Ishmael
11-04-07, 01:26 PM
Tales of The Inadvertent Pacifist
By Richard Scott © 2007 all rights reserved
(When I was eleven, my father had a barbecue for our neighbor down the street, a retired 30-year Air Force Chief Master Sergeant who had traveled all over the world and all he had ever seen were churches. So my father asked him the following four questions:
“Have you ever been drunk?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Have you ever been in a whorehouse?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Have you ever been in a barfight?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Have you ever been in jail?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Well, hell, son!”, my father finally answered, “You’ve never lived!”…Rich Scott)
Hi. I’m Ray Scott, Raymond William Scott to be exact although I’ve been called a lot of other names including Inmate #325468 of the California Penal System. But more about that later. This is my story from the time I was born, through my childhood in the Fillmore District of 1930’s San Francisco, the waterfront strikes and following my father to sea in 1939. It will also tell of my time in a pretty damn big war where I traveled to many exotic locales and was shot at by many different and diverse people, my service to the nation in the Army after the war was over, return to sea and final voyages before meeting my wife and coming ashore to marry her.
I was always a short **** growing up with two older brothers so I had to learn to use my fists early. Running away from fourteen foster homes and winding up on the streets and in the reform schools of the city and county of San Francisco reinforced those lessons even more. I never looked for a fight, but if I saw one coming, I’d pick the biggest son-of-a-bitch in the crowd and try to deck him with one punch. More often than not I was successful and, even when I wasn’t, I was never screwed around with later.
I was born on July 1, 1923 in the back of my obstetrician’s 1923 Buick while crossing the railroad tracks on Third Avenue in San Mateo, California. The obstetrician’s name, Emanuel Seveman, apparently became my name on the birth certificate, Emanuel Seveman Scott. I had no knowledge of this fact for the next sixteen years, oddly enough, and had to endure a particular ordeal to get it straightened out. My Dad, William Scott, had paid off after a six-month around the world voyage and had bought a piece of land he planned on building houses on. He had gone to sea in 1905 on the last of the old square-rigged windjammers out of San Francisco and the early steam schooners plying the Pacific Coast out to Honolulu.
William’s Sailor’s Union of the Pacific membership card was signed by Andy Ferusuth, founder of the union and the man responsible for the landmark Seaman’s Act of 1915 guaranteeing an end to the Shanghai, beatings by the masters and mates and a host of other needed reforms. Grandpa’s union activities also led him to choose San Mateo county for his family and away from the union-busting activities of the San Francisco Police. The contracts negotiated by the SUP brought the seafaring brothers a living wage and decent safety and hours as well. So I kind of grew up listening to sea stories for the first years of my life as my father’s shipmates and union brothers would come through between ships, get drunk for a month, then sign on and ship out again for another.
My mother, Martha, a petite high-strung woman, clearly loved my Father but also hated the absences while he was away. The alcohol-fueled parties of my Dad’s friends got carried over on one level as she started drinking when he shipped out. I didn’t understand at the time, but I can now remember the times she always cried for days after he left. The strain of running a household alone started to tell on her, but she always kept a brave face whenever Dad was in port. Still, my early life was pretty idyllic for a little kid living out in the grasslands of Coyote Point, the green-brown of the wild oat carpeted, scrub-oak sprinkled Montara range shielding us from the ocean winds. Fishing in the sloughs, exploring the shoreline while waves of fog broke across the hilltop crests, playing buccaneers on the Spanish Main, even being made to “walk the plank” into the sloughs are now remembered with all the fondness of innocence gone.
It was only a few months after I turned six that my entire world changed. In October of 1929, our family was dealt the trifecta. All within that month, the stock market crashed, the bank called our mortgage in and my Dad discovered he had advanced Bright’s Disease, a kidney ailment that left him dead by November. Because of the foreclosure and my Dad’s death, my mom had a nervous breakdown. It was due to this and my Dad’s previous union activity that led to the three brothers and one sister being made wards of the court and transferred to the San Francisco Foster Care system. To say that I hated it was a modest understatement. They put me in fourteen foster homes over the next ten years and I ran away from all of them, most more than once. Some of the people were caring, most were not, all I knew was they weren’t my blood kin and I wouldn’t do what they told me or stay under their roofs for love or money.
Whenever I was on the street, I would hide out at my Mom’s place on Fillmore and Fell Streets in San Francisco or a few blocks over on Devisidero at my best friend Bill Gaffigan’s place. Bill and I were pals and fellow punk kids and junior members of the Young Communist League. Bill’s Da, Patrick, was in the Marine Workers Industrial Union, the commie sailor’s front aligned with Harry Bridge’s Longshoreman’s Union. Bill wasn’t very Irish and you could barely recognize him as one, once you got past the shock of red hair, thousands of freckles, piercing blue eyes and appetite for trouble. I was with Bill when we broke into a boxcar full of peas and ate ourselves sick. I still can’t look at peas to this day without my stomach turning. It was Bill who taught me how to skate up to the rear bumpers of the buses and grab on for a ride uphill.
The bulk of my time in those days was running the Fillmore from Geary up to Pacific Heights and out the Avenues to the Playland and the Sutro Baths. We ran with a gang of street kids about ten strong, doing some petty crime, dodging the cops who I was getting to know on a first name basis after all my sabbaticals from foster care and Reform School, fighting each other and fighting other Irish gangs from the Avenues and the Italians coming over from North Beach. But the Fillmore was the waterfront’s home, sailor’s rest and the longshoreman’s home. And things in the city were simmering in the Depression. There were many long memories of the strikes of 1913 and the boss’s betrayal of the contracts they signed. The use of the cops alongside the scabs to break the strike was still on the minds of many with the return of the fink halls, violence against organizing the waterfront from goons, and no real improvement of working conditions at sea. What we couldn‘t envision at the time was how it would catch fire all along the West Coast and shut the ports down.
My older sister, Virginia, was working as an usher at a theatre on Geary, so Bill and I would hustle up the dime for one admission and I would go in and let him in from the exit. We would buy cracked Dungeness crab, sit in the balcony eating it and drop the claws down on the audience below. Between features, they would play Screen-O, a Bingo game with prizes of bags of groceries, usually large, bulky, cheap items like corn flakes, and toilet paper. Since Virginia was calling the numbers and handing out the cards, we generally got some percentage of the prizes.
Then there were the times we would visit his Grandma Wright, a celebrated medium of her day for cookies and milk. We had to eat them in her living room under the eerie gaze of an Indian Chief’s portrait she had painted in a trance. Everywhere you were in that room, those eyes would follow you. We would always ask her what our futures would be and she would smile at us sadly and say nothing. It wasn’t until I saw her for the last time in 1934 before she died and asked her the same question that she finally gave me an answer. When Bill stepped out to the bathroom, she motioned me over next to her by the bed.
“You’ll be in a world war from the very beginning.”, she told me, “You’ll see the whole world of it but will come to no harm and never have to kill a soul. After the war ends, you’ll meet your true love by the telephone and marry her. You’ll be her’s and she your’s for the rest of your life.” Then she kissed my cheek with tears on her cheeks. When I asked about Bill, a shadow seemed to cross her face as she turned away and said nothing more of what she saw.
I wasn’t much older than eleven when the Embarcadero caught fire and the Waterfront Strikes hit the West Coast from Seattle to San Pedro. Bill’s Dad, was in the thick of it as a strike organizer and tried to keep us kids out of it, but who could pass up a chance to throw bricks at the same cops who kept hauling us off to reform school anyway? There was no way in hell we were missing that fight. The fight was touched off by a strike vote by Harry Bridge’s International Longshoremen’s Association strike vote on March 5th to shut down the ports. The Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, The Marine Worker’s Industrial Union, The Fireman, Oiler and Wiper’s Union and the Marine Cooks and Stewards followed suit on the 19th. Things simmered for a few months as both sides jockeyed for position and public sentiment. The papers and city government backing the steamship companies and red-baiting the union leaders. Then the ILA called a walkout date of May 9th and everybody cleared the decks for action.
That day, Longshoremen walked off the job in every port in California as picket lines sprung up. By the next day, Portland and Seattle had followed suit and every West Coast Port was shut down. Many SUP members already signed on aboard jumped ship at the first opportunity and joined the strike. By May’s end, over eight thousand sailors from the shipboard trades had joined the strike, halting all west coast commerce. When the companies tried to hire strikebreakers, they were unable to perform the work after only ten days and had to run the gauntlet of union members and go home to the same neighborhoods to the epithet of “Scab!”. I have to confess that Bill and I scouted the home of many a scab and brought it to the attention of their friends and neighbors whenever we could. Bill’s Dad appreciated the information as well, making a list of strikebreakers for union “reeducation”.
While the strike was mainly peaceful at first, there were reports of ship’s officers drawing guns to break up fights between strikers and scabs in Seattle, while the Puget Sound unions allowed loading of Alaskan supply ships. They also threatened a general strike in Washington if troops were dispatched to break the strike. Australian trade Unions were also threatening to strike against any scab-loaded cargo there.
By Richard Scott © 2007 all rights reserved
(When I was eleven, my father had a barbecue for our neighbor down the street, a retired 30-year Air Force Chief Master Sergeant who had traveled all over the world and all he had ever seen were churches. So my father asked him the following four questions:
“Have you ever been drunk?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Have you ever been in a whorehouse?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Have you ever been in a barfight?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Have you ever been in jail?” “No.”, the neighbor replied.
“Well, hell, son!”, my father finally answered, “You’ve never lived!”…Rich Scott)
Hi. I’m Ray Scott, Raymond William Scott to be exact although I’ve been called a lot of other names including Inmate #325468 of the California Penal System. But more about that later. This is my story from the time I was born, through my childhood in the Fillmore District of 1930’s San Francisco, the waterfront strikes and following my father to sea in 1939. It will also tell of my time in a pretty damn big war where I traveled to many exotic locales and was shot at by many different and diverse people, my service to the nation in the Army after the war was over, return to sea and final voyages before meeting my wife and coming ashore to marry her.
I was always a short **** growing up with two older brothers so I had to learn to use my fists early. Running away from fourteen foster homes and winding up on the streets and in the reform schools of the city and county of San Francisco reinforced those lessons even more. I never looked for a fight, but if I saw one coming, I’d pick the biggest son-of-a-bitch in the crowd and try to deck him with one punch. More often than not I was successful and, even when I wasn’t, I was never screwed around with later.
I was born on July 1, 1923 in the back of my obstetrician’s 1923 Buick while crossing the railroad tracks on Third Avenue in San Mateo, California. The obstetrician’s name, Emanuel Seveman, apparently became my name on the birth certificate, Emanuel Seveman Scott. I had no knowledge of this fact for the next sixteen years, oddly enough, and had to endure a particular ordeal to get it straightened out. My Dad, William Scott, had paid off after a six-month around the world voyage and had bought a piece of land he planned on building houses on. He had gone to sea in 1905 on the last of the old square-rigged windjammers out of San Francisco and the early steam schooners plying the Pacific Coast out to Honolulu.
William’s Sailor’s Union of the Pacific membership card was signed by Andy Ferusuth, founder of the union and the man responsible for the landmark Seaman’s Act of 1915 guaranteeing an end to the Shanghai, beatings by the masters and mates and a host of other needed reforms. Grandpa’s union activities also led him to choose San Mateo county for his family and away from the union-busting activities of the San Francisco Police. The contracts negotiated by the SUP brought the seafaring brothers a living wage and decent safety and hours as well. So I kind of grew up listening to sea stories for the first years of my life as my father’s shipmates and union brothers would come through between ships, get drunk for a month, then sign on and ship out again for another.
My mother, Martha, a petite high-strung woman, clearly loved my Father but also hated the absences while he was away. The alcohol-fueled parties of my Dad’s friends got carried over on one level as she started drinking when he shipped out. I didn’t understand at the time, but I can now remember the times she always cried for days after he left. The strain of running a household alone started to tell on her, but she always kept a brave face whenever Dad was in port. Still, my early life was pretty idyllic for a little kid living out in the grasslands of Coyote Point, the green-brown of the wild oat carpeted, scrub-oak sprinkled Montara range shielding us from the ocean winds. Fishing in the sloughs, exploring the shoreline while waves of fog broke across the hilltop crests, playing buccaneers on the Spanish Main, even being made to “walk the plank” into the sloughs are now remembered with all the fondness of innocence gone.
It was only a few months after I turned six that my entire world changed. In October of 1929, our family was dealt the trifecta. All within that month, the stock market crashed, the bank called our mortgage in and my Dad discovered he had advanced Bright’s Disease, a kidney ailment that left him dead by November. Because of the foreclosure and my Dad’s death, my mom had a nervous breakdown. It was due to this and my Dad’s previous union activity that led to the three brothers and one sister being made wards of the court and transferred to the San Francisco Foster Care system. To say that I hated it was a modest understatement. They put me in fourteen foster homes over the next ten years and I ran away from all of them, most more than once. Some of the people were caring, most were not, all I knew was they weren’t my blood kin and I wouldn’t do what they told me or stay under their roofs for love or money.
Whenever I was on the street, I would hide out at my Mom’s place on Fillmore and Fell Streets in San Francisco or a few blocks over on Devisidero at my best friend Bill Gaffigan’s place. Bill and I were pals and fellow punk kids and junior members of the Young Communist League. Bill’s Da, Patrick, was in the Marine Workers Industrial Union, the commie sailor’s front aligned with Harry Bridge’s Longshoreman’s Union. Bill wasn’t very Irish and you could barely recognize him as one, once you got past the shock of red hair, thousands of freckles, piercing blue eyes and appetite for trouble. I was with Bill when we broke into a boxcar full of peas and ate ourselves sick. I still can’t look at peas to this day without my stomach turning. It was Bill who taught me how to skate up to the rear bumpers of the buses and grab on for a ride uphill.
The bulk of my time in those days was running the Fillmore from Geary up to Pacific Heights and out the Avenues to the Playland and the Sutro Baths. We ran with a gang of street kids about ten strong, doing some petty crime, dodging the cops who I was getting to know on a first name basis after all my sabbaticals from foster care and Reform School, fighting each other and fighting other Irish gangs from the Avenues and the Italians coming over from North Beach. But the Fillmore was the waterfront’s home, sailor’s rest and the longshoreman’s home. And things in the city were simmering in the Depression. There were many long memories of the strikes of 1913 and the boss’s betrayal of the contracts they signed. The use of the cops alongside the scabs to break the strike was still on the minds of many with the return of the fink halls, violence against organizing the waterfront from goons, and no real improvement of working conditions at sea. What we couldn‘t envision at the time was how it would catch fire all along the West Coast and shut the ports down.
My older sister, Virginia, was working as an usher at a theatre on Geary, so Bill and I would hustle up the dime for one admission and I would go in and let him in from the exit. We would buy cracked Dungeness crab, sit in the balcony eating it and drop the claws down on the audience below. Between features, they would play Screen-O, a Bingo game with prizes of bags of groceries, usually large, bulky, cheap items like corn flakes, and toilet paper. Since Virginia was calling the numbers and handing out the cards, we generally got some percentage of the prizes.
Then there were the times we would visit his Grandma Wright, a celebrated medium of her day for cookies and milk. We had to eat them in her living room under the eerie gaze of an Indian Chief’s portrait she had painted in a trance. Everywhere you were in that room, those eyes would follow you. We would always ask her what our futures would be and she would smile at us sadly and say nothing. It wasn’t until I saw her for the last time in 1934 before she died and asked her the same question that she finally gave me an answer. When Bill stepped out to the bathroom, she motioned me over next to her by the bed.
“You’ll be in a world war from the very beginning.”, she told me, “You’ll see the whole world of it but will come to no harm and never have to kill a soul. After the war ends, you’ll meet your true love by the telephone and marry her. You’ll be her’s and she your’s for the rest of your life.” Then she kissed my cheek with tears on her cheeks. When I asked about Bill, a shadow seemed to cross her face as she turned away and said nothing more of what she saw.
I wasn’t much older than eleven when the Embarcadero caught fire and the Waterfront Strikes hit the West Coast from Seattle to San Pedro. Bill’s Dad, was in the thick of it as a strike organizer and tried to keep us kids out of it, but who could pass up a chance to throw bricks at the same cops who kept hauling us off to reform school anyway? There was no way in hell we were missing that fight. The fight was touched off by a strike vote by Harry Bridge’s International Longshoremen’s Association strike vote on March 5th to shut down the ports. The Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, The Marine Worker’s Industrial Union, The Fireman, Oiler and Wiper’s Union and the Marine Cooks and Stewards followed suit on the 19th. Things simmered for a few months as both sides jockeyed for position and public sentiment. The papers and city government backing the steamship companies and red-baiting the union leaders. Then the ILA called a walkout date of May 9th and everybody cleared the decks for action.
That day, Longshoremen walked off the job in every port in California as picket lines sprung up. By the next day, Portland and Seattle had followed suit and every West Coast Port was shut down. Many SUP members already signed on aboard jumped ship at the first opportunity and joined the strike. By May’s end, over eight thousand sailors from the shipboard trades had joined the strike, halting all west coast commerce. When the companies tried to hire strikebreakers, they were unable to perform the work after only ten days and had to run the gauntlet of union members and go home to the same neighborhoods to the epithet of “Scab!”. I have to confess that Bill and I scouted the home of many a scab and brought it to the attention of their friends and neighbors whenever we could. Bill’s Dad appreciated the information as well, making a list of strikebreakers for union “reeducation”.
While the strike was mainly peaceful at first, there were reports of ship’s officers drawing guns to break up fights between strikers and scabs in Seattle, while the Puget Sound unions allowed loading of Alaskan supply ships. They also threatened a general strike in Washington if troops were dispatched to break the strike. Australian trade Unions were also threatening to strike against any scab-loaded cargo there.