Remembering Roy

Roy Rydell, sailor, communist, and teacher, died November 20th 2001 in New York City. On February 15th he would have turned 83 years old.

Roy Rydell, sailor, communist, and teacher, died November 20th 2001 in New York City. On February 15th he would have turned 83 years old.

I met Roy soon after joining the Young Communist League. The man that was introduced to me was a short old man, with a foul mouth, backed up by an undying love for all people. He devoted his life to the struggle of the working class, always putting himself on the frontlines.

From his days as a young YCL Member struggling in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York in the 30s, until his final days, he led by an example of hard unrelenting work. I’ve only heard a few stories about his life, but each was marked by these principles.

During the Great Depression, Roy, a high school student, became a YCL Member, and quickly began to organize. It so happened that the local school board had made a decision to raise the cost of mashed potatoes in the cafeteria. Knowing how this cost hike would affect him and his friends, he and his comrades got to work organizing a boycott. Those politicos didn’t know what hit them. They realized they had no choice but to answer the demands. The boycott led by Roy and the other YCLers succeeded in blocking the raise of mashed potatoes from 1 cent to 2.

Soon after, Roy joined the Merchant Marines. He was willing to join the fight against fascism, along with thousands of others from his generation. He remained a sailor for the next 47 years. His die-hard attitude solidified during those years in which, among many other things, he survived five days in a raft after a Nazi submarine sank his ship.

After the war, he faced blacklisting and Joseph McCarthy’s communist trials. Booted from the National Maritime Union (NMU), a union he helped to form, he began to fight a six-year battle to regain his seaman’s papers. In 1987 he retired, a member of the NMU and still an unwavering believer in the working class.
As Fred Gaboury wrote in his tribute to Roy, "for Rydell ‘retirement’ meant that he had more time to pursue the important things in life: going to demonstrations, distributing the People’s Weekly World at Central Labor Council meetings, and honing his skills as a writer." This is the Roy I knew and learned from.

He didn’t teach by sitting down in a room and lecturing or even much through conversation. He taught through example. He was always a block ahead of the YCL on our early morning travels to the Domino Sugar Refinery to walk the picket and support the workers during their strike. One day I went with a few friends to the picket line early on a Sunday morning to bring some soup to the workers. There was Roy in the trailer getting interviews for his stories in the Peoples Weekly World. "I’ve been here for a while already," he said to us.

That’s how Roy did things, from the Domino Sugar strike to other local labor struggles to the now victorious fight of the Charleston Five. Always ahead of the pack, not stopping for a moment, teaching all of us by example. That’s who Roy was to me.