Al Lannon

[2] Lannon joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and attended the International Lenin School in Moscow.

[1][5] In May 1937, Lannon became one of the founders of the National Maritime Union (NMU), representing merchant mariners on the East and Gulf coasts, and on the Great Lakes.

[1] During 1943, after the Tehran Conference, as Earl Browder considered reform of the CPUSA and Joseph Stalin dissolved the Comintern, Lannon advised local Maryland CP members to integrate into existing neighborhood clubs.

[8] During World War II, Lannon dispatched Corinne Shear Wood (1925-2009), at the time a shipyard worker in Baltimore, to Jacksonville, Florida to help seamen there produce their union newsletter.

Foster wrote in 1952: The final conviction of the eleven top Communist Party leaders was immediately followed by further arrests: on June 20, 1951, in New York —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, Pettis Perry, Israel Amter, Betty Gannett, Alexander Bittelman, Alexander Trachtenberg, Simon W. Gerson, V. J. Jerome, Albert Lannon, William Weinstone, Marion Bachrach, Louis Weinstock, George B. Charney, Isidore Begun, Jacob Mindel, and Arnold Johnson (four others were indicted with this group, —who did not appear in court—Fred Fine, Sid Stein, James Jackson and William Norman); on July 26th, in California-Al Richmond, P. M-Connelly, William Schneiderman, Rose Chernin, Dorothy R. Healey.

[15] During the late 1940s, his son later recalled: I lived with my parents and my kid sister Karen at 212 East 12th Street, a five-story walk-up across from a paper factory.

I remember Gerhardt as kind, always treating Karen and me to vanilla wafers until, facing prison, he secretly stowed away on a Polish ship to make his way to East Germany and become a government official.

Then came an old Russian, Boris Sklar, brother of a close comrade of Dad’s from Chicago...[15] In 1999, Lannon's son published a biography of his father, Second String Red.

[15] During the 1940s, Lannon and Pauline Rogers served as editor of West Side Record newspaper, published by the New York State Communist Party's 3rd and 5th Assembly Districts.