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came in from all over the country. Her old friend and fellow union activist Ernie Mazey wrote to Genora, “Dear Comrade, you certainly have had more than your share of the hard knocks of life.”87 Another friend wrote that Jody “was a wonderful kid, with a class consciousness and a revolutionary spirit which he got from you, and which a lot of us could go a long way to emulate.”88 Oscar Coover, her brother-in-law, wrote, “I think I know you well enough to know that you will bear up under this as heroically as you have the ones in the past and that you will be on the fighting line again soon.” But it took a while, for Jody’s death subdued her. A few months later, her mother, Lora, died.

The late 1940s and early 1950s were not happy years for Genora. Her oldest son, Dennis, was admitted to a Flint hospital in 1947, suffering numerous ailments, including what was apparently an early stage of multiple sclerosis. He kept running away from the hospital and returning to Detroit to be with Genora and his friends. Kermit would come and get him one time, Sol another. Denny entered hospital after hospital; then, apparently making a secret of all his illnesses, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1949. Almost instantly, he went absent without leave (AWOL), a situation that became chronic with the young man.

In mid-1948, Genora had begun—after her near-fatal beating—to get back into full swing with union and SWP activities. She endorsed an idea from her friend Bert Christensen, a member of the Local 598 Education Committee. He suggested an annual “White Shirt Day” in Flint to commemorate each year the February 11 anniversary of the UAW victory over GM. Christensen “wanted workers to wear white shirts traditionally worn by managers to show the company they were equally important people.” The shirts represented equal respect and treatment for blue-collar workers. “Workers try to keep their shirts as clean as the bosses.”89 White Shirt Day quickly became a tradition throughout the UAW, and it continues to be celebrated into the twenty-first century.

In mid-1949 Genora was in New York—her first extended visit since 1939, when she was married to Kermit—for the May Day celebrations that year. She wrote to Sol back in Flint that she has “acquired a new status in the Party now that I have remained married to you for nearly eight years. Comrades want to talk to me to obtain advice. I tell them I’m no father-figure.”90 She attended a citywide SWP meeting on Palestine and the future of the Jews there (several colleagues suggested that she convert to Judaism) and sat in on party seminars that discussed the nature of Stalinism and “Thermiodorian reactions”; she wrote to Sol that they must “get discussions like this in Flint.”91 Speaking to the New York Painters Union, which was contemplating a citywide strike at the time, she pointed out that there were 6,000 union painters in New York City but “40,000 scabs.”92 Women of the Chelsea and Harlem branches of the SWP invited Genora to speak, regarding her as “some kind of leader of the women in the Party . . . who should be sent on a National Tour.”93 Genora was flattered but frightened by the attention. Though she always spoke out on things that mattered to her, she had a residual inferiority complex—perhaps brought on by youthful struggles with her father—that she covered up with bravado.

In leisure time in New York, she went to numerous movies, including Panic, Les Enfants du Paradis, and Paisano, many of which had to do with international themes of Socialism. She visited almost every museum and art gallery in the city and was thrilled at watching Jackie Robinson when the Brooklyn Dodgers confronted the Cincinnati Reds at Ebbets Field. Sol told her “to stay [in New York] until you have had your fill of intellectual atmosphere.”94 She wrote back, “Do you really know what you are saying?” She loved New York and showed a marked reluctance to leave. If she went back to Michigan, she was “so afraid that I’ll never again get the chance to drink in New York as I have been doing this time.” And then