George Boomer

George Ellsworth Boomer was born November 29, 1862, in Lewiston, Maine, the son of workers in a cotton mill.

[1] Due to the family's poverty, Boomer himself soon went to work in the mills, taking a job which paid him 65 cents for each 12-hour day.

He eventually found a first job in the industry assisting with the production of the Greenback Labor Chronicle of Auburn, Maine.

[2] In the fall of 1882, Boomer moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he joined the newly organized International Typographical Union the following year.

[1] Boomer was smitten with the idea and he departed for the West Coast in the spring of 1898, bringing with him the knowledge of newspaper promotion which he had garnered in Girard under Wayland's employ.

[2] In December 1898 Boomer established a short-lived new socialist newspaper in Tacoma, the Spirit of '76, a publication supportive of the SLP.

[2] Boomer never joined the Social Democratic Party of America headed by radical trade unionist Eugene V. Debs and Victor L. Berger, instead forming his own socialist educational organization — a group which maintained an independent existence until after the formation of the Socialist Party of America in the summer of 1901.

[3] In 1903, Boomer, now married a second time to a woman 18 years his junior named Alice, headed east of the Cascades to Prosser, a small town in Central Washington.

The Boomers, baby daughter Mildred in tow, moved to Leavenworth, Washington, in 1910, where George worked as a printer.

[6] While soapboxing in the nearby town of Port Townsend, Boomer was attacked by a soldier from the nearby fort, an event which caused outrage in the Socialist community when the local judge refused to issue an arrest warrant for the attacker, instead declaring from the bench that the Socialists should all be thrown into the bay and that he would be glad to assist.