In Memoriam: Lowell May

Hard Crackers editor Lowell May died at his Denver home on the morning of December 19.

Born in 1949, he grew up under harsh conditions on a farm near Lorimer, Iowa. He went to high school in Hampton, Iowa (class of 1967), where he played on the football team.

He attended the University of Iowa during the Vietnam War days and was news editor of the Daily Iowan, which played an important part in the campus antiwar movement (where he learned writing and editing skills that would be useful to him for the rest of his life). He went on to law school with the intention of using his law degree to serve the popular movement. He graduated, passed the Bar and practiced briefly, but instead of pursuing a career as a lawyer, chose to work in the farm equipment industry in the Quad Cities area.

He was a founding member of the Haymarket Collective in the Quad Cities, a Marxist organization, which in 1975 affiliated with the Sojourner Truth Organization.

In 1977 he moved to Denver to work with the southwest branch of the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional, an organization dedicated to Puerto Rican and Mexican freedom. There he helped set up a print shop, P&L Printing, which became a center of movement activity, and the Bread and Roses Workers Cultural Center. He was active with the Industrial Workers of the World in supporting the P-9 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, and other worker insurgencies. He wrote or published a number of books and pamphlets on working-class history, including Slaughter in Serene: the Columbine Coal Strike Reader, co-edited with Richard Myers. He taught a popular class in dialectics, in Denver, Portland, Oregon, and northern California.

He was a founding member of the editorial board of Hard Crackers, and published an article in issue #5 about changes in his hometown he observed when he returned for his fiftieth high school reunion. Drawing upon his personal talents, his hardscrabble rural Iowa youth, and his political philosophy, he maintained throughout his life an adherence to the proposition that the working class would break its radical chains and liberate humanity. In 2016 he wrote:

I agree with Marx that the fundamental human characteristic resides in creative production for self-development as a species. A worker gets invested in the fruits of her labor and society gets involved in the fruits of common development, technological or otherwise, to the extent that it will always and inevitably resist the alienation of its efforts and their fruits. That’s where the capitalist rubber meets the socialist road, despite all ebbs and detours.

Readers are invited to add their memories and thoughts where it says “Leave a Reply.”

9 thoughts on “In Memoriam: Lowell May”

  1. Lowel has been a constant in my life for 44 yrs and there is no replacing such a great human being, a great friend and comrade. An excellent obit Noel. To add some concerning his hard scrabble upbringing, Lowel told me his experiences of farm life, specifically being part of the collective effort of the harvest by the small farmers in his county, is what made him a believer in Socialism

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  2. Lowell May was a sterling friend and comrade of 50 years! I am indebted to Lowell for the following.
    IOWA IN OUR HEARTS
    (gone forever)
    We grew up in adjoining Iowa counties. He loved the southern tier counties so much that he made a special trip from Colorado to witness their springtime beauty. Only Lowell could list all 99 Iowa counties from memory. We
    shared deep love/ambivalence of and about the Hawkeyes: recognizing big time football hypocrisy. Lowell once called me from a southern Colorado canyon asking if I was listening to the game on WHO. We played tennis on the clay courts next to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. We hated the Iowa College of Law. But, states away we met spiritually somewhere around Madison County.

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  3. Great epitaph!

    I met Lowell through his article in the 5th edition of Hard Crackers. He had attended his 50th HS reunion in the Midwest, small-town Hampton, Iowa. Against a backdrop of Trump campaign bashing of immigrants, then the election of a county sheriff determined to clamp down on immigrants, the Times article, he writes. “I see a town with three faces, two of which belong to the “white” residents, split both section against section and internally within individuals. Sometimes distrust and disunity prevail, sometimes humanity and solidarity prevail. I take lessons from both but am buoyed by the perspective that my old home town accepted mass immigration as a matter of practicality but in many cases grew and bonded with its new residents and at least began to form a new community with an awakening identity based on the dignity of labor, respect for hard work, and the potential for mutual reliance. Either way, Hampton will never be the same.”

    What profound observation by the author, I noted in the margin. In the chaos of politics, the world is changing right before our eyes, small increments at a time, not by politicians but by the masses. Thanks Lowell for the enlightenment and for hope that a better world is possible. May your work and writings continue to inspire and motivate us to strive to be our better selves. I know, I am. RIP.

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  4. Lowell and I were brief acquaintances a couple of decades back. We re-met six years ago at a jury duty call and when I asked him if he liked to fish his eyes lit up. This chance meeting led to six seasons of frequent shared walleye and trout fishing on my boat. We often talked and laughed to the extent that catching fish became an afterthought. Over time we became more than fishing buddies. We watched Bronco and Nuggets games together, shared food and drink, spoke on the phone and shared jokes, stories and our love of words. Lowell became very important to my wife Felicia as well, and we grew to love him. We enjoyed his intellect, his wit, his playfulness, his warmth, his humanity, his political awareness, his commitment to improving the world, and perhaps most—his kindness. To watch him hold our little poodle in his arms and let her kiss his face was touching. His passing has left a hole in my life and each time I want to reach for the phone to rant or laugh about the Broncos, the Nuggets or some fool politician, his absence is painful

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  5. Comments/clarification by Patty Abrisz: (the “P” in P&L Printing)
    Lowell Harold May
    ‘ Born June 9, 1949 in Kewanee, Illinois, to Harold and Mildred Geisler May
    Moved to Albin, Wyoming, as a baby. He lived there through kindergarten. His father’s brother was a potato farming mogul there. He set Harold up running a bar, which he loved. Harold was harassed into getting out of the bar business by Mildred’s conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran minister father. That’s when they bought the farm in the Lorimor area. His father hated it. No running water, outhouse, hard work. I think it might have been sixth or seventh grade when they moved to Hampton, Iowa, and bought a Dairy Queen. Lowell graduated high school in 1967. His intention at that time was to go to a Lutheran college and become a minister. Lowell ended up at the University of Iowa and within a month there was no more intention of becoming a minister.I think he graduated college in 1971 and law school in 1974. He worked at the print shop at gates rubber Company while we were getting the print shop going. P&L ran from bare bones 1978 until our retiring in the summer of 2009. It was passed on to a younger generation and is now defunct.

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  6. Before the Occupy, BLM, and MeToo moment, our small organization had spent the years spanning across the optimism of the antiglobalization movement and the despair of the war on terror attempting to forge a meaningful radical political organization. In practical activity, we spanned from the IWW to community based struggles around immigrant rights and against police violence. Many of us drew inspiration from the work and writings of Sorjourner Truth Organization.
    As we ran up against the limits of our own experiences and knowledge, we began to explore reinvigorating STO’s,”How To Think,” a crash course in Marxism and dialectics. As we understood it. the course had initially been crafted as an attempt to cultivate the confidence and capacities of all participants to understand themselves as equal philosophers and intellectuals, regardless of their formal academic training or movement experience. A good number of the previous generation’s participants expressed caution regarding the utility of the classes for accomplishing their stated goal, and Lowell was one of a small number who gladly volunteered hours and months of his time to nurture and mentor this younger generation.
    Lowell’s seeming ease in aligning his very Wobbly world view with membership and partiicpation in a Marxist Leninist organization still strike me as an example of the complexity and nuance of his worldview.
    I recall Lowell’s ability to make very challenging, seemingly obscure texts (Hegel?) seem approachable and meaningful to the world we live and act in now.

    In what feel like dark times, I continue to learn and draw hope from his unflinching faith in the capacities of the working class to overcome the most complex obstacles, but have not forgotten his admonition as to the likely trajectories(socialism or barbarism),which the unfolding crisis points towards.
    I will remember Lowell for his midwestern kindness and generosity, for his optimism, and the smirk and laugh which were ever offered as someone worked their way through the difficult material. His witty, politically pointed, laughing debates with his cofacilitator over seemingly obscure points, rather than being a diversion from the task at hand, stood out as high points in the classes.

    Lowell’s intellect and charisma made it clear he was the kind of person who could easily have accessed a life of comfort and privilege, yet he devoted his talents, passion, and capacities to the hope of a better world. I humbly hope my life might emulate his devotion.

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  7. Today is one of sadness for me, as I’ve only just now received word of Lowell’s passing. While my own relationship with him was never as close as those of some who’ve posted, he was one of the very first kindred spirits I encountered — at the old Radical Information Project, a block off Colfax — upon moving down to the Denver area from Wyoming in 1976. We remained firm friends and allies, not infrequently collaborating on things political, until the moment I left Colorado for Atlanta in 2012, and I’ve continued to view him as such ever since.

    My memories of Lowell are many, all of them warm, but one worth sharing is of our mutual amusement at discovering that, had his family stayed in Kewanee rather than moving west, we’d likely have met by way of playing high school football on opposing teams (in those days, my school faced off against — and was routinely beaten by — Kewanee Weathersfield),

    Lowell May was among the most clearly principled, consistent, and genuinely caring people I ever met. His is a life to be celebrated by all who knew him, yet I, for one, will forever mourn the loss of the light he shed on each of us.

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  8. On the prompt of a comment from a journalist that there are too many counties in the US, I remembered sitting in law school class, next to Lowell, watching him write the names of all of Iowa’s 99 counties on a styrofoam cup. It brought back such fond memories. Back then, we were both agent provocateurs, each in our own ways. From time to time, he hitched a ride on the back of my Honda 250. He was a big fellow, and when he leaned into the curves, it was all I could do to keep us steady. But the thing about Lowell was he knew that–and he helped make sure we stayed upright. I was so sorry, when I looked him up today, to discover he had died. I would have loved so much to reach out and say hello–but failing that, I’m glad to be able to add my small reminiscence here. Thank you for keeping him in our memories. He clearly lived a gorgeous, righteous life.

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