Vol. 79/No. 47      December 28, 2015

 

Frank Forrestal joined the party and never looked back

 
 
MINNEAPOLIS — “I first met Frank at a Militant Labor Forum,” Rafael Espinosa, from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, told a Dec. 13 meeting at the Labor Centre here to celebrate the life and political accomplishments of Socialist Workers Party cadre Frank Forrestal. “I was surprised to see him working on the line at the Dakota Premium Foods packinghouse a couple weeks later. We worked together to make sure he made probation and the boss couldn’t fire him.

“When we decided we were going to fight to get a union in Dakota, they laughed at us, saying immigrant workers couldn’t do it. Well, we did it. And the SWP worked with us.

“When the bosses finally found out Frank was in the SWP, they treated him just like the rest of us Mexicans,” Espinosa said.

“The picture of Frank on the leaflet for this meeting shows him sitting with a group of miners in Turkey comfortable and relaxed, talking about conditions in their mine and fights to win safer workplaces,” said Norton Sandler, speaking for the SWP National Committee. “It could have been workers in the Red River Valley locked out by American Crystal Sugar or coal miners in western Pennsylvania. That was Frank, talking and joking, and showing them the Militant newspaper and books on working-class history.”

Three attractive displays traced political developments during Forrestal’s life and his activities building the party, and two booklets contained messages sent to the meeting.

David Rosenfeld, organizer of the Twin Cities SWP branch, chaired the meeting and introduced David Vasquez, who had been one of Forrestal’s co-workers at Dakota Premium; Frank’s three sisters, Nancy Becker, Jane Forrestal and Patti Higgins; and members of the Minnesota Cuba Committee.

“We look forward to following his example of confidence and determination in building the proletarian party,” Joe Young of the Communist League in Canada told the meeting, “the greatest tribute we can give him.”

“The SWP and our world movement have jumped at opportunities to join struggles that have exploded around the world,” said Militant editor John Studer, “to meet those fighting, tell their story in the Militant, win solidarity and make lasting contacts.

Teams to Ukraine, Turkey

“When the mass Maidan mobilizations in February 2014 overthrew the Moscow-backed regime of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, the party put together a team of worker-correspondents to go.”

“I met Frank, John and their comrades in Maidan Square,” Oksana Demyanovych, who agreed to come along as a translator one day before they left for Ukraine, wrote in a message. “From the beginning I saw a man who gave all his heart and soul to defend the rights of working people worldwide.”

“Oksana threw her plans aside and stayed for our whole trip,” Studer said. “And she came back for the other two trips we’ve made.”

“We visited Chernobyl and learned about the Stalinist regime’s responsibility for the 1986 nuclear disaster there,” he said. “We met with former Komsomol leaders who had approached the Cuban ambassador to see if the revolutionary government would help care for the thousands who suffered from the radiation. Cuba’s leadership acted decisively to extend internationalist aid and treat over 25,000 victims from 1990 to 2011.”

“When we went the third time this summer, Frank was getting sicker, but volunteered to go,” Studer said. “Oksana saw we functioned as a team. When she wanted to ask us something, she would call us ‘Frankjohn.’ We were the party.”

“In 1998 the SWP organized a conference in Pittsburgh to respond to a rise in working-class resistance that posed new opportunities,” said Alyson Kennedy, chair of the Illinois SWP. “In Pittsburgh, where Frank was assigned, comrades worked to get jobs in coal. He was the first to get in.

“He went wherever there was a fight, or where the mine bosses’ drive for profit led to disasters that killed and maimed fellow miners. He would write about it for the Militant, look to win aid and solidarity, and get the paper out and win subscribers.

“Frank was the party’s candidate for mayor in September 2001, when al-Qaeda’s attacks brought down the World Trade Center. In the face of a ferocious ruling-class campaign against Muslims and working-class rights, he explained how the rulers were using the terror attack to expand their imperialist war in Afghanistan and go after our political rights.” It was one of many times Forrestal served as a party candidate.

“Frank joined me on a 2014 reporting team in Turkey, when workers rose up after a mine disaster killed hundreds in Soma,” Kennedy said.

“Frank grew up in New Jersey, where his father was an executive for Borden Foods,” Sandler said. “He became political during the 1970s, under the impact of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the Soweto uprising against apartheid rule in South Africa, the battle for busing to desegregate the schools in Boston and the revolution that overthrew the Washington-backed dictatorship of the shah in Iran.”

“Whatever his family background, his experiences led him to the fight for revolutionary change,” Sandler said. “He worked with the Liberation News Service when he ran into the party in 1978, and within weeks he was working on the production line in the Ford plant in Metuchen, New Jersey.”

‘Factory production worker’

“He never looked back and led the rest of his life through the working class and his party. When he went into the hospital a couple weeks ago, his companion, Diana Newberry, had to fill out all kinds of paperwork, much of which asked what his occupation was. She wrote ‘factory production worker,’ and that was the life Frank chose.

“He thought this was the only way to effectively advance the fight to overthrow the dictatorship of capital,” Sandler said. “He served on the party’s National Committee for 20 years and worked in rail, auto, coal mines and packinghouses.”

Forrestal set an example campaigning to free the Cuban Five revolutionaries. “It was Frank’s arrival to our committee that made sure that their liberation and return to Cuba became a priority for us,” August Nimtz, a leader of the Minnesota Cuba Committee who was at the meeting, wrote in a message. “I think no place in the world had as many showings of the paintings and cartoons of respectively Antonio Guerrero and Gerardo Hernández, two of the Five, as the Twin Cities.”

One of the last things Forrestal did was to write a review for the Militant of Visions of Freedom, Piero Gleijeses’ powerful book about how Cuba sent tens of thousands of volunteers to Angola to help defeat apartheid South Africa’s efforts to overthrow the victorious independence struggle there.

Forrestal spent nearly a decade working in the party’s print shop, producing the Militant and books on revolutionary politics published by Pathfinder Press.

“Like most cadres in the shop, Frank had no previous experience in printing,” Sandler said. “So he didn’t know what we couldn’t do, only what we needed. We put out beautiful four-color book covers on a one-color press.”

“Last summer I joined Frank to speak at a Communist League meeting in Montreal. I found him sick in the bathroom at the airport,” Sandler said. “When he and Diana Newberry, his companion in the party for 17 years, got the cancer diagnosis, they set an example in how they handled themselves.

“Frank was proud Diana continued to help lead the Minneapolis party branch. Whenever he had enough energy, Diana encouraged him to get out into politics. They reinforced each other.

“Over the last year, the Minneapolis SWP has lost three members — Frank, fellow national committee member Tom Fiske and his companion Becky Ellis,” Sandler said. “Tom and Frank were a real team, and worked together to make the branch one of the party’s strongest.”

Supporters of the party did a bang-up job preparing a spread of food and flowers, as well as drinks afterward. Most of the 70 participants stayed around sharing experiences and talking politics.

“The best way to celebrate our comrade Frank’s life and the contributions he made as a worker-Bolshevik — make more efforts to follow his example,” Joe Swanson, who came up in a carload from Nebraska, wrote in a message to the meeting.
 
 
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