For Brown and Yoneda, party membership led them into union activity. Angela Gizzi’s experience provides a different pattern. Her interest in the left led her to union activism and then to the CP. She was born in San Francisco’s North Beach, an Italian neighborhood. Her parents were middle-class Italian immigrants and nominal Catholics. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, (UC—Berkeley) in 1931, amid the Depression, but couldn’t find a job. In 1933 she was hired by the Bank of America because of her fluent Italian and ability with Spanish and French. She’d begun to move left politically at Berkeley and after witnessing the funeral march on Market Street. In early 1936 she attended a meeting of an AFL organizing committee for white-collar workers. After speaking up in the meeting, she was invited to a party recruiting session, led by Arthur Kent. She joined. Kent, however, was an informer. He gave employers the names of those who joined the union, and they were fired. Gizzi soon met Caroline Decker, who had recently been released from prison, and they became close friends. In 1937 Gizzi was elected president of a CIO organizing committee for office workers, and she continued to work as a CIO union organizer.

Estolv Ward’s efforts to found a union led him to the CP, which led him to positions with CIO unions and central bodies. He was born in Los Angeles in 1899. His father was a lawyer and former Populist who became a Socialist, and his mother was a physician, Quaker, and feminist. They moved to the Bay Area shortly after Estolv’s birth. After attending the University of California, Ward became a reporter and eventually assistant editor for the Oakland Tribune. Covering the San Francisco general strike in 1934 led him to join the Newspaper Guild, for which he was fired. He joined the CP in 1936 and held staff positions with CIO central bodies, labor publications, and Labor’s Non-Partisan League. He was executive secretary of the Harry Bridges Defense Committee in 1939. He and Angela Gizzi were married in 1939.