CHAPTER 3. MARRIAGE—TRAVEL IN 48 STATES 40
to prison in World War II, and some of them moved to Costa Rica to escape militarism. In late May we went westward across Texas again and climbed Pikes Peak on the night of the 4th of July, 1924. (We learned that next year the history teacher in Fairhope was an ex-army captain, so the pacifist was counter-balanced.) We stopped at Ludlow, Colorado and took a picture of the cross that marked the burning to death of the strikers and their women and children by the Rockefeller gunmen, years before. (Before this we had stopped at Leavenworth prison and visited Red Doran, Jim Thompson, and other I.W.W.'s still imprisoned. I was surprised to see Zerbst, my old warden from Atlanta. He was now deputy at Leavenworth. He could afford to be cordial now and praised the I.W.W.'s as being skilled workers.)
In Utah toward evening we saw what appeared to be thousands of maggots moving over a distant mountain. Drawing closer we saw they were goats. We watched that evening as the Greeks at the goat corral, backed a goat into a V shaped fence and milked her quickly into a huge washtub. They gave us goat-cheese (something you have to get used to) to carry along. After a few miles we hurried to a cabin off the road and knocked at the door, seeking to escape the rain. The door was slightly ajar and swung open. A sign said: "Cook what you want; clean up, and put out the fire." This was the open hospitality of the west that we had read about. We made coffee and oatmeal and soon it had stopped raining and we left. Later we found we never could buy cherries from the hospitable Mormons, for they always gave us some to eat and carry along.
In Seattle we met Red Doran on the street. He was a barker for a dentist. As we had little money left we hurried down to San Francisco and settled in Berkeley where Selma attended the Arts and Crafts School and I hurried into a job of selling Fuller brushes, taking an extension course in soils, beekeeping, etc. at the University.
Since 1922 I had been a nominal member of the Workers (Communist) Party because of my admiration for Ruthenberg, who had now been released from Sing Sing and was the head of the Party. He understood that I was an anarchist but that I wanted to be doing something and all the anarchists I knew of were a sleepy crowd. Accordingly I taught classes in American History each Sunday morning to the Finnish comrades in Berkeley, down by the waterfront. Each Thursday night I had a class of young Communists in Oakland and each Friday in San Francisco. By the time winter was over I understood that they did not want to learn about American History: all they wanted to hear was the word "revolution" over and over again. I could see no point in continuing my membership. I had never attended a party meeting; paying my dues by mail. I won a turkey as a salesman and Selma and Mother Bloor and a radical news vendor on the campus ate it for Thanksgiving Day. One evening in May I came home from a meeting and said to Selma: "Suppose we don't go to South America. Suppose we go to some place in the country near Milwaukee; start farming on a small scale; rest up from traveling, and have some children."
"I was thinking the same thing," she replied. We bought a sewing machine and shipped it home; Webster's unabridged
