Terry Pettus

[3] Pettus worked briefly as a reporter in Minneapolis and in Grand Forks, North Dakota, before moving to Seattle with his wife Berta in 1927.

By the end of the year, this had led to the first successful strike to gain union recognition for workers at a Hearst newspaper (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

[4] On January 27, 1948, Pettus disrupted the first witness of Canwell Committee hearings into Communist infiltration in the State of Washington.

When Budenz stated "The New World is absolutely controlled by the political committee of the Communist Party," Terry Pettus finally made it onto the hearing's transcript, stating, "That is a lie, as the editor of that paper--" Budenz also said that Jack Stachel had told him about Pettus, editor and comrade.

[6] Blacklisted in the McCarthy Era at the start of the Cold War, Pettus became editor of the People's World, a newspaper associated with the CPUSA.

Pettus had originally learned the word in Terre Haute, where it meant "a party that just sort of happens" without prior planning and brought it to Seattle.