Cleaning takes precedence today– when you go decades without moving from one home to another, or seriously tidying, it takes more than a couple of days to make a dent– but my father’s story also won’t wait.  I set the timer to ten minutes.

Israel I. “Irv” Widaen grew up in Peekskill, a once prosperous town on the Hudson River less than an hour’s drive from New York City.  His poor family had been taken by truck from the slums of New York City to the little town of Peekskill where his cousins lived. Shortly after they arrived the stock market crashed.   My father’s childhood spanned The Depression, he was five in 1929.  From its appearance today I’d have to assume Peekskill was hit hard by the worldwide economic collapse.

On my demented Aunt’s bookshelf in her assisted living apartment there was a brown paperback called Peekskill, USA. Written by Howard Fast, it was a detailed account of the Peekskill riots on two summer days in 1949.  Events Fast predicted, in slightly purple prose, would live forever in the history of the human struggle for equality and justice.  

I’d like to ask Fast about that prediction.   The Colfax Massacre of 1872 doesn’t live in history, a town full of blacks slaughtered by an army of local whites, their bodies left to rot in the sun on Easter Sunday.  It doesn’t live anywhere.  History is a brutal teacher and pays little attention to the passionate Howard Fasts of this world.

My father, a twenty-five year old college student a few years out of World War Two, made the trek from Syracuse to Peekskill, supporting the cause of Brotherhood. We can debate how close his beliefs were to Communism, I never really got a sense of it, but I know he was radical in his belief in a better world.   Paul Robeson was the featured performer, I think Pete Seeger was probably there.  

So was every local Ku Klux Klan type, anti-Semites who believe Communist race-mingling Jews are the cause of all the troubles in the world, baseball bat wielding white men threatened by any vision of the world that might see Blacks and Jews as the same as them.  And their teenaged sons who threw rocks the size of softballs through the windows of cars ambushed on the narrow road leading into the concert ground.   State police stood and watched, some nodding and saying “wow, isn’t that a shame?”.

Also a shame, I never got Irv’s account of the events, outside of a few short snippets in passing.