Vol. 71/No. 6      February 12, 2007

Lane joined the Young Socialist Alliance for a brief time in the late 1960s when he was a student at the State University of New York in Binghamton active in the movement against the U.S. war on Vietnam. Lane joined the SWP in 1977, after the party formed a branch in Albany, New York. Lane remained in Albany and became an at-large SWP member when that branch was dissolved some years later. He worked as a machinist at a General Electric plant in nearby Schenectady and was a member of the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE).

In 1986 Lane participated in Construimos Juntos (We Build Together), a construction brigade building a school in the Nicaraguan town of San Pedro de Lóvago. A workers and farmers government, which working people established through a popular insurrection in 1979, was in power there at the time. That government was leading Nicaragua's toilers to defend the revolution from a war being waged against it by U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries, known as contras.

In 1994 Lane was the SWP candidate for governor as part of the party's ticket in the New York State elections. The Socialist Workers candidates were on the state ballot that year as the result of a big effort by campaign supporters in New York City and across the Northeast. Some 22,000 people signed nominating petitions, including more than 300 of Lane's coworkers.

Lane moved to San Francisco in 1996. For the last decade, he worked as a machinist at the United Airlines maintenance base here. He dropped his membership in the SWP in 2000.

Lane later joined with many other party supporters as a volunteer in the Pathfinder Printing Project. Last year Lane was part of a large team of SWP supporters who indexed the Pathfinder Press book The Case of Leon Trotsky, which reports on his testimony before the 1937 Dewey Commission investigating charges made against him in the Moscow Trials.

Printing Project volunteers are producing upgraded editions of nearly 400 Pathfinder Press titles, making the living legacy of the communist program understandable to new generations of readers of all ages.  
 
 
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