Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
Dynamite and Dreams is based on the life of Job Harriman, a socialist labor lawyer who was Eugene Debs’s running mate and twice ran for mayor of Los Angeles during the 1910s. This historical novel is also a fictionalized account of life in the utopian, turn-of-the century Llano Colony north of Los Angeles that Harriman co-founded in 1914.
Chapter 17
May Day
Jerry woke early. He had slept well, coughing but little, sweating hardly at all. He shaved, pulled on his striped knickers and shirt, and headed for the baseball diamond. He thought he heard music on a ukulele down the street. Or maybe it was music in his own mind. “God, I’m happy.” The refrain kept repeating in his thoughts. May Day! We’ve made it. One whole year. He looked at the long streets of tents in all directions. Workers of the world, look at you. We’ve made it.
He greeted a few early risers as he went. Even if they were all out, he would know them, all five hundred of them, farmers in overalls, mechanics with grease stains, bearded intellectuals with horned-rim glasses, women in bonnets with calloused hands, girls in tattered shifts and chemises, boys in suspenders.
The sun shouted its way upward over the mountains to proclaim May Day and light the baseball diamond that lay in a cleared space beside the industrial school, between an alfalfa field and a pear orchard. No one was there yet except his uncle Dan, who didn’t wear a baseball uniform but had on clean work clothes. To Jerry he still seemed incredibly tall with the shoulders of an ox.
Jerry taunted him. “I hope you can throw a ball today better than you’ve thrown bricks.”
“That’s a low blow. Not sure I like that.”
Jerry stood for a moment, his mind flooding with images of Chicago and Pullman. But all he said was, “If all the Marrieds feel as good as I do today, we’ll beat you hands down.”
By the time the first ball was pitched there were hundreds of rooters, and the Marrieds had the biggest support. But they lost 6-5. Dan made three runs. Jerry played third base and flubbed crucially. At bat he struck out twice. But his booming voice rose over everyone’s. He made even more noise than Dan.
So May Day began with rooters, and the rooting lasted all day. It was as if the Llano Socialist Colony had landed from Ararat and the rainbow splashed in every face. Hundreds of people, residents and visitors from the city, slapped backs and gave hugs. If someone added up all the announcements of the day, they’d have a good picture of the colony--five hundred acres of pears, almost as many in peaches and almonds, five hundred acres of alfalfa and truck gardens, and many more planned. Barns with dairy cattle, horses, hogs, goats, and rabbits. Water pouring down from Big Rock Creek through the cemented ditch to the fields and cisterns of the colony. The water feeding a bakery, a dairy, a barber shop, a cannery, a laundry, a general store, a library, a medical department, a printing press, a lime kiln, a soap factory, and a machine shop. Schools, including a Montessori and an industrial school, teaching near a hundred children. The colonists cheered every announcement. They were proud of it all, and especially of the unspoken fact that they worked at a standard wage of $4.00 a day while a Los Angeles skilled worker was lucky to be getting $3.50.
After the ball game there were three-legged races and gunny-sack races and races with eggs on teaspoons and human wheelbarrow races. Jerry wasn’t game for the physical ones but he signed up for the relay passing an orange under the chin. He didn’t realize that Mildred had also enrolled for the race, but when he saw the line-up with Mildred on his team and with her name following his, he suspected her of some manipulations. The teams, each divided, readied on either side of the field. An orange was carried under the chin as a racer walked from line to line, and without using hands, passed the orange from chin to chin.
When Jerry faced his leg of the race, orange under chin, he had counted twenty steps when he noticed Mildred’s long arms waving him at her. He got there at twenty-five steps--a good number. He could feel her pulling him down to her level. She was holding his arms like a driver might hold a wheel. She was pressing to get at the orange, and he felt her breasts against his light shirt. Her chin was smooth and soft, rubbing on his to get at the orange. He let loose too soon and the orange bounced on the ground. She picked it up, “Hold it tighter,” she screamed as she put it back under his chin. But his perspiration was making it slippery and this time she locked her chin very close to his mouth. He wondered if he should ever let that orange go. But the crowd’s screams brought him back to reality. “They’re winning. Get it on!”
Jerry felt Mildred’s chin push hard, and his chin sank into her soft cheek, as the orange went from his grasp to hers. He felt his arms free again and she was gone.
They lost by two and a half minutes. Jerry thought, it was probably our glorious two and a half minutes. I’d play that game anytime. And I wouldn’t play to win.
At noon was a picnic in the almond orchard with tables set under the blossoming trees and the young people gathered around blankets on the ground. Jerry sat at the head table, applauding the winners of the races and listening to Bert Engle extol the red flag as the only international emblem. At the end of the picnic the girls from the Montessori School did a Maypole dance. Their weaving ribbons were all red.
The Hotel with its two huge fireplaces and front pillars of stone had been finished barely a month before. Jerry would never forget the cheering when the final doors were installed. That building became the colony’s focus, a crowning symbol of their reach and their vision.
On May Day night the Hotel was jammed for the anniversary banquet. Jerry arrived, dressed in a suit and wing collar. He paused at the door and looked over the crowd in what was now his favorite room in the world. He smelled the pine-sap of the unpainted joists. He loved the stone fireplaces. He foresaw their winter fires as brotherhood incarnate, and their strong rock-faces for him were emblems of permanence.
Frank Wolfe interrupted his reverie. “I’ve got seats for you and Mildred over here.”
Jerry said dreamily, “Tonight I’d walk there on water if we had it.” He put back his head, shook the hair from his forehead, and when he got to where Mildred was waiting for them, he smiled at her, “Who was it said ‘God bless us every one’?”
Young people brought in the dinner of macaroni and cheese and carrots served on thick china plates rimmed with indigo, interrupted by chips.
They were eating at long tables, scrunched on folding, wooden chairs that groaned on the linoleum, sounds mixed with the bass obligato of chatter.
“Friggin' capitalists,” Wolfe muttered. “They'll drag us into those French trenches yet. I'd call 'em far worse if you weren't here, Mildred.”
Jerry said. “Our job is here, not over there.”
He noticed how Mildred’s green eyes sparkled. She said, “Our job is teaching people how to hold oranges under their chins.” As Jerry laughed he was thinking how warm Mildred’s voice was, like a piano in a romantic concerto. That was the way he remembered first hearing her at the Young People’s Socialist League.
They were interrupted by a dozen men and women in overalls and denim skirts, the Llano Chorale Society, trooping up before the west fireplace. Two of their men unrolled a crooked paper streamer: “Many Happy Returns.” The group sang “Happy birthday, dear Llano,” and the assembly clapped wildly.
The chorale society swung into an old socialist song.
So raise our socialist banner high;
Beneath its folds we'll live and die.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.
Then they tried the Anvil Chorus, battering away at Verdi. A farmer from Ohio played a violin rendition of the Marseillaise.
The ukulele trio followed, strumming, “I don't want to play in your yard . . . I won't climb your apple tree.” Mildred knew the words and she rallied people around her to sing and hum with the ukuleles.
One of the ukulele players shouted, “We want to hear from Jerry Bannerman.” Loud applause.
Jerry made his way to the fireplace. He stood on the high apron and smiled while he waited for absolute silence. He spoke as to a friend but his voice was like water rushing up from an underground cavern. Every person heard every word.
“Remember that scorcher when the YPSL arrived on the truck bed? Remember those first tents where we're sitting now? My first bedroll was on a pile of hay under the stars. My head was near a jimson weed and I went to sleep watching those white trumpets shining in moonlight. I was sure they were trumpeting our future.
“You new people should have seen those early weeks. Volunteers came out from the city in droves, good socialists all. We hitched four horses to heavy rails, dragged them back and forth, uprooted Joshuas, cactus, sage. We burned the debris in long windrows. Smoke rose like all the capitalist world was burning. Then we set in on the rocks. Aching socialist backs! Thousands. Hundreds of thousands of rocks. Altars to Karl. Altars to Debs. Now the stones are in the water ditch and these fireplaces I stand on. And out there the soil grows alfalfa and vegetables and fruit.
“You know I spend a lot of time in LA. Hundreds there haven’t eaten today. I can show you tons of people, workers like you and me, lined in front of the soup kitchens. Let’s remember them here. The best way we can help them is to make this colony work.”
He raised both arms like a candidate accepting an acclamation. “Happy birthday, Llano. Many happy returns for our dream of a better life.”
The applause was warm and there were whistles, too. One woman muttered aloud, “We may have a phone but there’s no lard in the beans.”
The Chorale Society led everybody in booming out the Internationale. The folding chairs began their complaining scrapes. Passing groups called to Jerry, “Good talk.” “Keep it up.” “We love ya.” He waved and smiled and followed Mildred out into the night.
* * * * * *
Dolly Torvaldsen had arrived on the first truckload. She watched with excitement the dozens of cars and trucks in the days that followed. She saw order gradually emerge from chaos. She watched the volunteers dragging the rails to clear the land. She smelled the burning debris and brushed ashes from her hair. She carried her share of rocks from the fields. She watched the alfalfa spring up in those fields. She thrilled when men converted piles of rocks into the towering fireplaces and the pillars that sheltered the porch of the Hotel, their pride.
Dolly would be the Hotel’s first bride. The wedding was between Dolly and Tom Miller, with whom Dolly had lugged rocks and planted alfalfa. She knew Tom well, and in work and play they had grown to love one another. Now on a Sunday afternoon, a justice of the peace drove over from Palmdale. Tom borrowed a brown suit from Bert Engle. He wore a celluloid collar, and looked as uncomfortable as an octogenarian on an x-ray table. Dolly managed to remain pert and sprightly in a powder blue dress loose around her neck. Her bouquet was of desert primrose and verbena. At least seventy-five people were there, including a carload of their Los Angeles friends in a new Saxon, duly admired.
The colony had assigned the newlyweds a tent of their own, which pleased them. The reception was in their tent. People were arriving loaded down. One man carried a small wooden table as a gift, and as soon as it was set down in the corner, dishes of food covered it. A couple of young men were carrying in a small chest of drawers. When Jerry Bannerman arrived, Dolly noticed that he smiled at Mildred Shannon in the corner of the crowded tent. Jerry carried one of his Navajo rugs. He snapped the rug as he unfurled it on the floor.
Three members of the Ukulele Club tuned up and swung into “Pack up Your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag.” It was a new song, but almost everyone knew the words. Tom and Dolly kicked the rug aside and did a quick dance on the cement floor. Jerry led the clapping.
Dolly wanted to play games. They started with Cat and Mouse. Tom played the cat to Dolly’s mouse. The circle of fifteen included Jerry and Mildred. The circle held hands and started moving, suddenly raising their arms. Tom darted in but simultaneously Dolly darted out the other side. Eventually Tom caught his mouse and gave her a big kiss.
Someone in the circle called for Jerry and Mildred next. Jerry’s mind flickered danger. Who knew about them? What did they know? What was there to know?
The circle chanted “Jerry . . . Mildred.”
Jerry in his softest voice, “Not me. I’m a married man.” And he ducked out from the circle and disappeared outside among the men around the beer keg. He could hear big laughter from inside.
As evening came and the party was winding down, a tall, red-bearded stranger with arms like bedrolls and a stomach to match appeared in the door of the tent. “Is this the wedding?” he called out.
The tent fell silent, and Dolly’s voice rang out, “Papa!”
They tried not to appear so, but everyone was listening. Dolly moved over to the man. “What are you doing here?”
“Can’t I come to my daughter’s wedding?”
Dolly seemed embarrassed and looked around at her friends as if seeking help.
The man paid no attention to the others, looking straight at Dolly, “Pretty sneaky of you.” She could see the thews in his sloping shoulders tense.
“How did you get here?”
“I’m joining.”
“Joining Llano?” Her inside organs collapsed on one another.
“I’m just as good a socialist as you are!”
“I haven’t seen you for so long.”
“You know your mother died on me? She wouldn’t come west with me.”
“I’m not surprised,” Dolly said in a whisper.
“I lost my job in ‘93 and came out here.”
“You work in LA now?”
“Sure. Llewellyan Iron. I’m BSIU.”
Dolly thought, that fits. She knew the BSIU was the union associated with dynamite, and that’s what he would like. And her mind flooded with memories of his emotional outbursts at home, the bullying, and his flaring at her mother as if she had lost her mind.
“Where’s the guy that takes you to bed?” He said it loud enough to embarrass everyone.
“His name is Tom Miller,” she said proudly and beckoned to Tom. He came over.
“This is my husband. This is my father, Sig Torvaldsen.”
They weakly shook hands. “Hope she’s better in bed than her mother.”
Dolly cringed. And he was coming to Llano! How could fate do this to her?
Tom drifted off and the older man turned to Dolly. “Looks like a limp shrimp to me, wet behind the gills.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, father.”
“Sound just like your mother.”
He elbowed his way onto a bench and talked to the people there as well as to Dolly. “Your Bannerman guy promised me a job in the machine shop, but now I find I’m on the farm brigade.”
“You’ve had more experience on farms than with machines. And what’s wrong with farm work? I love working in the alfalfa.”
“What’s that Bannerman know about farming? He’s a lawyer, ain’t he? I could tell him the orchards are gettin’ too much water and rabbit manure ain’t right for peaches. Stunts ‘em.”
“I think he’s only temporarily supervising the farming. They’re looking for someone.”
“I don’t like this Bannerman. Got thin wrists. Pansy wrists. No real farmer’s got thin wrists. I voted for him once, but that was because of Gene Debs.”
Two nights later Tom asked Dolly, “What’s with your father? He looked daggers at me on the street today. Ready to lynch somebody.”
“I couldn’t live with him, my mom couldn’t live with him, and now Jerry Bannerman won’t be able to live with him.”
Tom changed the subject. “Bunch of Wobblies came in today. I worry about all those tramps that pour in. I know they need a place, but they pour in--no money, all ragged and smelly.”
“Jerry knows what he’s doing.”
“I hope so. I hear he’s got a case on Mildred Shannon.”
“You don’t worry about Jerry having a fling, do you?” She paused. “That doesn’t mean I want you to have a fling.”
“I’m not going to have a fling.”
“But what if you did have a fling?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Dolly was not about to let the matter die. “I don’t want you picking up any ideas from Emma Goldman. Free love may be all right for some people, but let’s not try it. OK?”
“OK, let’s not.” Tom was anxious to change the subject. “But what about your father. He makes me think of those coyotes howling in the night except that the coyotes aren’t hating anything, only making men jumpy.”
“Hating is a terrible thing. It’s like sadness--it eats away. I guess sadness makes it easier to hate. I know another thing, though; Bannerman’s stronger than my father. And Llano is stronger than either of them. We’re going places, Tom. We’re on a ride, you and me and Llano. Every time I walk out in the alfalfa fields or into the orchards, I know it’s true. Let’s walk in the alfalfa right now.”
It was nine in the evening. It was spring. And they walked hand in hand, barefoot, in the wet alfalfa.
*********
Robert V. Hine (1921-2015) specialized in California utopianism and the American West. His first book, California’s Utopian Colonies, was published in 1953. From 1954 to 1990, he was a faculty member of the Department of History at UCR. He served as Chair from 1962 until 1967. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic years 1957–1958 and 1967–1968. Prof. Hine was recognized as the Academic Senate's Distinguished Teacher in 1968 and as the Senate's Faculty Research Lecturer in 1980.
For fifteen years, from 1970 to 1986, Prof. Hine was totally blind, but actively continued his teaching and research. Prof. Hine put lecture notes in Braille on index cards he kept in his pocket and was so adept at fingering them that many students believed he had memorized his talks.
A high-risk surgery restored his sight in 1986, and he subsequently wrote a memoir, Second Sight, which was a first-hand account of his journey through blindness. Second Sight was a Book of the Month Club selection and a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. He published a second memoir about his experiences parenting a daughter with mental illness, Broken Glass: A Family's Journey through Mental Illness, in 2006. When Prof. Hine first returned to the classroom after regaining his sight, the first thing he said to his students was, “You’ll never know how beautiful you are.”
His books include: California's Utopian Colonies (1953), continuously in print to this day; Edward Kern and American Expansion (1962); Bartlett's West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (1968); The American West: An Interpretive History (1973, 2d ed. 1984); Community on the American Frontier: Separate but Not Alone (1980); California Utopianism: Contemplations of Eden (1981); In the Shadow of Frémont (1982); Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (1992); and The American West: A New Interpretive History (with John Mack Faragher, 2000). He also published two historical novels, Dynamite and Dreams (2008) and I Have Seen the Fire (2008).
