By the late 1940's Steve had joined the Communist Party of Canada and was trying to keep the communist-led Canadian Seaman's Union alive. Steve began to do guard duty on C.S.U. organized ships. he began to work on sthem too. One night he came off his ship that had tied up outside the Welland Canal.
Two men jumped him, and knocked him down. Then they began kicking him. "You f-ing communists," one snarled at Steve as he smashed one of his steel-toed boots into Steve's ribs. "We'll teach you to stay off these ships, you bum."
Steve ended up in hospital with a broken nose and three fractured ribs. He recovered in an Ontarion hospital where his friends had taken him. It took him three months to recover from the beating. In the meantime, the ranks of the CSU kept shrinking. For years afterwards, if Steve moved his right arm quickly backwards, he could feel pain where his ribs had been broken.
Afterwards Steve went back on the picket lines. The communist party also led demonstrations against joblessness and also demonstrated for unemployment insurance for the jobless. One early fall day in the late l940's, Steve joined dozens of mostly men who were picketting outside the Ontario legislature at Queen's Park, not far from downtown Toronto. The then-Ontario premier who was a Progressive Conservative invited some of the crowd into his office.
He promised the people that he would talk to the Liberal government in Ottawa about releasing more money for the jobless.
Yet wherever Steve looked in the late 1940's, the ranks of the communists were shrinking. They were in prison, or they'd gone underground, or they'd dropped out of the party. It was time to leave Canada.
Years later, the foremost American anti-communist of his era, U.S. President Richard Nixon said, "When in trouble, travel."
Steve loathed Nixon's politics but he followed this slogan. He left his country for the very first time and started a worldwide journey. It was a journey of self-discovery. It was a search for a new world and sometimes it was a voyage to the ends of the earth.
The small cargo ship headed out into the steel grey, storm-tossed waters of the Georgia Straight. It carried a crew of only five, and Steve was one of them.
"It was rough, terribly rough out there," Steve recalls. The ship headed north, hugging the coastline of British Columbia. The ship docked in Kitimat, and then Prince Rupert. Then it headed north again, and threaded its way along the coast of Alaska, passed the Aleutian Islands and then plunged into the icy turbulent waters of the north Pacific Ocean.
It was November 1950 and this small ship was heading to South Korea to deliver supplies to the Allied forces in the Korean War. Steve who was a communist, was indirectly helping the anti-communist side. But what could he do? Working on this ship was the only job he could find. And the job was dangerous.
- To be continued
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