From the Detroit "Free Press" of Thursday, 24 May, 2001:

Lester LaVerne Rowlson, who fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and remained a liberal and a social activist all his life, died of kidney failure Monday (May 21) at Danto Nursing Center in West Bloomfield (Michigan). He was 84 and lived in Detroit.

He was born poor on a farm in Coldwater, a child of the Great Depression."There were four brothers and three sisters, and one of his brothers starved to death," his son, Charles Rowlson, said Wednesday. "He couldn't stand up totally straight, because he had rickets, but he was an incredibly powerful man."

Mr. Rowlson never forgot those early years and fought all his life for the dispossessed. When he was 19, he went to fight in Spain on the side of the Republic. He drove a five-ton truck through the Spanish mountains to deliver men and goods to the front, and off duty, he was a drinking buddy of Ernest Hemingway's.

Of the 12 men in his group, eight were killed, three were wounded in battle, and Mr. Rowlson was injured when a damaged building collapsed on him.

The war ended in 1939, but soon he was back in uniform, this time in the Navy, where he was a Seabee.

When he came home, he had a hard time getting a job because he had been put on the FBI's Red List for having served in Spain and for briefly being a Communist.

So he and a brother founded the Concrete Wall Co. in Detroit, which built homes.

"He hired predominately minorities and political dissidents," his son said. "He was the first man in Detroit to put a black man in charge of white men on a construction crew and the first to put an American Indian in charge. He thought a man was a man, and if they had the ability, they were given a promotion."

One of the Scottsboro Boys -- nine young black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama -- worked for him.

He retired 20 years ago, and the company folded soon afterward. He was a 50-year member of Carpenters Local 687.

He was buried in Commerce Memorial Cemetery in Commerce Township, with a pin he picked up at a Lincoln Brigade reunion. It says "No passaran."