Hedy was afflicted with cancer for several years and carried out a courageous battle from people I know who were in regular contact with her and an even more courageous battle with the awful chemotherapy. The cancer had mastiticized a couple years ago, according to a friend of mine who was in contact with her and who tried to get her performing work whenever she felt up to it. Sadly, the impact of chemotherapy made it difficult and then impossible for her to sing. I was told she didn't care to just play the banjo if she could not sing.

I remember a very strong amount of dignity that she had both during her career and in the longer time when she was not in the limelight, something I think she attempted to avoid. Friends, particularly women folkies, who knew or spent town with her or hosted her or hired her during tours recount that she had a great and rolicking sense of humor and was a lot of fun.

Her father, Don West, was a good poet, a teacher treasured by his students, a sometime preacher, and a better fighter for the rights of labor and for civil rights who was the target of massive persecution during the 1950s witch hunt. Last night I was talking to an old friend from Atlanta who knew Don who repeated a story about him that I had heard him tell a number of times over the years.

The Atlanta Constitution which is supposed to be a bastion of liberalism in the South. Its famed columnist Ralph McGill who was supposed to be a progressive Southerner during tha time of segregation in Georgia targeted Don West. McGill would print regular columns in the Constitution in the early 1950s pilloring Don West and saying he was the leading Communist Party figure in Georgia, if not the entire South, with the usual charges and lies leveled at the CP by witchhunters with the special racist twist popular int he South. These undoubtably came directly from the sewer called the FBI. McGill regularly included a public listing of the West family's home address, their telephone number, and where West worked or preached at the time. As a result of this campaign the KKK burned down their home the day after one of these column and Don West and his family and friends were subject to almost daily harassment by anticommunist and racist activists.