Ramblin' Man by Ed Cray

Author:Ed Cray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Seamen Three

JUST AT MIDNIGHT, the Liberty ship slipped its mooring at the New Jersey docks and edged downstream into Buttermilk Channel. On deck watching the shore recede in the darkness, Woody Guthrie stood with Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi, three messmen aboard the S.S. William B. Travis, bound eastward on this night in June 1943 toward the submarine killing grounds of the North Atlantic.

A sense of patriotism stoked by Houston’s chiding had persuaded Guthrie to follow Houston to the union hiring hall on 17th Street. Guthrie would be doing his share, sacrificing the Rosenwald fellowship intended to support his writing. He could hardly do less. His younger brother George was in the navy; older brother Roy and his wife Ann had moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where Roy worked at the Douglas Aircraft plant. Mary Jo’s new husband was in the army.

Like Cisco, many of the Almanacs and those who had sung at their Sunday hootenannies were now scattered. Pete Seeger was stationed in Mississippi. Jim and Hazel Garland were in Vancouver, Washington, building Liberty ships on the Columbia River. Jim’s sister Sara and her new husband, Joe Gunning, were working in defense plants in Detroit. Marjorie’s two older brothers were engineers in the merchant marine. (David Greenblatt wondered if he was the example that had inspired Guthrie to join the radical National Maritime Union and go to sea. They could build a strong union and help defeat Hitler at the same time.)

Cisco Houston’s presence aboard the “Willy B.” went far to ease Marjorie’s apprehensions. “There was something marvelous about Cisco’s temperament,” she explained some years later. Ashore, Houston often stifled his disagreements with Guthrie, as if he believed “if Woody said it, well, it’s OK. I’m not going to argue with Woody.” At sea, however, Cisco was the experienced one and their leader. Two voyages as a merchant seaman steaming through the wolf packs of the North Atlantic granted him a veteran’s wisdom.

Guthrie himself was inclined to agree. Houston, Guthrie wrote later, was “one of our manliest and best of our living crop of ballad and folksong singers. . . . I like Cisco as a man. I like him as a person, and as a funhaving, warmhearted, and likable human being.”

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1918, Gilbert Vandine Houston had moved with his mother, two brothers, and a sister to the Los Angeles suburb of Eagle Rock. His father abandoned the family, leaving young Gilbert to turn to his year-older brother “Slim” as the man in the house.

The depression struck the Houston family hard. They lived over the store that provided them a scant livelihood selling groceries to their hard-hit neighbors. First Slim and then Gilbert sought some explication in radical politics for their hard times. Growing up in Los Angeles, the strikingly handsome Gilbert studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He took small parts in little theater productions, found work as an extra in Hollywood, and eventually fell in with actor Will Geer.

Despite his good looks, Houston was hampered as an actor.

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