Panhead Pete

July 6, 1936, Route 66, New Mexico. This is Martha Evans, 32. She had been walking for three days. Her husband died of tuberculosis in Oklahoma in May. The farm was foreclosed. She took the six kids and a Radio Flyer wagon and started west for California. The twins in the wagon were 11 months old. The boys walking were 6, 5, 4, and 3. Her dress was torn on barbed wire. Her leg was cut and infected. She wrapped it with a feed sack. She had $1.60 in her pocket. A photographer from the Resettlement Administration saw them and pulled over. He offered her a ride. She said no. She said if she took a ride now, the kids would expect one every time they were tired. She gave him her name and kept walking. The photo ran in newspapers across the country. Donations came to a PO box in Barstow. She got $200 and a bus ticket. She made it to Bakersfield and picked grapes. All six kids lived. Three went to college. Martha died in 1978. The wagon is in the Smithsonian

The irony of the whole McCarthy scandal is that, despite his highhandedness, lack of evidence and general recklessness, there definitely was a communist presence in the United States at the time, as illustrated by the Rosenbergs and others. In fact, a number of the people McCarthy interrogated were later identified as communists and even Soviet agents. The evidence he had so desperately sought became available in 1995 with the release of the Venona intercepts. These secret Soviet intelligence messages had been decoded in the 1940s but didn't become public knowledge until 1995. According to journalist Charles Peters, the Venona intercepts identified multiple communists, including: