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(Except for supporting Mao Zedong rather than Jack Barnes, life in Progressive Labor in the 1960s sounds pretty much like life in the SWP. From John Levin and Earl Silbar’s “You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance".)
My sister loved to sell Challenge and was actually good at it. She should have been the Minister of Challenge Sales for the Southwest. She, I, and her best friend, Dick Johnson, used to drive down to San Antonio to sell Challenge to people on the streets around the Alamo. We especially targeted and tried to sell the paper to personnel from the military bases around town. PL thought that the military should be organized. No one was more antiwar than the people who had served in Vietnam. They clearly understood anti-imperialism. I can't remember specific conversations, but many of them were against the war. Dick and I didn't have the skills that Lynn had in selling Challenge. Sometimes we'd head off to our assigned corners and dump most of the copies in trash can and go have coffee until time to meet up with Lynn. Once she found boxes of unsold Challenges under my bed and was disappointed that Dick and I weren't really selling them on campus. Until her death, she chided me for it on the one hand and apologized on the other for forcing Dick and me to try to sell them.
My sister moved to Houston and worked with PL under the leadership of Stevie Eisenberg. The two of them sat me down for a meeting when I was visiting and asked me to donate some of the insurance money from my husband's death on active duty in Vietnam to PL. I was using the money to buy property for our parents in the Texas Hill Country, but they wore down my objections and I gave them $400. I wrote an article for Challenge about the coordinated efforts of workers from all over the state to help restore services in Corpus Christi after Hurricane Celia. It was edited beyond recognition to reflect what they called "revolutionary enthusiasm." It was a pretty straightforward article about the numbers of IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), CWA (Communication Workers of America), and Plumbers union workers who came from other parts of Texas and volunteered time to help restore services in the aftermath. I said it was a show of working-class solidarity with the people of the city. The edited version inflated the numbers for no explainable reason.
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