Dirty Rotten Pinkoes

Clint Eastwood wasn't the only famous guy to put Kennydale on the map. Joe Robel may not be a household name anymore, but back in the paranoid "red scare" days everyone knew that he was one of several members of the Communist Party around here and that he was involved in an epic fight with with the Justice Department.

Like my dad, he was a machinist and they were casual friends, loaning to and borrowing from one another from time to time. My older brothers, Jim and Tiny occasionally did jobs for the Robels. Kathy Robel was prominent in my circle of younger friends (read: within one year of me; as opposed to my elders like Oan, Ray Pickle and Jimmy Chapman - as much as two whole years older).

The Robel family lived at the northeast corner of 36th and Meadow, one of the few older home in Kennydale that has now been restored rather than bulldozed (though what was their property has been subdivided with new construction on both sides now). They were close, loyal to one another and progressive.

Robel was a Communist, perceived to be a very bad thing then. He worked at the Naval Shipyards and at the peak of the hysteria, when writers, directors and actors in Hollywood were getting blacklisted; when job applications had a question: "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"; when Hoover and McCarthy were running rampantly amuck; when we were deploying Nike missiles on Cougar Mountain to shoot down the Russian bombers we were sure were coming to attack the Boeing plants, he was fired from his job. The basis for it was that no Communist should work at a defense facility. He fought the dismissal in a legal wrangle that went on for several years, all the time continuing his work pending court decisions, and eventually got to the Supreme Court. He was victorious and vindicated there.

I have always been a little proud that it never occurred to us kids to discriminate against, pick on or talk trash about any of the Robels. He might have been a Communist, but he was also a pretty nice guy and his kids were our friends. This wasn't a hard choice for us. There wouldn't have been serious repercussions whatever we did.

Not so for the adults. If they were too supportive of Joe they risked being "fellow travelers". My dad straddled. He was always friendly and welcomed Robel when he came to visit, but also declined to provide supportive affidavits or testimony or become involved in the court case in any way.

There's one other curious link between Joe Robel and the McNeely's. My transient orchard worker brother Jim, aka "Okanogan Red" for the color of his hair, who had worked for the Robels and who, if not an actual Communist, had fairly pronounced leftward leanings of his own , was run over and killed by a train at the King Street Station in 1983. A few years later Joe Robel wandered away from his home in north Seattle onto the railroad tracks nearby and was hit by a train. I wonder if a conspiratorial campaign against Kennydale's dirty rotten pinko reds was unrelenting, consistent in its methods and, in the end, diabolically successful?