William M. Adler » Blog

No one will mistake the author for a math major.

Bill — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:50:19 +0000

I’m grateful to the alert reader who recently pointed out an error of fact in the text. On page 297, I assert, incorrectly, that Hilda Erickson waited “60 years to tell her story” about the circumstances of Hill’s gunshot wound on the night of Jan. 10, 1914. In reality, as I’d stated three pages earlier, Hilda came forward in an unpublished letter to Aubrey Haan in 1949 — 35 years afterwards. (It took another 60 years until I came across the letter in the possession of Haan’s daughter.)

My arithmetically-challenged self aside, the question of why Hilda declined to come forward with the alibi while Hill was still alive is no less salient.

“Kill a Wobbly who insults you, and get honored at the Elks Club.”

Bill — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:44:29 +0000

Two weeks before Utah executed Joe Hill, another IWW member, Ray (or Roy) J. Horton was murdered in Salt Lake City — shot on the street, frontier-justice style, for the crime of mouthing off to a hotheaded old gunfighter who had once been a deputy under Sheriff Bat Masterson in Dodge City, Kansas.

The story is told briefly, too briefly, in the book, and is now ably reprised, and with some additional and welcome detail, on the Web page of the Standard-Examiner of Ogden, Utah. The blog post is headlined: “In 1915, kill a Wobbly who insults you, and get honored at the Elks Club.” It’s written by Doug Gibson, the paper’s editorial page editor, and well worth reading.

Also, it should be noted that back in 1991, the nonprofit Joe Hill Organizing Committee put a marker on Horton’s grave. He’s buried in Salt Lake in Mount Olivet Cemetery, plot S_49_1. The Salt Lake-based Committee is already organizing a commemoration of the centenary of Hill’s Nov. 1915 execution.

On hiatus

Bill — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:00:31 +0000

Now that the author and family are off the road, our On the Road blog is taking a breather. More soonest…