COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

(2 of 8)

After Frankie's mother died in 1916, father was married to Amelia Kien. Times were better. The family moved into a better house and Frankie led a pleasant life. His stepmother and sister Nora were devoted to him. He swam in Lake Washington, tinkered with a $10 motorcycle which he could never make run, worked at a few after-school jobs. The most disagreeable of these was cleaning out a horse stall under a store on Rainier Street; Frankie was never much at manual work. His ambition, as he was achieving social success at Franklin High, was to go to college. Then father went stony broke.

Rebel's End. Instead of going to college after high school, Frankie first had to go to work. He was a good salesman and in a year he made enough money selling children's swings, and later electric drills, to start himself out at the University of Washington. He had become a serious young man, a reader of H. L. Mencken's green-covered American Mercury—not a radical, merely an earnest explorer of panaceas for the common man. Then father's health began to fail.

His freshman year was his last year. He worked at odd jobs, to help support the family, and hung around Seattle's A.F.L. Labor Temple. There he listened to lectures delivered by old Wobblies, old Socialists and some advocates of communism. Franklin High's lively graduate had become a sullen young man, outraged by his family's plight and the collapse of his long-cherished plans for college. Half in despair, half in defiance, he formally joined the Communist Party.

Father, for his part, suffered his last blow from a society which had never quite suited him anyhow. He had to be committed to the Northern State Hospital, where he died of "general paralysis of the insane." The hospital sent Frankie all of Waldron Sr.'s worldly goods: a crumpled leather cigarette case, a Seattle streetcar token, and a worn 25¢ piece.

Love in Woodland. In South Pasadena, Calif., where he had taken his stepmother and Nora, Frankie Waldron fingered the mementos and closed that preliminary chapter in the career of a revolutionary. He was absorbed in Communist reading matter, furiously wrote Communist tracts. He worked only when his stepmother and Nora were down to the last dime. Salesmen's jobs were "bourgeois," he orated. His stepmother pleaded with him to make something of himself. He told a friend: "Humanity's welfare is far more vital than my desires in life." He worked briefly as a puddler in a steel foundry—until one day he received his reward for devotion to the cause. He was put on the Communist Party payroll as a $15-a-week instructor. The Waldrons went their separate ways, Nora to go into show business, Amelia to work in a library. Frankie, seedy-looking and burning-eyed, with a shock of wild hair, went off to teach Marxist economy at a youth seminar at a Finnish community in Woodland, Wash.

Among his students was Reggie Schneiderman, nee Karasick, the wife of Willie Schneiderman, another paid functionary of the party. Willie had stayed at his assignments in California. Reggie, born in Brooklyn, was 19, cute and lively, with dark curly hair. In the summer woods of