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force and stop payment on Congress's blank check for military madness.

  Thank you for all you do!

Peace!

  Sandy Davies

for PDA's End War & Occupation Issue Organizing Team

Demand the immediate release of Margaretta D’Arcy Join the Irish Embassy picket in London Wed 22 Jan 11am-1pm 17 Grosvenor Pl, London SW1X 7HR https://www.facebook.com/events/655038224534808/  We plan to give in the GWS and other statements. Margaretta will have a pre-trial court appearance on this day. Dear friends,  Please find below a statement from Global Women’s Strike demanding that our dear friend and colleague Margaretta D’Arcy, be released.  She has been jailed for three months in Ireland, for protesting the use of Shannon’s civilian airport for US wars.  She is only allowed one phone call a day and two half-hour visits a week of no more than three adults. Many people internationally are shocked and furious that Margaretta has been jailed and are demanding her immediate release!  We first met Margaretta at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp outside the US Air Force nuclear weapons base in Berkshire UK, where we lived during 1983/84.  Margaretta stayed there in the ’80s and ’90s, living outside for weeks at a time, helping maintain the camp’s presence and anti-war activities at Yellow (Main) Gate. Yellow Gate women fought and eventually won the fantastic legal victory that the base was illegal and the Common was restored to the people. Please join the demand for Margaretta’s release by any of the following: ·         Add your signature and/or organisation, endorsing the GWS statement below. Please send back to this email address and we will add to the final list to be handed in to the Irish embassy in London at the demonstration in support of Margaretta on Wednesday. ·         And/or write your own statement in support, sending us a copy. ·         Circulate the statement/s to your networks and put on your blogs, website, Facebooks, tweets, etc... ·         Write to Irish Minister for Defence Alan Shatter demanding the government release Margaretta - alan.shatter@oir.ie  ·         Send support cards to Margaretta: c/o Limerick Jail, Limerick City, Ireland.  ·         There will be a regular picket outside Limerick prison on Fridays at 5-6 pm.  See below for LINKS to coverage of protest in Ireland. Invest in caring not killing! Kay and Sian (Orange Gate 1983-84) Statement to the Press and the Public We are outraged to learn that our dear sister and colleague Margaretta D’Arcy has been jailed – and for three months! – for protesting the use of the civilian airport at Shannon for US wars.  And we are deeply worried about her health and well-being as a cancer patient.  One of the many public services Ms D’Arcy has performed is to protest the Irish government’s many years of complicity in US war crimes and its destruction of Irish neutrality.  She has been dedicated to highlighting that the most devastating impact of war is on women and our children, both directly from the bombs that rain down on us, and by paying with our poverty for the horrendous weapons of massive destruction that surround us all.    Ms D’Arcy is a veteran of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, which opposed the US military placing cruise missiles on common land in England, and won – the camp is no longer a military base.  To dissent from a perspective of permanent war and austerity, and demand the protection of life and the planet, is increasingly labelled subversive and even criminal behaviour.  While war criminals are allowed to pass through Irish airports and financial criminals go unpunished, the Irish State in thrall to the US, UK, EU and IMF Masters of War has imprisoned a pensioner who has dedicated herself to highlighting and preventing war crimes. An attack on courageous and principled Margaretta D’Arcy is an attack on us all. We demand the immediate release of Margaretta D’Arcy. Selma James                            on behalf of Global Women’s Strike Maggie Ronayne on behalf of Global Women’s Strike, Ireland   FREE SHANNON AIRPORT FROM THE US MILITARY! NOT MARGARETTA D’ARCY!  Write to Government TDs and to Minister Shatter: alan.shatter@oir.ie webcal://www.facebook.com/ical/u.php?uid=100000384772555&key=AQD3NAHxvJRL59no https://www.facebook.com/galway.antiwar https://www.facebook.com/FreeShannon?fref=ts http://www.shannonwatch.org http://www.irishantiwar.org online petition contact.ie/node/271 youtube clips re protests last Fri http://youtu.be/Y8Gsw-uKw3I http://youtu.be/k0GDbIc3yTg http://youtu.be/916TFoITexY

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Subject : WED 1/22, 7 PM, FUND-RAISER FOR INSOMNIA COOKIES STRIKE & ORGANIZING CAMPAIGN! To : act-ma@act-ma.org   Mon, Jan 20, 2014 03:03 PM

Occupy Boston Announcement Dear All, In August, employees of Cambridge's Insomnia Cookies struck, and joined the IWW. They were fed up with lousy pay and conditions. Their demands included $15/hr, health care, and a union, and they were swiftly terminated. Ever since, workers have stayed strong  and maintained their struggle, which has grown into an organizing drive at the boutique cookie business. Insomnia pays rock-bottom wages, charges $1.35 for cookies that cost the company .10 to make, and refuses to pay workers' compensation. Bike delivery workers report that if they get hurt in traffic, the boss' response is, "Why are you late?"  In response to a series of protests against the company's labor practices, Insomnia falsely reported picketers were blocking the sidewalk in front of the Cambridge store, giving Harvard and Cambridge cops an excuse to bring police violence, and phony charges of assaulting cops, down on a union member. Undeterred, the workers and their allies are keeping up pressure on the company with continuing pickets of local stores. Students at Harvard, BU and elsewhere have called for a boycott of the company. The National Labor Relations Board issued a Complaint against Insomnia for illegally firing workers for union activity. Recently SEIU Local 509 donated $1,000 to the campaign, a magnificent act of solidarity. You can help too! Please join Insomnia strikers and their supporters at the Strike & Organizing Campaign Fund-raiser, Wednesday January 22, starting at 7 pm, at the Center for Marxist Education, 550 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge (2nd floor), steps from the Central Square MBTA stop. If you can't come to the event, please consider donating to the Insomnia Cookies Workers' Organizing Fund, which is fueling the union drive.  In Solidarity, Geoff http://iwwboston.org/

From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Chapter 9-Veterans For Peace Archives-

 

Saint Patrick's Peace Parade

The Alternative People's Parade for Peace. Equality, Jobs, Environmental Stewardship, Social & Economic Justice

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Like Last Year The Heroic Whistleblower Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning Will Be Honored At This Year’s Parade-Free Chelsea Bradley Manning 

Assemble Time: 2:00 pm

Start Time: 3:00 pm (Approx.)

Start Location: Corner of West Broadway & D Street,

Four Blocks East of the - MBTA Redline "Broadway Station"

Look for Veterans For Peace Flags

End Location: Corner of Dorchester Ave. and Dorchester St)

"Andrew" MBTA Station

'The St. Patrick's Peace Day Parade STARTS on West Broadway (easterly), left onto East Broadway, Right onto "P" Street, Right onto "East 4th" Street, Left onto "K" Street, Right onto "East 5th" Street, Left onto "G" Street, Right onto the 'Southerly Arm of Thomas Park', Left onto "Telegraph" Street, Left onto "Dorchester Street" and ENDING at "Dorchester Avenue" (Andrew Square).

 

From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Chapter 9-Veterans For Peace Archives

Flyer for Boston's Veterans For Peace-led Saint Patrick's Day Peace Parade on Sunday March 16^th where Chelsea Manning supporters will be out in force calling for President Obama to pardon our sister. Distribute widely.

 

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator   – The China Doll-Take Two

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Those who have been following this series about the exploits of the famous Ocean City (located just south of Los Angeles then now incorporated into the county) private detective Michael Philip Marlin (hereafter just Marlin the way everybody when he became famous after the Galton case out on the coast) and his contemporaries in the private detection business like Freddy Vance, Charles Nicolas (okay, okay Clara too), Sam Archer, Miles Spade, Johnny Spain, know that he related many of these stories to his son, Tyrone Fallon, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tyrone later, in the 1970s, related these stories to the journalist who uncovered the relationship , Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a friend of my boyhood friend, Peter Paul Markin, who in turn related them to me over several weeks in the late 1980s. Despite that circuitous route I believe that I have been faithful to what Marlin presented to his son. In any case I take full responsibility for what follows.        

*************

No question Michael Philip Marlin, hard-headed, no nonsense, tough as nails private investigator was a “homer,” was a guy who felt right at home in the sun-drenched back streets and alleys of his native Los Angeles (really Ocean City, formerly an independent town but since incorporated into the blob sprawl of the city of angels, but that was when he was a kid in those white-washed faux adobe tenements and came of age on their hard-edged streets). He knew the players, the Hollywood producers, the oil executives, the old California money hidden behind the walled fortresses up in the hills with no number, no need for addresses, the new Okie money made in the massive transportation swirl and being Okies made a big display of front, cars, servants and numbered houses on well-thought of streets. Yeah, Okie front.       

He knew the bit players too, the wannabe starlets ready to take off their clothes the minute they hit town on the last Greyhound bus from Omaha, Springfield, Toledo, and points east. The press shills hustling those big- time promoters to place copy about their latest can’t miss wonder boy. The shady landlords who let anything go out as long as the clients kept the noise down, the hard-hearted repos men and failed insurance men, the small shopkeepers trying to squeeze a penny. Knew the bouncers at half the gin mills in town, likewise the house dicks in the run-down hotel (he/they called them no tell hotels with a laugh), knew and used the intelligence of the newsies. Yeah, he knew all the flotsam and jetsam of the city before it was swamped with every person without a permanent home or just with a permanent itch to not have such a home.           

Marlin knew, had to, the cops, good and bad, mostly bad or indifferent, knew the guys on the take to the new wave bad boys from the east who decided to settle in the sun and reap the profits in style and knew the guys who knew the score and kept quiet. Yeah he knew the hot spots and the low- life dens, knew Hollywood, knew Inglewood, knew all the vastness of the city in the days before the tourists and Okies came and ate up the land. Knew it before the ill-winds of World War II and the vast monies hanging around to be spent by those money-starved Okies. Knew it to be exact.

Time were tough though all around in those years before the war money came booming into his city of angels, his east of Eden, and the private- eye game was no exception. So every once in a while to keep himself in coffee and cakes he needed to take an outside job. Sometimes it was grabbing the graveyard shift as a house- peeper over at Jackie Craig’s Taft Hotel and sometimes he had to take out –of-town jobs. This one is about one of those out-of-town jobs, about a Frisco town job, always a tough dollar town and this time was no exception. Worst it involved dealing with the denizens of that town’s bustling and crowded Chinatown district, also always a very tough dollar. After the last episode in such a district, the Yellow Dog case he called it, where he almost single-handedly got himself in the center of a drug war, opium, with rare jade involved as well, and wasted a couple of guys on the way out he had avoided chop suey joints in LA like the plague.      

It wasn’t like Marlowe had something against the yellow race, against the Chinese, although he probably if he thought about it shared the same bewilderment at that exotic race, and the same prejudices as the average Anglo- Californian when confronted with a swarm of them. He didn’t have time to wonder how they got here, who brought them, or the fact that their coolie labor had built half the west but just that there were so many of them. What bothered him though, bothered him in a professional way too, was that they were so secretive, so clannish and closed- mouthed that you could not get a straight answer from them to push your investigation forward. That was the case here, the case he called the China Doll case.  

Marlin had been hired by a woman, a young Chinese woman, Lillian Chou, who wanted to know why her house, her summer house over in Pacifica had been vandalized not once but twice. Miss Chou told Marlin that she did not live there much, a few weeks now and then, since her father died and passed on the property to her and had not been on the premises when the vandals wreaked havoc on the premises. She told him that she had been living in the East after attending college, Wellesley, along with a number of familiar daughters from the Chinese elite in now occupied China. Her concern however had been for a caretaker, a trusted employee of her father’s who had come with the place, and who had been beaten within an inch of his life on the second invasion. That time the thieves had taken everything that was not nailed down, everything including some priceless rare jade jewelry handed down from her mother. She wanted Marlin’s services to find at least find the jade and her employee’s attackers because he had done similar work on that Yellow Dog case. Moreover Freddie Ching had recommended him to her after the cops had essentially blown off the case as just another tong war episode. (Miss Chou’s late father, an importer, was well known to the San Francisco police for his various, uh, enterprises, stolen jewelry, sex- trafficking, opium, coolie laborers, whatever could be sold in the import-export markets).

That is where things started right off to get dicey. Miss Chou gave him little information since she had spent most of her time back East. That included trying to shed her Chinese origins as much as possible to fit in with the other Anglicized Chinese. Marlin pulled a few connections through Freddie Ching, the man to see in Frisco town on any China-tinged issue and was able to find out that Miss Chou’s father had made enemies in his time but also many friends, among them Sonny Dell. Sonny the number one Anglo drug trafficker in Northern California, the number one guy in the lucrative opium and heroin markets. Her father had made arrangements with Sonny to allow him to use his beachfront house in Pacifica to bring in his materials from the Far East in return for a big cut of the profits. That arrangement had, unknown to Marlin, extended beyond her father’s death through the employment of the trusted caretaker, Sung Ling, That caretaker though was the weak link in the chain down from Sonny. Ling had wanted to tell Miss Chou about the set-up but Sonny would not let him. And for his efforts he got beaten within an inch of his life and the house was ransacked to make it look like a robbery was the motivation.        

Marlin’s life became a great deal harder after coming by this information since all parties to the Pacifica house arrangements, including Sonny Dell, were keen to keep the commerce moving. One night over on Post Street Marlin learned how serious that big-time operator was about his interests when three gunsels hired by one Sonny Dell tried to waylay him, waylay him the only way they knew with slugs flying. The Frisco gunsel talent pool apparently had taken a nosedive since after a few shots of his own two of the boys lay dead on the street and the third hightailed it for parts unknown. That little shoot-out however put him no closer to the missing jade although it cleared up the mystery of who had beaten Miss Chou’s caretaker.

Sonny’s guns were not the only ones that he had to run up  against since nothing involving Chinatown escaped the purview of the tong leaders in that locale. Lee Chang, another powerful figure in Chinatown who had the Chinese end of the arrangement with Sonny just then and had no interest in seeing his newfound profit center disrupted by a white man working for some princess. So Marin also had to go rat-a-tat-tat with some of Chang’s boys. Par for the Frisco course.

Here is the screwy part though Miss Chou had been privy to what was happening at her estate from the start. She in fact had an arrangement with Sonny where he could use the premises in exchange for shipping weapons and other materials to China to aid in the struggle against the Japanese who had occupied the main areas of China. She used Marlin as a shield to find out what had happened to her caretaker who not only worked for Sonny but as a patriotic Chinaman for Miss Chou’s operation. Moreover there never was any jade, or rather that jade had long before been turned in cash by Miss Chou and used to pay for arms for the resistance back in China. Marlin when he heard that news after confronting Miss Chou once he realized that Sonny, Chang or one of their agents had to have spoken to her about his whereabouts left her place in disgust. Later he thought that a couple of lives could have been saved, a lot of trouble could have been avoided if Miss Chou another one of those damn secretive members of the yellow race had leveled with him. In any case since Lee Chang had some unfinished business with Marlin as a result a certain Chinatown shoot-out, he was avoiding chop suey joints in Frisco as well, staying far away indeed.       

'My Goal Is To Tell The Really Truth About Black Life In The '60s'

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• Written ByGreg Cook
• PublishedJanuary 20, 2014
• 2Comments
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Winfred Rembert is one of the survivors of the harrowing, segregated mid-20th century American South. Born in 1945, he grew up black in Cuthbert, Georgia, where whites and blacks were separated from each other at soda fountains, doctors’ offices, laundries. When he was just a baby, his mother gave him up to a great aunt, who raised him. She took him to church and carried him into fields where they picked cotton and peanuts. In his teens, he says he joined the civil rights movement, was arrested, escaped, was recaptured and nearly lynched, then sentenced to years working chain gangs.
Rembert’s a born storyteller with an incredible, heartbreaking, and hopeful story to tell. So when he took up leatherworking—again—in the mid 1990s, he carved the tan sheets into extraordinary patterns and colored them with shoe dye to illustrate his tale. His stories became the subject of a major 2011 documentary, “All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert,” which has been screened on PBS. And these are the stories he told me when we talked yesterday at his exhibition “Beyond Memory,” on view at the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham through Feb. 23.

Winfred Rembert at the Danforth Art Museum. (Greg Cook)

Rembert: “I was sick and tired of the cotton fields. It’s no fun picking cotton for nothing. You know you ain’t making no money. You just out there every day. And my mother was out there. She was making herself two or three dollars a day. I’m making 50 cent maybe. That was no fun.”
“I ran away from the cotton fields and I started hanging out at Jeff’s Pool Room on Hamilton Avenue. All the civil rights work was based on Hamilton Avenue. I was 14. They was doing street protesting for different things, trying to get equal rights in restaurants, theaters, all over Georgia and Alabama. … I wasn’t a big part. I was just making up the numbers, just being part of the body.”

Winfred Rembert, “Bubba Dukes and Feet’s Pool Hall (Winfred Dancing),” 2002, dye on carved and tooled leather. (Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, Boston)

Among the protests he participated in was one in Americus, Georgia, in the mid 1960s against blacks receiving much harsher sentences than whites for similar crimes. “It was a kind of big demonstration, bigger than usual. They had the fire department deputized and they had citizens deputized. And things got out of hand. White people started shooting. And we started running and everything. So I ran down this alley trying to get away and these two white men were running behind me. There was this car sitting there and I took that car and got away.”
Within hours, police caught him: “They just pulled up behind me. And they put me in jail in Cuthbert.”
Rembert says was held there for at least a year. “Well I had stayed in there so long that I was just trying to do something to irritate him.”
“I had stuck a roll of toilet paper in the john and it flooded the jail and the deputy sheriff come back and he opened the door and came in and jumped me. Then there was struggle between him and I. And I ended up taking his firearm away from him. I locked him in the cell and escaped.”
“I went to some people’s house who I thought I could get some help from. But they went in the next room and called the police. They threw me in the car. First, they put me in the back seat and escorted me to the jail. Then two, three hours later, they threw me in the trunk [of a police car] and drove me out to an isolated place where they had these noose hanging from a tree. Then they took me out and hanged me upside-down. Then the same guy that I locked in the jail, in the cell, he tried to castrate me. Until another man, a white man, came up and stopped him and saved me from being castrated. Then they cut me down and took me back to the jail bleeding like a pig.”

Winfred Rembert, “Chain Gang,” 2010, dye on carved and tooled leather. (Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, Boston)

“There was no new trial. One day they took me to a kangaroo court. They had a judge, but there was no plea, guilty plea, and all that kind of stuff. They just gave me some time. Judge gave me five years for escape, two years for pointing a pistol, and he gave me 20 for robbery. And I asked him, ‘Who did I rob?’ He says, ‘You robbed a man of his pistol.’ I said, ‘Well, he was pulling the pistol to shoot me.’ He says, ‘Well, you should have let him shot you.’”
Rembert says he was sentenced to 27 years and transferred to Georgia State Prison at Reidsville, but ended up serving seven years, much of it working on chain gangs. “I was doing labor work, digging holes, cutting down trees, building roads, and running from bees and snakes. Everyday except Saturday and Sunday.”
“It is slave labor. They just figure out things that’s hard for you to do and make you do them.”
“I just had a hard tough will. I was just determined to survive it. That’s how I got by. I seen a lot of people who didn’t get by. They lost their minds and died, some of them. Young guys too. Young as I was [19]. And some younger.”

Winfred Rembert, “Cracking Rocks,” 2011, dye on carved and tooled leather. (Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, Boston)

While working chain gangs, he saw a girl named Patsy. “The water had washed away a bridge that lead to her home. Me and some more inmates went to fix it. I had seen her once before, but I didn’t really know that she lived where that bridge had washed away. And I recognized her as we rode by, so I walked up to her and introduced myself. And she ran.”
“But I kept pursing her and pursuing her. Finally wrote her a letter and she answered it back. We did that for four and a half years, through the mail. Then I got out in July ’74 and we married that same year, December.”
In prison, Rembert learned leatherworking from a fellow inmate. “I was watching this guy make billfolds. He’s making billfolds and everything and I just stood there and watched him. That’s how I learned, just by watching him. So I convinced him to let me help him make his billfolds. He did that until he saw that I was going to be good, then he kicked me to the curb. Didn’t let me us his tools any more. I made my own tools with nails. You know, they sell all size nails. So I just took a file. They didn’t last very long those type of tools because it’s not hard metal. But I could do enough with them to get what I want done.”
Rembert and his wife now live in New Haven, Connecticut, where they’ve raised eight children. “I couldn’t make no money in Georgia to support a family so that’s when I came to Connecticut in 1975.”

Winfred Rembert, “Picking Cotton/Colors,” 2010, dye on carved and tooled leather. (Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, Boston)

“Don’t stay knocked down. If I had stayed knocked down, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I would be a person who hates everybody. I don’t have time for that. I used to think that way, but I met Patsy and I knew if we were going to have a family I couldn’t be thinking like that. I can’t afford to raise my children that way. Just imagine how my six boys would be if I was a hater.”
“I continued doing it [leather work] for about a year [after I left prison] maybe and then stopped and let it go. Then I tell so many stories after we had the children and all, my wife thought it would be a good idea to put my stories on the leathers. And that’s where we are now.”
“I watch a lot of movies on black life and it seemed to me they don’t tell everything, they leave a lot out. That’s not my goal. My goal is to tell the truth, tell what I saw. Maybe a lot of people didn’t live black life like I lived it or saw that I saw. But my goal is to tell the really truth about black life in the ‘60s. They leave out the attempted lynchings and the killings of families and castrating me and women having babies in the cotton fields. All kinds of things. My father getting his eye knocked out. Police hit him in the face with a blackjack.”
“There’s a lot of black people I think are none interested in their past. And by them being none interested in it, it causes them to commit black-on-black crime and not to be a together race of people. I think if we know the truth then we can inherit and appreciate where we come from and treat each other better and be a better race of people.”
“I bet you Martin Luther King—today’s his birthday—would be very dissatisfied and hurt to his heart knowing how black people have turned their life around oppositely of what he stood for. People just done forgot about that. The civil rights movement accomplished a lot back in the day. But now it’s at a standstill. Even though we’ve got a black president, I don’t think it means that much. Obama is just a black president, that’s all, nothing else. It don’t seem to mean anything to his race of people that we have a black president. And that’s bad.”
“I’m just a black guy in a white people’s world. Let’s face it, the art world is a white world. To be a part of it, to me, is a miracle. I consider myself very successful to come where I come from and to be a part of this elite society of people, you know what I mean? The people in this art world is an elite bunch of folk that you can’t touch. And for them to love my work enough to bring and accept my work, man, that’s something.”
“But don’t go to the chain gang just to be a successful artist.”
Greg Cook is co-founder of ARTery. He’s also the host of the monthly “Quiet, Please” arts and culture talks at the Malden Public Library. Follow him on Twitter: @aestheticresear

With support from

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Labor Movement-“Big Bill Haywood  

 

 

 

 EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. DURING THE MONTH WE ALSO HONOR OTHER HISTORIC LEADERS AS WELL ON THIS SITE.

Book Review

Big Bill Haywood, Melvyn Dubofsky, Manchester University Press, Manchester England, 1987

If you are sitting around today wondering, as I occasionally do, what a modern day radical labor leader should look like then one need go no further than to observe the career, warts and all, of the legendary Bill Haywood. To previous generations of radicals that name would draw an automatic response. Today’s radicals, and others interested in social solutions to the pressing problems that have been bestowed on us by the continuation of the capitalist mode of production, may not be familiar with the man and his program for working class power. Professor Dubofsky’s little biographical sketch is thus just the cure for those who need a primer on this hero of the working class.

The good professor goes into some detail, despite limited accessibility, about Haywood’s early life out in the Western United States in the late 19th century. Those hard scrabble experiences made a huge imprint on the young Haywood as he tramped from mining camp to mining camp and tried to make ends mean, any way he could. Haywood, moreover, is the perfect example of the fact that working class political consciousness is not innate but gained through the hard experiences of life under the capitalist system. Thus, Haywood moved from itinerant miner to become a leading member of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and moved leftward along the political spectrum along the way. Not a small part in that was due to his trial on trumped up charges in Idaho for murder as part of a labor crackdown against the WFM by the mine owners and their political allies there.

As virtually all working class militants did at the turn of the 20th century, Big Bill became involved with the early American socialist movement and followed the lead of the sainted Eugene V. Debs. As part of the ferment of labor agitation during this period the organization that Haywood is most closely associated with was formed-The Industrial Workers of the World (hereafter IWW, also known as Wobblies). This organization- part union, part political party- was the most radical expression (far more radical than the rather tepid socialist organizations) of the American labor movement in the period before World War I.

The bulk of Professor Dubofsky’s book centers, as it should, on Haywood’s exploits as a leader of the IWW. Big Bill’s ups and downs mirrored the ups and downs of the organization. The professor goes into the various labor fights that Haywood led highlighted by the great 1912 Lawrence strike (of bread and roses fame), the various free speech fights but also the draconian Wilsonian policy toward the IWW after America declared war in 1917. That governmental policy essentially crushed the IWW as a mass working class organization. Moreover, as a leader Haywood personally felt the full wrath of the capitalist government. Facing extended jail time Haywood eventually fled to the young Soviet republic where he died in lonely exile in 1928.

The professor adequately tackles the problem of the political and moral consequences of that escape to Russia for the IWW and to his still imprisoned comrades so I will not address it here. However, there are two points noted by Dubofsky that warrant comment. First, he notes that Big Bill was a first rate organizer in both the WFM and the IWW. Those of us who are Marxists sometimes tend to place more emphasis of the fact that labor leaders need to be “tribunes of the people” that we sometimes neglect the important “trade union secretary” part of the formula. Haywood seems to have had it all. Secondly, Haywood’s and the IWW’s experience with government repression during World War I, repeated in the “Red Scare” experience of the 1950’s against Communists and then later against the Black Panthers in the 1960’s should be etched into the brain of every militant today. When the deal goes down the capitalists and their hangers-on will do anything to keep their system. Anything. That said, read this Haywood primer. It is an important contribution to the study of American labor history.