MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE COLD WAR
Chapter 2 THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Chapter 3 YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
Chapter 4 TENNIS
Chapter 5 THE TRUMAN YEARS
CHAPTER 2
THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
The Monterey Peninsula was the best place in the world to grow up. Anybody who says different doesn’t know what he’s talkin’ about. Of course, I mean the days before television got ahold of us. The 30’s and 40’s. There was Depression and War for most of it, and that meant that we didn’t have anything. At least that’s the way it was with the people I knew in my grammar school days.
it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. That’s why so many writers and and artists came and settled there. Monterey is on the Bay, Pacific Grove on the Point, and Carmel and Pebble Beach run along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. In back of Carmel and south of there, to Big Sur and past for a good hundred miles, are soft, high hills that rise abruptly out of the Pacific and move eastward. Between the hills are canyons and streams, and on the other side of the hills is the Salinas Valley, with its jet-black chunks of earth and expansive lettuce fields and still some sugar-beets and over recent decades more and more grapes in the south-county.
Salinas and its valley aren’t geographically part of the Monterey Peninsula, but going way back there’s been a lot of contact between people from those two places. Mainly from Salinas coming over for the beaches and for the big, beautiful pool at the Del Monte Hotel, and some of ‘em built summer cabins at Robles del Rio, up the Carmel Valley. Was one family up there added a big porch on back of their house and during the War in the ‘40’s used to invite maybe 20 people at a time up for a week-end. From Monterey and Salinas. They had a bunch of dogs and horses, and a couple of times a few of us kids rode back down to the mouth of the Valley. Then at night they’d clear out the front room, and we’d square dance—kids and old people—everybody. Fat guy from Salinas would bring his fiddle, and he knew how to call, and pretty soon food would begin to appear out of the kitchen.
Lots of Okies came to Salinas in the 30’s looking for field work, because their farms back home had blown away. Before them Filipinos had done it all. Anyway, a few years after the War we could get Big Jim DeNoon broadcasting country swing music from the Big Barn in Salinas over our KDON radio station in Monterey, and a couple of times a few of us high school kids drove over to the dance to see The Maddox Brothers and Rose or another good act outta Bakersfield. And, of course, the real cowboys from up the Carmel Valley would go over for Big Week in August and take part in the Salinas Rodeo. My best friend when I was in the fifth grade (he was in the sixth), lived with his mother in Sal Cerrito’s garage a block up the street from us while his dad was off in the Pacific fightin’. He went over to the Junior Rodeo and won a big silver belt-buckle ridin’ a bronco. Never had lessons or anything.
Then during the War there were some Italian families from the Peninsula and south of Carmel who got relocated to Salinas or somewhere in the interior, because some of ‘em weren’t citizens. One of those Italian kids, Tony Teresa, played against us when he was at Salinas High then went on to start in the first Oakland Raider backfield.
But for me the reason I felt close to Salinas was because my grandfather settled there and became the first elected County Surveyor in the 1890’s and it was where my mother was born and grew up.
Pacific Grove first saw the light in the 1870’s as a Christian summer resort, which banned cards, dice, billiards, dancing, liquor, and the sale of anything except medicine, and the little town that grew up around it reflected austerity on into the future. Carmel, only a few miles away, began attracting writers and artists, and they set the tone there. Neither of these communities had an ethnic component to speak of outside of northern European, but early on in Monterey a few Chinese set up a fishing industry, and by the turn of the century Japanese abalone divers and Sicilians had started to come to harvest the Bay and the Ocean beyond. The canning industry to process the annual catch was developed in Monterey by entrepreneurs from out of town who used the local Chinese, Japanese, and Sicilian labor, as well as Portuguese and Spanish immigrants.
Much of the rest of the land on the Peninsula that was not a part of these three towns, including the splendid Hotel Del Monte, came to be controlled by the Crocker family through the Pacific Improvement Corporation. When they decided to sell their holdings around the time of the First World War, the family employed a young ex-footballer from Yale to take care of it. This was Sam Morse, who shrewdly bought up most of it for himself, and by building two world-class golf courses and bringing in the finest polo and tennis, he created a recreational paradise.
Morse despised Monterey, the ethnicity of it and the stink that permeated the town when the sardines were running and were being brought in to the canneries by the purse seiners to be pulverized for feed and fertilizer. Still, he relied on Monterey labor to work the laundry at the Del Monte Hotel and to staff his five golf courses. One of the Spanish kids who caddied at Del Monte later played on three Ryder Cup teams and another went on to win the United States Open at Merion, outside of Philadelphia in 1934, the year I was born.
1934 was also the year in which the recently-organized Filipino farm workers struck the produce fields in Salinas. A piece of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation had given industrial workers the right to bargain collectively, so strikes were breaking out everywhere around the country, and although agricultural workers had not been specifically mentioned in the legislation, they were striking, too.
Although Mexican field labor through the ‘20’s was mostly migratory in California, there had been a successful union with 20 locals established, and it attracted the attention of the Communist Party of the United States, which, acting under a mandate from the Comintern in Moscow, set up the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) aimed at bringing unskilled workers into organizations that cut across racial, ethnic, and class lines. In 1932 TUUL formed the Marxist-oriented Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAIWU).
One of the most vocal supporters of CAIWU was a Carmel resident, Ella Winter, who was born in Australia of German-Jewish parents. She had met journalist-muckraker Lincoln Steffens at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and the two were secretly married five years later. Steffens, as a radical journalist in New York in the decade after the turn of the century had mentored the young John Reed, who was recently graduated from Harvard and was in the process of becoming a Communist activist. A few years later Steffens covered the Mexican Revolution, and in 1919 he accompanied Swedish Communist Karl Kilbom and William Bullitt, who was to become the first American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, into Moscow, with authorization from President Wilson, to explore the possibility of formal recognition for the new Bolshevik state.
In 1927 Steffens and Winter moved to Carmel and settled into a cottage that was to be home until Steffens died in 1936. Although he never joined the Communist Party Lincoln Steffens was a Marxist revolutionary and always aligned himself with the communists when it came to matters involving social justice. He and Winter were regulars at the John Reed Club meetings in Carmel, named after Steffens poet-radical protégé whose ashes are buried in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, and they announced their support for communist William Foster in his 1932 presidential run. They had been involved with the communist backed Cannery and Agricultural Industrial Workers Union and in close touch with Samuel Darcy, regional director of the Communist Party. In 1930-1931 Winter visited the Soviet Union to observe Stalin’s first five-year plan in operation and afterward wrote a book entitled Red Virtue about the new role of Soviet women. A promotional book tour of ten California cities was done under the auspices of the “friends of the Soviet Union.”
In 1932 Winter chaired a meeting of the John Reed Club, at which the black American poet Langston Hughes, who was a member of the New York Reed Club and was in Carmel for an extended visit, gave a reading. The following day he had tea at Tor House with Una Jeffers and husband-poet Robinson Jeffers, who was at the height of his popularity in America. In June Hughes sailed for a year’s stay in the Soviet Union, leaving behind a good deal of local hostility toward himself and the members of the John Reed Club for their outspoken support of communism.
A year later Hughes returned to Carmel and began work on a play in collaboration with Ella Winter, and the perception grew that there was more afoot between the two than playwriting, and when Winter and the Club vigorously supported labor and Harry Bridges in the San Francisco longshoremen’s strike and the Filipino Labor Union in the lettuce fields in Salinas, it was more than most Carmel residents could take. Local newspapers accused Winter of being the conduit for the funneling of Soviet money into longshoremen hands and Hughes of spreading communist ideas and multiple counts of miscegenation. Langston Hughes left Carmel.
Carmel had incorporated in 1916, the year before the October Revolution in Russia, with fewer than 650 inhabitants, many of them artists and writers who had been attracted by the natural beauty of the area. Then when Sam Morse formed his Del Monte Properties Company in 1919 and built his great golf courses and tennis and polo facilities and a new lodge at Pebble Beach, the town of Carmel began to grow, so that by the year 1940 there were almost 3000 people living there. Many of these newer residents were small business owners. Doctors and lawyers, and so forth. The nearest thing to an industry with labor problems was the fishing and canning over the hill, and everybody outside Monterey tried to avoid that.
So it was quite disturbing to for many of these people in Carmel, surrounded by the best that nature can offer and without serious social problems of their own, to be faced at the outset of the Great Depression by a handful of writers and artists, their neighbors, who had taken up the cause of migrant field workers in other parts of the state. Then these radicals got behind the longshoremen in San Francisco and the Filipinos in the lettuce fields in Salinas, Filipinos, 30,000 of them, who had migrated in from southeast Asia in the 1920’s to add needed labor to an agricultural industry that was growing rapidly in the fertile valleys of California. In addition to their support for the field workers and longshoremen these bohemians had augmented their own voices with that of a famous black writer from New York, Langston Hughes.
The radical voices of Carmel came together through the John Reed Club, which was communist in its inception and philosophically represented the overthrow of the capitalist system, and while the membership was threatening in neither number nor appearance—the one-legged poet Orrick Johns, the lithe Ella Winter—their message was alarming to the business community, and it was met with vigor and hostility by its most powerful members.
Byington Ford, whose sister was married to Sam Morse, formed and headed the citizens’ committee to oppose the John Reed Club and their activities. His father had been a State Senator, Attorney General of California, General Counsel for the United Railroads in San Francisco, was a member of the Pacific Union and Bohemian Clubs and was listed in the San Francisco Social Register. Byington Ford himself was a Santa Clara University graduate, did a Master’s degree at the University of California, where he also played baseball, and served in the trenches in France as a Captain during World War 1. He also was listed in the San Francisco Social Register.
From 1919 to 1931 Ford managed the Del Monte Properties Company for his brother-in-law, Sam Morse, and then went out on his own to form the Carmel Realty Company. He was very social and popular and was a mainstay in the Abalone softball league, in which games were played weekly during the summer and each team was required to have two females. He was a fine horseman, and he wrote plays and entertainments that he staged at the Arts and Crafts Theater in Carmel.
The outward image of Carmel was artsy, quirky, intellectual, and fun-loving, but the hatred between the majority of the citizenry and the John Reed Club was very real and lasted several years. Convinced that the outbreak of violence might be imminent, the majority formed an American Legion post comprised of World War 1 veterans, and the city council voted to purchase tear-gas. The situation came to a head in July of 1934, shortly after the longshoremen’s strike in San Francisco was broken. A John Reed Club meeting was held in Carmel to discuss the events that had transpired, and the room filled-up with the opposition, among them several black people and a prominent artist, Jo Mora, who spoke on behalf of the legionnaires. Happily, there was no violence.
The Salinas lettuce strike of 1936 began in late August and lasted several months. Most of the field workers involved were white people, Okies, who were refugees from the Dust Bowl, and they formed the Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union. Close to 4,000 of these lettuce packers left the fields of the Salinas Valley and tried to picket, but the owners were well prepared and had organized 2,500 armed and deputized strike-breakers who met the striking pickets with tear-gas. Acting under the aegis of the Associated Farmers of California, an organization recently formed in anticipation of such exigencies, the owners had also hired a U.S. Army Reserve officer to coordinate the response of the local and state police against the strikers and their sympathizers and to protect the scab labor that had been employed.
The strike and the Union were crushed, but out of the angry and violent days in and around Salinas and, an Apple Harvester’s strike in Watsonville in the same year and the migration of a million Okies into California during the decade of the 1930’s, came two books that did far more to draw attention to the plight of the field worker than the actual strikes had. John Steinbeck wrote them both: In Dubious Battle and Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck had grown up in Salinas, was in and out of Stanford for quite a few years, and then took a variety of jobs in New York before coming back to the Monterey peninsula about when the Depression hit. Soon he began interacting with members of the Carmel John Reed Club, in particular Lincoln Steffens, Ella Winter, and blacksmith Frances Whitaker, who introduced him to strike organizers from the communist controlled Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union. In 1935 Steinbeck joined the ideological “League of American Writers,” which existed principally to disseminate dicta and propaganda out of Moscow. Of course, he and the other participants in these various Soviet-front organizations came under intense F.B.I. scrutiny, and the conservative establishment thought of him as being a communist during these years, but Steinbeck never became a member of the Party.
He lived in a small house on 11th Street in Pacific Grove that had been in the family. It was walking distance down to the canneries and through the Depression years he spent a lot of time there. “Cannery row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream,” he wrote in his charming fiction called Cannery Row and then went on to describe it more realistically: “(There are) sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkytonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”
Steinbeck did not use the full weight of his social protest voice against the fishing and canning industries in Monterey as he did when he wrote about the lettuce packers in Salinas and the apple harvesters in Watsonville. The reason for this was that the sardine industries, including the strongest fishermen’s and canners labor unions in Monterey, were controlled by Sicilian families, and they preferred to solve their problems in-house. The fishermen’s union eventually affiliated with the A.F. of L., and in 1937 it conducted a strike against the boat owners. It only took two days for them to get their demands, for while there was obvious socio-economic differentiation within the community between owners and crew members, there was extensive familial interrelationship and, small town that it was, neighborly proximity. The man who was the business agent for the fishermen’s union, Bricky Crivello, lived across the street from perhaps the toughest and most respected of the boat-owners, Captain Sal Colletto. A story still circulates among old-timers in Monterey that in the 1930’s a carload of San Francisco Mafioso drove down to see about cutting themselves in on the fishing profits and were met at the county line by Colletto and his friends and sent back north.
MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
END OF CHAPTERS 2 - THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
This url is:
derekmo.net/frostmonterey
BY JACK FROST
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE COLD WAR
Chapter 2 THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Chapter 3 YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
Chapter 4 TENNIS
Chapter 5 THE TRUMAN YEARS
CHAPTER 2
THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
The Monterey Peninsula was the best place in the world to grow up. Anybody who says different doesn’t know what he’s talkin’ about. Of course, I mean the days before television got ahold of us. The 30’s and 40’s. There was Depression and War for most of it, and that meant that we didn’t have anything. At least that’s the way it was with the people I knew in my grammar school days.
it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. That’s why so many writers and and artists came and settled there. Monterey is on the Bay, Pacific Grove on the Point, and Carmel and Pebble Beach run along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. In back of Carmel and south of there, to Big Sur and past for a good hundred miles, are soft, high hills that rise abruptly out of the Pacific and move eastward. Between the hills are canyons and streams, and on the other side of the hills is the Salinas Valley, with its jet-black chunks of earth and expansive lettuce fields and still some sugar-beets and over recent decades more and more grapes in the south-county.
Salinas and its valley aren’t geographically part of the Monterey Peninsula, but going way back there’s been a lot of contact between people from those two places. Mainly from Salinas coming over for the beaches and for the big, beautiful pool at the Del Monte Hotel, and some of ‘em built summer cabins at Robles del Rio, up the Carmel Valley. Was one family up there added a big porch on back of their house and during the War in the ‘40’s used to invite maybe 20 people at a time up for a week-end. From Monterey and Salinas. They had a bunch of dogs and horses, and a couple of times a few of us kids rode back down to the mouth of the Valley. Then at night they’d clear out the front room, and we’d square dance—kids and old people—everybody. Fat guy from Salinas would bring his fiddle, and he knew how to call, and pretty soon food would begin to appear out of the kitchen.
Lots of Okies came to Salinas in the 30’s looking for field work, because their farms back home had blown away. Before them Filipinos had done it all. Anyway, a few years after the War we could get Big Jim DeNoon broadcasting country swing music from the Big Barn in Salinas over our KDON radio station in Monterey, and a couple of times a few of us high school kids drove over to the dance to see The Maddox Brothers and Rose or another good act outta Bakersfield. And, of course, the real cowboys from up the Carmel Valley would go over for Big Week in August and take part in the Salinas Rodeo. My best friend when I was in the fifth grade (he was in the sixth), lived with his mother in Sal Cerrito’s garage a block up the street from us while his dad was off in the Pacific fightin’. He went over to the Junior Rodeo and won a big silver belt-buckle ridin’ a bronco. Never had lessons or anything.
Then during the War there were some Italian families from the Peninsula and south of Carmel who got relocated to Salinas or somewhere in the interior, because some of ‘em weren’t citizens. One of those Italian kids, Tony Teresa, played against us when he was at Salinas High then went on to start in the first Oakland Raider backfield.
But for me the reason I felt close to Salinas was because my grandfather settled there and became the first elected County Surveyor in the 1890’s and it was where my mother was born and grew up.
Pacific Grove first saw the light in the 1870’s as a Christian summer resort, which banned cards, dice, billiards, dancing, liquor, and the sale of anything except medicine, and the little town that grew up around it reflected austerity on into the future. Carmel, only a few miles away, began attracting writers and artists, and they set the tone there. Neither of these communities had an ethnic component to speak of outside of northern European, but early on in Monterey a few Chinese set up a fishing industry, and by the turn of the century Japanese abalone divers and Sicilians had started to come to harvest the Bay and the Ocean beyond. The canning industry to process the annual catch was developed in Monterey by entrepreneurs from out of town who used the local Chinese, Japanese, and Sicilian labor, as well as Portuguese and Spanish immigrants.
Much of the rest of the land on the Peninsula that was not a part of these three towns, including the splendid Hotel Del Monte, came to be controlled by the Crocker family through the Pacific Improvement Corporation. When they decided to sell their holdings around the time of the First World War, the family employed a young ex-footballer from Yale to take care of it. This was Sam Morse, who shrewdly bought up most of it for himself, and by building two world-class golf courses and bringing in the finest polo and tennis, he created a recreational paradise.
Morse despised Monterey, the ethnicity of it and the stink that permeated the town when the sardines were running and were being brought in to the canneries by the purse seiners to be pulverized for feed and fertilizer. Still, he relied on Monterey labor to work the laundry at the Del Monte Hotel and to staff his five golf courses. One of the Spanish kids who caddied at Del Monte later played on three Ryder Cup teams and another went on to win the United States Open at Merion, outside of Philadelphia in 1934, the year I was born.
1934 was also the year in which the recently-organized Filipino farm workers struck the produce fields in Salinas. A piece of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation had given industrial workers the right to bargain collectively, so strikes were breaking out everywhere around the country, and although agricultural workers had not been specifically mentioned in the legislation, they were striking, too.
Although Mexican field labor through the ‘20’s was mostly migratory in California, there had been a successful union with 20 locals established, and it attracted the attention of the Communist Party of the United States, which, acting under a mandate from the Comintern in Moscow, set up the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) aimed at bringing unskilled workers into organizations that cut across racial, ethnic, and class lines. In 1932 TUUL formed the Marxist-oriented Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAIWU).
One of the most vocal supporters of CAIWU was a Carmel resident, Ella Winter, who was born in Australia of German-Jewish parents. She had met journalist-muckraker Lincoln Steffens at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and the two were secretly married five years later. Steffens, as a radical journalist in New York in the decade after the turn of the century had mentored the young John Reed, who was recently graduated from Harvard and was in the process of becoming a Communist activist. A few years later Steffens covered the Mexican Revolution, and in 1919 he accompanied Swedish Communist Karl Kilbom and William Bullitt, who was to become the first American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, into Moscow, with authorization from President Wilson, to explore the possibility of formal recognition for the new Bolshevik state.
In 1927 Steffens and Winter moved to Carmel and settled into a cottage that was to be home until Steffens died in 1936. Although he never joined the Communist Party Lincoln Steffens was a Marxist revolutionary and always aligned himself with the communists when it came to matters involving social justice. He and Winter were regulars at the John Reed Club meetings in Carmel, named after Steffens poet-radical protégé whose ashes are buried in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, and they announced their support for communist William Foster in his 1932 presidential run. They had been involved with the communist backed Cannery and Agricultural Industrial Workers Union and in close touch with Samuel Darcy, regional director of the Communist Party. In 1930-1931 Winter visited the Soviet Union to observe Stalin’s first five-year plan in operation and afterward wrote a book entitled Red Virtue about the new role of Soviet women. A promotional book tour of ten California cities was done under the auspices of the “friends of the Soviet Union.”
In 1932 Winter chaired a meeting of the John Reed Club, at which the black American poet Langston Hughes, who was a member of the New York Reed Club and was in Carmel for an extended visit, gave a reading. The following day he had tea at Tor House with Una Jeffers and husband-poet Robinson Jeffers, who was at the height of his popularity in America. In June Hughes sailed for a year’s stay in the Soviet Union, leaving behind a good deal of local hostility toward himself and the members of the John Reed Club for their outspoken support of communism.
A year later Hughes returned to Carmel and began work on a play in collaboration with Ella Winter, and the perception grew that there was more afoot between the two than playwriting, and when Winter and the Club vigorously supported labor and Harry Bridges in the San Francisco longshoremen’s strike and the Filipino Labor Union in the lettuce fields in Salinas, it was more than most Carmel residents could take. Local newspapers accused Winter of being the conduit for the funneling of Soviet money into longshoremen hands and Hughes of spreading communist ideas and multiple counts of miscegenation. Langston Hughes left Carmel.
Carmel had incorporated in 1916, the year before the October Revolution in Russia, with fewer than 650 inhabitants, many of them artists and writers who had been attracted by the natural beauty of the area. Then when Sam Morse formed his Del Monte Properties Company in 1919 and built his great golf courses and tennis and polo facilities and a new lodge at Pebble Beach, the town of Carmel began to grow, so that by the year 1940 there were almost 3000 people living there. Many of these newer residents were small business owners. Doctors and lawyers, and so forth. The nearest thing to an industry with labor problems was the fishing and canning over the hill, and everybody outside Monterey tried to avoid that.
So it was quite disturbing to for many of these people in Carmel, surrounded by the best that nature can offer and without serious social problems of their own, to be faced at the outset of the Great Depression by a handful of writers and artists, their neighbors, who had taken up the cause of migrant field workers in other parts of the state. Then these radicals got behind the longshoremen in San Francisco and the Filipinos in the lettuce fields in Salinas, Filipinos, 30,000 of them, who had migrated in from southeast Asia in the 1920’s to add needed labor to an agricultural industry that was growing rapidly in the fertile valleys of California. In addition to their support for the field workers and longshoremen these bohemians had augmented their own voices with that of a famous black writer from New York, Langston Hughes.
The radical voices of Carmel came together through the John Reed Club, which was communist in its inception and philosophically represented the overthrow of the capitalist system, and while the membership was threatening in neither number nor appearance—the one-legged poet Orrick Johns, the lithe Ella Winter—their message was alarming to the business community, and it was met with vigor and hostility by its most powerful members.
Byington Ford, whose sister was married to Sam Morse, formed and headed the citizens’ committee to oppose the John Reed Club and their activities. His father had been a State Senator, Attorney General of California, General Counsel for the United Railroads in San Francisco, was a member of the Pacific Union and Bohemian Clubs and was listed in the San Francisco Social Register. Byington Ford himself was a Santa Clara University graduate, did a Master’s degree at the University of California, where he also played baseball, and served in the trenches in France as a Captain during World War 1. He also was listed in the San Francisco Social Register.
From 1919 to 1931 Ford managed the Del Monte Properties Company for his brother-in-law, Sam Morse, and then went out on his own to form the Carmel Realty Company. He was very social and popular and was a mainstay in the Abalone softball league, in which games were played weekly during the summer and each team was required to have two females. He was a fine horseman, and he wrote plays and entertainments that he staged at the Arts and Crafts Theater in Carmel.
The outward image of Carmel was artsy, quirky, intellectual, and fun-loving, but the hatred between the majority of the citizenry and the John Reed Club was very real and lasted several years. Convinced that the outbreak of violence might be imminent, the majority formed an American Legion post comprised of World War 1 veterans, and the city council voted to purchase tear-gas. The situation came to a head in July of 1934, shortly after the longshoremen’s strike in San Francisco was broken. A John Reed Club meeting was held in Carmel to discuss the events that had transpired, and the room filled-up with the opposition, among them several black people and a prominent artist, Jo Mora, who spoke on behalf of the legionnaires. Happily, there was no violence.
The Salinas lettuce strike of 1936 began in late August and lasted several months. Most of the field workers involved were white people, Okies, who were refugees from the Dust Bowl, and they formed the Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union. Close to 4,000 of these lettuce packers left the fields of the Salinas Valley and tried to picket, but the owners were well prepared and had organized 2,500 armed and deputized strike-breakers who met the striking pickets with tear-gas. Acting under the aegis of the Associated Farmers of California, an organization recently formed in anticipation of such exigencies, the owners had also hired a U.S. Army Reserve officer to coordinate the response of the local and state police against the strikers and their sympathizers and to protect the scab labor that had been employed.
The strike and the Union were crushed, but out of the angry and violent days in and around Salinas and, an Apple Harvester’s strike in Watsonville in the same year and the migration of a million Okies into California during the decade of the 1930’s, came two books that did far more to draw attention to the plight of the field worker than the actual strikes had. John Steinbeck wrote them both: In Dubious Battle and Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck had grown up in Salinas, was in and out of Stanford for quite a few years, and then took a variety of jobs in New York before coming back to the Monterey peninsula about when the Depression hit. Soon he began interacting with members of the Carmel John Reed Club, in particular Lincoln Steffens, Ella Winter, and blacksmith Frances Whitaker, who introduced him to strike organizers from the communist controlled Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union. In 1935 Steinbeck joined the ideological “League of American Writers,” which existed principally to disseminate dicta and propaganda out of Moscow. Of course, he and the other participants in these various Soviet-front organizations came under intense F.B.I. scrutiny, and the conservative establishment thought of him as being a communist during these years, but Steinbeck never became a member of the Party.
He lived in a small house on 11th Street in Pacific Grove that had been in the family. It was walking distance down to the canneries and through the Depression years he spent a lot of time there. “Cannery row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream,” he wrote in his charming fiction called Cannery Row and then went on to describe it more realistically: “(There are) sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkytonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”
Steinbeck did not use the full weight of his social protest voice against the fishing and canning industries in Monterey as he did when he wrote about the lettuce packers in Salinas and the apple harvesters in Watsonville. The reason for this was that the sardine industries, including the strongest fishermen’s and canners labor unions in Monterey, were controlled by Sicilian families, and they preferred to solve their problems in-house. The fishermen’s union eventually affiliated with the A.F. of L., and in 1937 it conducted a strike against the boat owners. It only took two days for them to get their demands, for while there was obvious socio-economic differentiation within the community between owners and crew members, there was extensive familial interrelationship and, small town that it was, neighborly proximity. The man who was the business agent for the fishermen’s union, Bricky Crivello, lived across the street from perhaps the toughest and most respected of the boat-owners, Captain Sal Colletto. A story still circulates among old-timers in Monterey that in the 1930’s a carload of San Francisco Mafioso drove down to see about cutting themselves in on the fishing profits and were met at the county line by Colletto and his friends and sent back north.
MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
END OF CHAPTERS 2 - THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
This url is:
derekmo.net/frostmonterey
