THIS is a guy who used to hang out in the back booth of the legendary Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle back in the Sixties. He was a Communist when I first ran into him. Then he became a Trotskyite. Then he became an Anarchist.

He identified himself with The Working Man. He always wore work clothes and a hard hat, and he carried a lunch pail. He did work. Four hours a day, four days a week, in a small bookstore. I presume he wore the hard hat because he had a phobia about the possibility of a heavy book falling off a high shelf and beaning him. And he carried paperback books and political tracts in the lunchpail.

Every night you could find him in the back booth of the Blue Moon, holding forth on Comes the Revolution. He had a number of disciples. One of them took this fellow's beer-sodden non-stop political rants a bit too seriously and decided to get the Revolution under way. He opted to blow up a government building.

He managed to fashion a crude bomb. He could have tried to bomb the Federal Courthouse or somewhere like that, but that would have involved taking a bus downtown, which was far too much trouble. So he decided to blow up the University District Post Office (government building, ain't it?).

So one sunny afternoon he ran up the front steps of the University Branch Post Office, set the bomb down, and ran up the street like a deer.

Even though at that time of the afternoon, there were usually a lot of people going to and fro in that area, when the bomb went off, there was no one very close. There were several people doing business in the post office when the bomb went off, and it scared the hell out of them!

But—the post office entrance consisted of double swinging doors into a small antechamber, and another pair of swinging doors into the lobby area. The explosion shattered the glass in one of the outer swinging doors and left a scorch mark on the concrete in front of the door.

The Mad Bomber had managed to get about a quarter of a block up University Way N. E. when the bomb went off, and about three seconds later, he collided with—Ben Johansen, the local beat cop. Ben Johansen was about six foot two and build like a refrigerator. Ben grasped the situation in a split second, and also grasped the Mad Bomber by the scruff of the neck, lifted him off the sidewalk, and carried him off to the hoosegow.

So much for the Revolution!

You see, Goofus, I've met guys like you and Akenaton before.

And guys like Little Hawk. I believe that Little Hawk is, at least, sincere, but he likens the United States to Nazi Germany. I don't think we're there yet, and there are some folks here who are doing our damnedest to make sure we DON'T go there. It does no good to just sit around being Above it All, kibbitzing, going "Tsk tsk" a lot, and criticizing those of us who are striving to DO something!

Don Firth