Of Mooncursers and other Spun Yarns

Of Mooncursers and other Spun Yarns
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Sunday, December 31, 2006

A Nation Of Trees: read the older posts first

This speech was given in the park in front of the school about 1949 This fellow was a card carrying communist. He was supported by a number of Dundalk and Highland town people.
I knew several people who thought he would save the country by the fact that he was a communist. He would end hostility between the United States and Russia. He claimed he would would run for President and be elected by the end of the 1960's. The following are many of his words, though I don't remember all he said so what is written below is not his exact words but but close and very much the flavor of what he said.

Beside every shinning river, along highways, across vast plains and meadows a forest of trees will stand proud and tall. Lit in the glory of crisp clean sunlight shining through pristine oxygen rich air will sooth the eye of the traveler. Majestic conifers, oak, birch and all the other trees of the forest to provide cover and sustenance to a myriad of wildlife, birds and buzzing insects. A place where things may live in natural safety was intended. Free from death by gun, bulldozer and the staccato rattle of chain saws.
A garden of Eden you say? Yes my friends! That is what our nation will be in the eyes of all mankind. Free from the need to manufacture, Free from the need to devastate our forests and lands for metals and fuels, Free from the pillaging industrialists greed and need to pollute.
We will be the first nation on earth that will have no need to import raw materials. Impossible will say pillaging conservatives of the opposition party, nay sayers of the negative republican and Democratic party that has held our nation in the dark past for so many years.
Let me tell you it is possible and not only is it possible but a sure thing that some western country will follow this path if we prove to weak to take this step into the future.

That was the gist of the thing and now days I wonder how in the heck anyone could have been taken in by anything so silly.
This guy was well educated and was an excellent speaker and he had attracted a lot of listeners. He spoke for nearly an hour according to some, but I left in the middle, being a kid I was not all that interested in what he was saying. I remember thinking it sure sounded nice. But then I was fifteen or sixteen years old.
About a week later my mother was asked to sign a ban the bomb partition that a neighbor lady was passing around. She claimed it was promoted by her church. My mother refused to sign as she did not believe that was the thing to do considering what was going on the world.

A couple days later it came out in the Baltimore News post that it was the Communist Party that was passing those papers around. My mother was mad as a wet setting hen as was her way of describing her anger. She called the FBI and the next day they were at our house. My mother told them her story.
The FBI agents very gently questioned me about anything I might know and of course I told them everything I knew and some I probably didn't.
The woman who passed the paper around was the wife of a man my father worked with and who was also a union organizer. His brother was arrested a few months later for being involved in a plot to Sabatoge Bethlehem Steel Co.
Dundalk people were very patriotic and they were mad as they could be when the word got around. What had happened and that communists had been speaking right there in Dundalk really angered many. What was unbelievable to many, was that some local people were involved. I remember hearing, that there could be a lynching right here in Dundalk if that fellow with all that Lot of of mouth, came back

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