Haskell Wexler had eclectic tastes — grassroots unions, L.A. Lakers games, electric cars, Liberation Theology, naughty limericks, veggie food, cowboy shirts, and baseball games with Fidel Castro. We met in 1973, after he heard my NPR reports about the Indian uprising at Wounded Knee. I was a car buff at the time and was immediately taken by the fact that he had seventeen automobiles, including a 1949 Rolls Royce Silver Dawn with right-hand drive, which he’d picked up on a shoot in Italy, and a Formula 1 racer with a souped-up Buick Straight-8 engine. For the next 42 years, he was my friend and mentor.
Born into a wealthy Chicago family in 1922, Haskell took his first photos — of striking unionists during the Depression — when he was still in the 8th grade. When he was just 12 on a family vacation to Italy, he used a wind-up 16mm camera to shoot his first film. The footage intercuts tourist shots of his parents and siblings with fascist teenagers wearing Mussolini insignia. He told me that during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, when he was still in high school, he’d lied about his age to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Rebuffed, he proceeded to leaflet against the aerial bombings of civilians in Spain, earning him his first attention from the FBI. According to his FOIA file, the Bureau marked him as “prematurely anti-fascist.” He was 15 at the time.
Haskell enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1940. A year later, after he was expelled by the dean of students for a campus prank, he joined the merchant marines. In 1942, his ship was torpedoed by a Nazi sub off the coast of Africa. He spent two weeks in a lifeboat, nursing a leg wound, catching seagulls, eating them raw, and watching his best friend die in his arms. He was the last sailor off the sinking ship, manning — but not firing — a machine gun as his fellow crewmen scampered for safety. Haskell remembered the U-boat commander standing on the deck of the surfaced sub, shooting the bobbing lifeboat with a small movie camera. It was Friday the 13th, a day he would always consider lucky.
