WASHINGTON: Skidroad Avenger

One cold night in 1931, his shabby clothing buttoned tightly about his short, diabetic body, a derelict named Driscoll lay on the floor of a boxcar in Seattle’s railroad yards. For days he had hunted work. Weary, he had turned to bread lines, soup kitchens, listened to soap-box orators on corners of the Skidroad.* Deep into his dulled consciousness sank the speakers’ catchphrases, their shouts of plenty for everyone, taunts at Big Business, cries that Capitalists were to blame for Derelict Driscoll’s wrinkled belly.

As he lay hunched in the drafty boxcar that bitter night Derelict Driscoll thought of railroad tycoons in their private cars, mansions, soft beds. He bundled some oil waste between the car’s walls, struck a match. Safely out of the yards, he watched the flames redden the sky. He felt better.

Few weeks later the Albers (FlapJack) Milling Co. plant made a roaring fire with a $300,000 loss. Seattle’s ball park spiraled in smoke. Executives and their underlings opened the morning mail to find printed notes threatening fires. Factory after factory burned. Lumber yards, stacked high with fir and cedar from Washington’s forests, became kindling pyres. A boxcar, filled with new Buicks specially built with right-hand drives for shipment to the Orient, became a pile of ashes and twisted steel. Seattle’s nominally low 60¢ per capita fire loss zoomed to $1.40 in four years.

Fortnight ago a thin, black-eyed Russian woman, owner of the Moscow Restaurant in Seattle’s crowded White Russian colony, gazed out of the window to see why her dog barked. She saw a shadowy figure kindling a fire against the frame walls of the old Russian Orthodox Church where she worshipped each Sunday. Russian patrons raced out of the café, pounced upon Robert Bruce Driscoll.

In jail, fire chiefs and prosecutors made Driscoll print his name, dictated sentences, compared the printing to the threat notes of 1931-32. Driscoll twitched, squirmed, finally burst into a babble of confession. For four days he gushed about his crimes, drove with fire officials the city’s length & breadth, pointing out plants he had fired. When he was talked out, flabbergasted officials tallied up 125 fires, $1,000,000 losses.

*SeattIe’s street of Radical orators, flop houses, bawdy houses, named long ago when it was frequented by rough loggers from the skid-roads of the timberlands.