December 16, 2009
I knew Tim when we were both SDS militants at the New School and later in Boston. Unlike others of us, Tim was both an active SDS member and a trucker who believed deeply in the union movement and in the possibilities for working people to change the social order and rule in their own name. When SDS occupied a building or staged a sit-in, Tim used it as an opportunity to show fellow workers what “these kids” could do. ” That’s my group. And if they can do it, we can do it,” he’d say. And while we–at least those at the New School in the late 1960s –considered ourselves Marxists, either in our way or in his, Tim was a Marxist in Marx’s way. He had read Capital and got it, while we had barely read Paul Sweezy. He is missed.