“One day when I was about seventeen I was walking up and down in front of a restaurant in some small town in Montana. I had a sandwich board strapped to my chest and back, advertising the restaurant, and I’d been promised a meal if I walked that beat for six hours. So I’m walking up and down there, and some guy comes up to me and he’s about forty, fifty years old, and he’s got cold, angry blue eyes and a big beard like prospectors wore up in the hills, and he says to me: ‘You an Amurrican?’ ‘Sure,’ I says back. He points his finger, really angry, at the sandwich board, and he says to me, ‘You’re an Amurrican and a human being. It don’t seem right that you should have to do that just to eat a meal.’ And he made me take the sandwich board off, right there in the middle of the street, and told me to come with him. I was thunderstruck. No one in my whole life had ever said anything like what he’d just said to me. There was nothing for it but to do as he said, and go with him.

“He took me on out to the edge of town and there, on an embankment near a small river, was a campfire and a bunch of guys sitting around it. I thought they were hoboes, but they weren’t. They were Wobblies. They sat me down, gave me some food to eat, explained themselves to me, and within twelve hours they brought politics into my life. [...]

“Of course, I took to the Wobblies right away. It wasn’t just that they were kind to me, and that their talk hypnotized me, and that somehow I knew they were saying something important and they had a lot of guts to be saying it. No, it wasn’t just that. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but all that talk about solidarity and the working class, I didn’t know what the words meant, but somehow, they were touching that loneliness in me. Something flickered up in me, it was warming, I didn’t feel lonely listening to the Wobblies.