Loner

Cecil Eklund, born in early 1910, lived more than 100 years. His life was touched by great events of the 20th century. Only surviving son of a Swedish immigrant, a boy doing a man’s work in a logging camp, working in his teens in apple orchards and selling tickets for the silent movies, Cecil grew up fast. He spent much of his time alone, with wild nature as solace. With his one true friend, Berg, Cecil went off to find his fortune in San Francisco at the age of 17. Relating his experiences as a young worker in a glass factory, then as a young husband and father, Cecil offers a first-hand look at the Great Depression and the events that made him a Union man for the rest of his life. His firsthand experience inside the formation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) story adds a personal touch that catches the reader’s attention. Janelle Eklund, youngest of Cecil and Dolores Eklund’s five children, transcribed her father’s stories from videotapes. Janelle searched this history to answer her own questions: why had he been remote and often angry in the middle of what seemed such a successful life? She finds some answers in the tumultuous social struggles he lived through, the justice for working people that he fought for. Helping him tell his own story in this book, Janelle says, is the conversation she always longed to have with her father.