Willimantic, Now & Then
He worked on a road crew that summer, and, as he tells the story, he spent nights around the fire, playing his ukulele and singing Hawaiian songs.
“The other hands working on that crew, a lot of them were old, old alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs. They sang old songs, Jimmie Rodgers, and they sang old Gene Autry songs, songs I had never heard, but were much closer to the way I was living right there at that time,” Utah Phillips said in a 2004 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “And it’s right about then I started making songs...of what I saw in the world around me.”
“The Golden Voice of the Great Southwest”
“Welcome to my workplace.”
With these words Utah Phillips would start the evening, setting the tone for his stories and songs about working men and women, travelers through life on some of the rougher roads. Like Utah Phillips, the people who populate his songs have made their choices and lived with the consequences, with little in the way of apology or complaint.
Bruce “Utah” Phillips died in his sleep May 23, of congestive heart failure. He was 73 years old.
“Oh, mercy, I think we’re all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up,” he once said of his job.
By Mark Svetz
WILLIMANTIC –July, 2008
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Utah Phillips: 1935-2008
Utah was born in 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved with his family to Salt Lake City, Utah when he was a young boy. The name “Utah,” came to him when he was in the Army. He was the only one in his company from that state. When his mail came from home, they would just call out “Utah!” The name stuck.
He started his extraordinary life on the road in America when he was a high school student and went to work one summer in Yellowstone National Park. He got there from his home by “riding the rails.” He would spend many years of his life crisscrossing the country on freight trains.
Utah Phillips’ stories reflect other stories I have heard all my life. I remember Stuart Mathes, a family friend from my childhood – he was an old man when I knew him and is now long dead – telling me stories about “riding the rails.”
I would listen to tales of riding from Connecticut to Madison, WI, where my friend had gone to school. Riding freight trains was, in those days, like hitchhiking when I was a young man. It was how many folks got around. I loved his stories of sleeping near rail yards, with other hobos, in the “jungle camps.”
Those stories of freedom and adventure stayed with me. I would recall them years later when I hitchhiked around, tasting the world for myself in my youth.
The Labor Movement and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) were also part of Utah’s life and songs.
“This is my fiftieth year in the IWW, by the way, my proudest association,” Utah said in that 2004 interview on Democracy Now! “It is the only organization I’ve ever known of that didn’t break faith with its elders.
The Labor Movement was also a powerful force throughout my life. Another old family friend, Cliff von Tobel, had been a Linotype operator in Waterbury, CT. He was blacklisted because of his involvement with the labor movement. This happened many years before I was born, and I only heard the stories. They were powerful stories, though, filled with strong language and stronger passion.
I will always think of Cliff when I hear Utah’s stories about the Wobblies.
Another struggle that occupied Utah Phillips was pacifism. He tells many stories about more elders, organizers and anarchists who fought for justice with pacifist principles.
He tells a story of his meeting Ammon Hennacy, who was with the Catholic Worker in Salt Lake City, where he started the Joe Hill House of Hospitality.
Hennacy, Utah would recall in that 2004 interview, told him: “You came into the world armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons, the weapons of privilege, economic privilege, racial privilege, sexual privilege. You’re going to be a pacifist. You’re not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You’re going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed. Well, you try that.”
“I’ve been at it—Ammon died over thirty years ago, and I’m still at it. But if there’s one struggle that animates my life, it’s probably that one,” Utah said.
The first time I heard Utah’s name was when an old friend Kathy Warpinsky told me about going to hear him. She told me because it was when she first met two other old friends of mine, Tony and Kathleen Clark. The day after I learned of Utah’s death, Tony gave me a couple of Utah’s records to listen to.
That these people are all entwined in my memory of Utah Phillips is not surprising. Tony has been a life companion, a brother, and a friend for over 25 years. I think it was about the same time I became aware of Utah Phillips, Tony was taking up his own struggle toward pacifism. As he is in many things, Tony was my teacher in this.
Utah Phillips was also a teacher for me. His words have instructed me, as they have sometimes chastised me – when I fall way short of my mark – and above all made me feel part of something, a source of pride.
Pete Seeger, another elder, on my mind as the The Great Hudson River Revival Music Festival approaches, once explained that a movement doesn’t begin or end in one person’s lifetime. Each of us picks up the struggle from our elders, to wage in our lives and pass along to the next generation.
I don’t know if we can all wage the struggle like Utah did, or Ammon Hennacy, or Pete Seeger, or Stuart Mathes, or Cliff Von Toble; but we’re giving it our best shot. And we’re never alone, since all those elders are still with us, their words guiding our lives.
Mark Svetz and Sarah Winter own Clothworks, a shop on Church Street in Downtown Willimantic, where they make and sell clothing and bags. You can often hear Utah Phillips on the tape player in the shop.
“Well, when I hit the road... I found those elders and I sought them out,” Phillips said. “I think of Fred Thompson and the elders that I’ve talked to that went through the First World War as unionists and endured the Espionage Act, endured the enormous persecution, and just kept at it and kept at it. That was an amazing thing,” he recalled.
Preamble to the constitution of the
Industrial Workers of the World
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing
class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of
the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of
production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the
Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer
and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-
growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of
affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set
of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in
wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to
mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have
interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class
upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its
members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease
work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus
making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's
work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword,
"Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.
The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday
struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when
capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we
are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Utah Phillips and Larry Penn in Milwaukee 5/1/2006
