I recently finished reading "The Boys in the Boat", the story of the rowing team from the University of Washington going on to win in the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin. I thoroughly enjoyed it...many of the locations were familiar to me; paddling a boat in the Seattle area is one of my favorite activities; the characters in the story were amazing, growing up in the Depression, and pulling together in a way that seems lost, now. The book was exceptionally well written, and when I was done, I asked a friend of mine (we have kayaked together on Puget Sound) to see if he had read it, and if not, should I send it to him?

Of course he had read it. And then, he sent me this: https://crosscut.com/2018/05/dont-forget-man-who-saved-seattles-houseboats . Dixie Pintler, interviewed in the article, is his mother. (No, his name is not Bill).

She has her own story about Pettus. “After I moved to Seattle in 1975 and ended up living on a houseboat, Terry Pettus was one of the first people I met,” Pintler remembers. “I loved just stopping by his boat and listening to his stories. No one in my life ever influenced me like he did.”

Terry Pettus reminded me me again of that spirit of pulling together that I had just read about. He took it a little farther than the boys in the boat, and joined the Communist Party of the time:

Pettus was open about being a Communist. After the WCF dissolved, he became editor of the Party’s newspaper, The People’s World. He spent time in jail for his party activism, then left the Party in 1958, objecting to its increasingly authoritarian structure. Blacklisted, he was unable to find employment, and for a time wrote pulp fiction under pseudonyms to survive.

He never apologized for his Communist affiliation. “I have nothing to apologize for,” Pintler recalls him saying. “I fought for old-age pensions, the right to organize, and a minimum wage, and against racism and discrimination. Apologize for that?”

Now Dixie is getting a park refurbished in his honor, ribbon cutting, June 2nd. I wish I could go.