June Solnit Sale, a 40s protester sees Trump-era parallels

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it—always."
Mohandus “Mahatma" Gandhi

BY Bill Boyarsky | PUBLISHED Apr 26, 2017 | Bill Boyarsky

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In November 1943, June Sale, a UCLA student, was part of a demonstration at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School against Gerald L.K. Smith, the most prominent anti-Semite of the time.

Listening to the speeches inside the auditorium, she recalled recently, “I became nauseated and teary. I decided to leave.  As I got to the foyer of the auditorium, a police officer arrested me, told me I was disturbing the meeting and walked me to the police paddy wagon.”

June when she was a girl in Sierra Madre California

I learned of her long-ago bust in one of the emails she sends to friends, often writing of her anger over where President Donald Trump is taking the country. I was intrigued by the story of her arrest, and by the picture she included of herself talking to her lawyer before going on trial, which appeared in the now-defunct Los Angeles Daily News (the one that folded in 1954, not the current Woodland Hills-based newspaper). I wanted to know more. So my wife, Nancy, and I talked with her early in April over lunch at her home above Sunset Boulevard. We have been friends since we met June and her late husband, Sam, on Barbara Isenberg’s London theater tour several years ago.

As she told the story of her life, I saw that it reflected an almost forgotten era of Jewish Los Angeles, when anti-Semitism was rampant and a beleaguered Jewish community pondered how to fight it. “It was just something that happened to me over and over again,” she recalled of the anti-Semitism of her high school days in Pasadena.

June was born at White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights in 1924. Boyle Heights was then home to immigrants of many ethnicities and a hotbed of Jewish progressive politics.  Her parents, Ben and Bertha Solnit, were immigrants from a town on the Russian-Polish border. Ben learned the shoe business from the bottom up and grew prosperous. When their son was ill with bronchitis, his pediatrician advised them to move to a hotter, drier place. They chose Sierra Madre, near Pasadena, a center for right-wing politics and one of several communities riddled with anti Semitism.

Although Jews were among the founders of Los Angeles in the 19th century, Midwesterners who made the growing city a white Protestant conservative place soon outnumbered them. Restrictive covenants kept Jews — and African-Americans, Asians and Latinos — from some neighborhoods. Clubs would not admit Jews nor would fancy downtown law firms hire them.

In high school, June said, “all my friends who were not Jewish joined sororities and they were told not to talk to me.”   When she was elected president of a student YWCA group in junior high school, a vice principal said she could not accept the job because the group recited Christian prayers and Jews could not join them.

The Solnits wouldn’t take it. “I’m a better citizen then you’ll ever be,” Bertha Solnit told another school vice principal when he refused to permit June to use transfer credits to graduate and lectured Bertha on what he considered the citizenship obligations of immigrants. 

Their determination to fight anti-Semitism, as well as their liberal political views, put the Solnits firmly in the ranks of pro-labor, progressive Jews — usually immigrants or children of immigrants. They were at odds with more politically conservative Jews who wanted to get along with the city’s Republican powers and didn’t approve of the liberal activists’ confrontational tactics with anti-Semites. 

June accompanied her father to meetings of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which was helping anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War and campaigning to rescue Jews and other victims of Hitler. President Harry S. Truman’s Justice Department later blacklisted the committee, an action overturned by the Supreme Court.

June's father with David Ben Gurion on a trip to Israel

“The grown-ups were passionate, worried and concerned,” June wrote of the meetings. “The discussions were often difficult for me to comprehend, but I do remember the point of the gatherings was to find ways to bring refugees from Spain and Europe to safety. [President Franklin] Roosevelt had turned away Jews trying to escape the Holocaust and refugees from Spain were not welcome here.”

Liberal outrage was intense when Gerald L.K. Smith spoke at Poly High in 1943. Sam and June had married and he was overseas with the Army Air Corps. June, still at UCLA, had been on a union picket line during a strike against the studios. Impressed with her demeanor, one of the strike captains, a man named Irving, asked her to join a labor-sponsored demonstration against Smith.

June and her beloved husband Sam Sale

After her arrest, she said, “I was greeted in the paddy wagon by other ‘disturbers’ and we were whisked off to jail. The women were placed in cells with prostitutes who had been arrested. Irving had observed my arrest and soon came to my rescue. He was able to pay my bail and I was released early in the morning. Believing I would be the first person out of the dungeon, I took everyone’s phone number on a piece of toilet paper (the guard loaned us a pencil) so I could call a contact and tell what had happened.”

All of the charges were dismissed. “The police were required to identify us and they couldn’t,” she wrote in an email. “Strangely enough, we all looked quite different from the time we were arrested.”

She concluded her email about her arrest by saying, “You may ask why I bring this moment in my history up at this time. Well, I think we are headed for rough and difficult times as we face the Trump years. America First was a theme of the thirties, anti-Semitism is on the rise, the rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing and the poor are getting poorer. We must organize against this growing threat of ‘America First.’ ”

June graduated from UCLA. She and Sam raised a family and generously supported progressive causes, no matter how unpopular. She became a preschool teacher, started Los Angeles’ first Head Start program and was in charge of child care services at UCLA for 10 years. Then for 18 years, she was a court-appointed special advocate, going from court to court, home to home, looking after the welfare of some of the 35,000 children in the Los Angeles County foster care program.

 An article June wrote for the LA Times

 June and her Prius, one of the first sold in Southern CA.  She still owns it.

 June and Sam, with their kids.  June is a many times great grandmother

In her 90's June is still passionate and still active in her life of service.

“When you get old, gray and sleepless, you may find, as I do, that your memories of days gone by keep you company,” she wrote.

Her memories keep us company, too. The issues have changed. The immigrants are no longer Jewish refugees, but Latinos and those fleeing war-torn Muslim-majority nations. Episodes of anti-Semitism are increasing. But the challenges remain the same as they were when June Sale joined the picket line at Poly High.

Watch this video of

June explaining The Blankie Project.

In her mid-90's June is still making valuable differences in the lives of people and community.

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BILL BOYARSKY is a columnist for the Jewish Journal, Truthdig and L.A. Observed, and the author of “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers."

Note from Ed Garren, Below is a link to the story I wrote about June almost a decade ago.  I hope you enjoy it as well.  

https://edwardgarrenmft.blogspot.com/2013/01/seventh-day-june-solnit-sale.html  

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Arms are for hugging.

How Louis Vremsak became Edward Voltaire Garren (an American story)

In the early 1900s, a young man from Slovenia came to New York to work in the auto business. His name was Louis Frank Vremsak. When he became established, he moved in with a young woman, an orphan also from the Austro-Hungarian empire, named Marie/Mary Bolte. They had a child, our father, whom they named Louis Vremsak.

Around three years later, Ms. Bolte left Mr. Vremsak, taking with her their young child. She "fled" to Tampa Florida, where she met a man named Columbus Garren from Hendersonville North Carolina. Columbus was in the merchant marine, their liaison lasted about 9 months.  After he left her, his family in Hendersonville, offered this young "widow" a chance to come live with them, so she took her young son to Hendersonville, where the family operated a large rooming house for summer visitors. That experiment lasted the summer. Marie returned to Tampa and that fall, when it was time to enroll young Louis into school, she asked him, or convinced him, that he needed a "more American sounding name." So Louis Vremsak Jr. became Edward V. Garren, our father.  

Marie also told my father that his father was dead, died of pneumonia from a chill, giving his coat to a beggar after leaving the opera. This was not true. His father, Louis Sr. left New York, moved briefly to Pennsylvania where he co-founded the Adria Automobile corporation, then settled in Los Angeles in 1920. He was a pioneer avaitor, co-founder of General Western Aero, a company that designed airplanes, a self described "adventure seeker & treasure hunter", he had two more wives, was a member of the Santa Barbara Elks Lodge, and died in 1946, never knowing where his first son was, or how to contact him.  

In 2014 I discovered his grave in the Accaia Gardens of Forest Lawn Glendale California.  I took my brother Francis Edward "Gene" Garren to see the grave site.

My father, never believed his mother, but doing a diligent search for his father was too painful, so he never knew what happened to his father.  

One genuine "mystical" part of the story, Louis had another son, Gene Vremsak, who was a young marine, fresh out of boot camp, who with 31 others died in a plane crash in 1946. My brother was named Francis Edward Garren at birth, but when he was about 3 years old, emphatically told our parents, "Stop calling me Francis, that's NOT my name. My name is "Gene" which has been his "nickname" his entire life.  

Thanks to the internet, we have found a lot of the missing links to his story, and I have found our relatives in Slovenia. Thanks to Vladka Vremšak, Nika Vremšak and Nuša Vremšak for sharing their stories and photos and for making us feel very welcome in their beautiful country.  

The love of mountains runs very deep in our blood.  My brother loves the mountains of North Carolina where he lives, and our cousin Vladka goes hiking year round in the beautiful mountains of Slovenia.

Any of you who knew my father knew of his lovely tenor voice and his constant search for knowledge (often falling asleep reading the encyclopedia), both traits that I have as well. It turns out the Vremsaks are all musicians and scholars. The very first photo of cousin Boris Vremsak (Vladka's brother, Nika & Nusa's father) and my brother "Gene" (Francis Edward) Garren. Meeting them in 2014 was wonderful. We all looked at Boris and Gene and did many double takes. They even sound the same. We share a great-grandfather, Alois Vremsak.

Alois Vremsak with his second wife, the great grandmother of Boris & Vladka

I have always had a very high apptitude for all things mechanical, and I also enjoy singing, and have always been complimented on my singing abilities.  Our father had a lovely tenor voice as well, but he was the only one in the family (other than me) that shared that gift.  No one else has my mechanical aptitude.  I always was fascitated with automobiles and in high school wanted to become an automobile designer (engineering) but that never happened.Because there was no "blood" connection to any of this, my gifts were never encouraged by anyone in or out of the family, so I languished, whilc trying to figure out all of this on my own.  Discovering the Vremsaks removed a huge sense of not being connected to anyone from my life.Some other family photos are below:

 Edna and Edward in the early 1940's

 Edna and Edward in the late 1940's a couple of years before I was born.

Edward at a sink we constructed in the Cattail Creek house in the early 1970's.

 "Gene" Garren, Edward George 

Michael Lee, Edna and Edward Garren 1985.

 Gene hiking near his home in the mountains of North Carolina

Louis Frank Vremsak in Vienna as a boy..

 Our father told us that his father was a "trick rider" in the Austrian cavalry and a favorite of the emperor Franz Joseph.

 Another old photo of the young Louis Frank.

 Our grandmother Mary/Marie Bolte

 Marie with my brother Francis Edward "Gene" Garren

Marie was a giften Modiste' who could make any dress without a pattern.  She made this one.  This look best captures her tortured interior, the trauma of surviving Catholic orphanages from the late 19th century.  She was incredibly damaged, very similar to Joan Crawford of "Mommie Dearest."  We suspect she had multiple personalities, some of which were violent and abusive.

Gene and his son Michael circa 2000 in Los Angeles

Our father's genetics, and the origins of the Slavic peoples.  The blood of Ghengis Kahn and Attila the Hun runs in our veins.

Thank you for reading this very "American" story.  Generally, we are a nation of refugees, bastards, etc.  The American philosopher Eric Hoffer said, "We are the scum of the earth."  My friend Grace Ahn puts it best, 'Anyone who has anything in the old country never leaves.  The only people who leave and come to America are people who have nothing but a knife or a gun at their back." We inherit the unresolved traumas of our parents and grand parents.  

Our father was particularly formed out of his mother's trauma.  I wrote this story about how all of this prepared me for my vocation as a "Family Therapist.   

I hope you enjoy our story, "Ode to our Father"