Ya know, I've always known those tapes of Paul would, one of these days, be noticed. When I'd play 'em for folks in the '60s qnd '70s, the standard line I got back was, "Jeez, that old guy had a hell of an imagination, didn't he?"----------It got so I quit playing the thing for just anybody. I knew Paul Durst and I saw and heard the fire in his words---the dedication to the values of that other time and place---the love for the ideals of his union--the I.W.W. For me, if Paul said that he had been there, then, damn it, he HAD been there. There was maybe 20 minutes more to those tapes than I did save but they were so deterriorated by the time I managed to dub off the stuff that now survives that I was sure they'd be lost along the hot dusty roads I was on then in order to make a living singing. When this new technology came along, my buddy Fritz Schuler in Manitowoc, Wisconsin took the reel of the dialogue I'd saved before my reel-to-reel decks quit for good --- and he digitized those and put 'em on a CD. The bad hum from the neon lights in the cold old shop where I taped Paul Durst was still on the CD, but when Utah Phillips needed a halfway decent recording of Paul to use on the air, I just sent him one of those CDs that Fritz had made for me. (I was in awe of what folks were doing with computers. Still am. To me it's the stuff of magic and sorcery.) But Bruce (Utah) saw the validity of those recordings---the importance. Yeah, Paul had been at Ludlow and the Haymarket---jumped freights with his fiddle on his back---played all over for his meals---knew Joe Hill and had shipped out with him---was a part of Buffalo Bill's big show---was one of the 50,000 lumberjack Wobblys on strike in the North woods---had dug potatoes in Greely, Colorado and floated a flatboat down the Mississippi after jumping Mini-ha-ha-ha(sic) Falls in Minnesota all the way down to New Orleans where the boat sold for $25.00 'cause Northern hardwood was rare down there.
The strain of mentally going back to those times was in his voice when he said, "Yeah, them was some times. I'm just an old hobo now. I been through all that. I came into this world with nothin' and gonna go out with nothing. So to hell with it."----------Mr Durst was sitting by the front door of that music shop and he got pretty cold as the sun went down. Finally he arose and said, "Gettin' pretty chilly. Think I'll go in back. Thanks for everything."---like I had done him a favor by recording his music and talk.

Well, that short interview I managed to save sure has stuck with me these last 40 years. And it sure is great to have old friend Bruce Phillips find value therein.

My old column in Come For To Sing Magazine out o' Chicago was called 'Links On The Chain'. More than ever I see now that we really are just that. Paul KNEW back then he might have something to thank me for. Woody has a ton to thank Pete for.

And so it goes...

(That shop I recorded Paul in was THE FRET SHOP---1500 E. 57th St. in Chicago's Hyde Park area. The shops were left over from the Columbian Exposition of 1893 where they were concession stands. After the fair ended, they became cheap housing cold-water-flats for Bohemia in Chicago. Vachel Lindsey and Floyd Dell andMaxwekk Bodenheim, Ben Reitman and Emma Goldman, Hemingway and Boxcar Bertha --- so many others. If you can find it, check out Floyd Dell's novel THE BRIARY BUSH. A BIG part of it was in those storefronts when they were called THE ARTIST COLONY. They were on both sides of 57th St between the Illinois Central Railroad overpass and Stoney Island Blvd. (The first Mayor Daley demolished them.) If you've ever gone to Chicago's Museum Of Science And Industry, you have been a good stone's throw from where all that went down. I'm still being invigorated by it --- and right now I'll take all the vigor I can get.

Art Thieme