Washington State (used to be referred to—and some folks still do—as "the Soviet of Washington") was the scene of a lot of Wobbly (IWW) activity during the first few decades of the 20th century. In Centralia, WA, on 1919, the Centralia Legionnaires attacked and burned the Centralia IWW hall, setting it on fire and killing everyone they found inside. Before that, in 1916, there was the "Everett Massacre," where a group of Wobblies were met on the Everett waterfront and slaughtered (Bob currently lives in Everett).

During the late 1940s and into the 1950s, we had the Canwell Committee locally, concurrent with and sharing the values of the House Un-American Activities Committee, so people around here were constantly being investigated up the ziggy. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger used to make regular visits in the early 1940s to sing for some of the same organizations that Bob sang for—and the term "hootenanny" in relation to a folk singers' jam session was invented in Seattle and carried back to New York by Seeger (he notes this in his "The Incompleat Folksinger").

In the early 1950s, if you bought a copy of "A Treasury of Folk Songs" edited by John and Sylvia Kolb (Bantam Books, 35¢) off your local drugstore paperback rack, somebody was liable to start surreptitiously following you.

As Bob mentioned in the interview, I also had a couple of representatives from the Fat Boys Institute knocking on my door and asking me to keep an eye out on their behalf (I figure they must have had me pegged as relatively innocuous, otherwise they wouldn't have asked me). But that's another story and too long to go into here.

Fun times!!

Don Firth