ifihadalist

If I Had A List

We had a place called Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, founded by Ammon Hennacy, the great anarchist. Bums would come through on the freights into the Roper yard and stay with us a couple of days, get together a road stake and then boom on down to California or Arizona. We had a lot of traffic through during the fall, mainly Eastern bums on their way to winter in down around Salinas and Monterey in California. A lot of them were on their way to Yuba and Marysville, too.
In Yuba if you hang out on the skids, you hang out in the old bars and dives and the cheesy flophouse hotels, or you can jungle up in the Western Pacific yards in dead loads, the boxcars that have been permanently sidetracked because they're damaged. The pickup trucks come over the river driven by labor contractors. They canvass the bars and the flophouses and tell these boys, "Day labor, 60 cents an hour."
The old guys will climb in the back of the pickup, go across the river and do their day labor, dredging canals or making boxes for the growing season or doing pruning work. Then they come back with their day wages, rent a cheap room, and go and drink in the bars. When the season's over they'll either jungle up in the yards or move on to someplace else.
This is the kind of people that were dug up in that orchard in Yuba. There were 25 of these burns between the ages of 45 and 60. Their bodies were found buried in shallow graves. A man was convicted for doing that, but I think we're all still uncertain as to why.
Fred Thompson, one of our great IWW organizers in Chicago, had saved all the clippings about the killings in Yuba. He wasn't so much concerned about the motives. He said we may never know that. What concerned him was the fact that none of those 25 dead men could be identified. The contractors had never taken their names. The bar owners didn't know any names. There were no names on any of the registers at any of the cheap hotels. Even the bums down in the yard couldn't identify these boys except by nicknames, which sometimes change every week. The relatives would come into town, when the news got out, with photographs of an uncle or father who had drifted away some time before. They still couldn't match them up because nobody had taken the time or the trouble to ask these people what their names were.
Fred said, "It's a terrible thing going through the world without your name." You try getting along without your name. Or have it taken away so casually. He asked me to write a song for our newspaper, The Industrial Worker, about those nameless men.

He may be your brother, I just couldn't say;
We hire lots of floaters who work by the day;
Now I see his photo, they might be the same,
But I just can't remember his name.

He stopped for a drink every now and again,
Didn't look no different than hundreds of men;
You know these old bums, they all look the same,
No reason to ask him his name.

He had a room and ran out on the rent,
Hired on a crew, I don't know where he went;
If I knew his boss I might make a claim,
But I forgot to write down his name.

He might have been Shorty, a feller I knew;
We bunked in the empties when the season was through.
You know, I've been thinking, it sure is a shame
I never did ask him his name.

We always abandon the old for the new,
And second-hand people get thrown away, too;
I know it won't help, but still it explains
Why no one remembers their names.

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