I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but it never stopped me to butt in and offer my wellcome.
For those of you
not familiar with Washington State, it is divided north-to-south by the Cascade Mountains (aka
The Big Rock Pile such that the western (about) third is temperate rain forest and the eastern (about) two-thirds is high chaparral desert. Much of the State was taken over by WWI era populists and socialists such that many people used say about America,
There are the 47 States and the Soviet of Washington. Back in the 1920's there were four major shoot-outs between Industrial Workers of the World (IWW -- aka
Wobblies, hard-core socialists) and mobs hired and paid for by eastern (U.S.) bankers. The
Socialist Party controlled most major elective positions from the end of WWI to the mid-1930's -- and, as late as 1959, the (elected) State Treasurer was backed by the Socialist Party.
Those days are long gone, but my grandfather was part of them (he even defended Joe Hill once). I used to have fun on Federal Security interviews because they would ask me if I knew any Communists. My answer would be,
Gus Hall, will he do? (Gus Hall
ran the
American Communist Party from sometime in the 1920's until his death in the 1980's.)
