Chris Foran

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In 1965, the nation's top cop labeled a tiny Milwaukee bookstore a Red menace, putting both in the headlines — and, a year later, the bookstore's operator in peril.

In testimony before a House subcommittee in March 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover listed eight "major communist bookstores operating in the United States at this time." Among them, The Milwaukee Journal reported on May 18, 1965, was Mary's Book Shop, 318 W. Juneau Ave.

Mary's was operated by Fred Bassett Blair, the longtime chairman of the Wisconsin Communist Party. Blair's wife, Mary, was the owner of the secondhand book shop.

Fred Blair, Hoover testified, also was one of five communist speakers at an anti-Vietnam War protest earlier that year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

"The major lesson to be learned from all this is that the communists and their supporters in this country are not a weak, insignificant element on the American scene," Hoover testified. "The wave of demonstrations which erupted on a national scale immediately following news of the United States' counterstrike against communist forces in Vietnam demonstrates how unified, organized and powerful an element the communist movement in the United States is today."

A photo of the book shop's front window, also published in The Journal May 18, revealed a pretty non-revolutionary selection: the Perry Mason novel "The Case of the Shapely Shadow," by Erle Stanley Gardner; Reader's Digest collections; a book about Harriet Tubman.

Milwaukee Sentinel reporter William Janz checked out the store himself, only to find the door locked and a sign reading "Back in 15 Minutes."

"After waiting for a half-hour … a man approached and said, 'You looking for Fred? He's at Reuter's," Janz wrote, in a story published May 19, 1965.

Janz found Blair at Reuter's, a nearby tavern.

"Just having a beer," Blair told Janz as they walked back to his store. "Business is dead. If this is one of the major communist bookstores, it must be kind of bad for the minor ones."

Janz spent more than an hour at the store, during which only one person came into the store, giving Blair plenty of time to talk.

"I bet if I opened a grocery, the FBI would come peeking around the oranges," Blair said. "Hoover would say that Fred Bassett Blair had opened a grocery store and there was communist propaganda under the onions. …

"Sure, I carry Marxist literature. It's 10% of my stock. … I count myself a Marxist and a communist, but this is not a communist bookstore in the sense that is owned by the Communist Party."

Actually, Blair's political activities had put him in the headlines often over the previous 35 years. When he was jailed in a protest in 1930, rallies were held calling for his release. He ran for statewide office several times, wrote poems (some of which were published in The Journal) — and, in 1951, at the height of the Red Scare, disappeared, along with his wife, for several years.

In the mid-1950s, Blair and his wife resurfaced in Milwaukee and opened a bookstore at 1010 W. North Ave. (The Sentinel's headline, on March 14, 1956, read "Commie Bookshop Back in Business.") The store moved several times before ending up on Juneau Ave.

A year after Hoover identified Mary's Book Shop as a "major" communist bookstore, a 17-year-old from Brookfield came into the store gunning for Blair.

According to a story in The Journal's "Final" page on Nov. 28, 1966, the teenager asked if he was Blair and pulled out a pistol. While Blair ducked under the counter, Ralph Sacks, a book salesman who was at the store, tried to get the gun away from the teenager and was wounded. Blair re-emerged with a small baseball bat and hit his assailant over the head several times before he dropped the gun.

Blair told the Sentinel in a story published the next day that he asked the youth who had sent him.

" 'Nobody sent me,' Blair quoted the youth. 'It was all my idea. You're a communist. I want to kill a communist.' "

The youth was later ruled mentally ill and sent to the state hospital in Winnebago for treatment.

Blair ended up closing Mary's Book Shop in the summer of 1969 — not because of political harassment, but because freeway projects had taken away most of the neighborhood surrounding the store.

In 1977, Blair and his wife won $48,000 from the FBI, after suing the agency for its surveillance activities in the early 1960s. Mary Blair died in 1992; Fred Blair died in 2005, at age 98.

ABOUT THIS FEATURE

Each Wednesday, Our Back Pages dips into the Journal Sentinel archives, sharing photos and stories from the past that connect, reflect and sometimes contradict the Milwaukee we know today.

Special thanks and kudos go to senior multimedia designer Bill Schulz for finding many of the gems in the Journal Sentinel photo archives.