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Harold
(Hal) Verb, an occasional writer on historical subjects for Socialist
Action newspaper, passed away at the Veteran’s Hospital in San Francisco on Dec 4. Hal was a
committed revolutionary socialist and an activist in a number of social
causes, as well as being a “pioneer atheist” in the San Francisco area.
Hal
Verb was born in Philadelphia on April 14, 1931. Following the Cuban
Revolution, he became active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and
joined the Socialist Workers Party. He moved to San Francisco in 1962 and worked at
various jobs, including as a printer and independent bookseller, while
participating in the movement against the Vietnam War.
Hal
was an astute reader of American history. He was convinced from his
research into the John F. Kennedy assassination that Kennedy had been
murdered as part of a conspiracy, and that Lee Harvey Oswald had been
employed as a government agent. Hal frequently addressed that issue as
a public speaker and writer.
Hal
Verb became a supporter of Socialist Action after its formation in the
1980s. He frequently participated in events sponsored by the San
Francisco Socialist Action branch, though his deteriorating health made
such activity difficult in later years. He suffered from Marfan’s Syndrome, which leads to progressive
muscular degeneration.
Don
Havis, a member of the San Francisco
Atheists, writes that “Mr. Verb reported in his autobiography that he
became completely convinced that atheism was the conclusion that made
sense to him in 1948 or ’49, when he read about it in the so-called
‘Little Blue Books’ published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius.
(E.H.J. was a well-known atheist and socialist who published his inexpensive
and popular little booklets from 1919 to 1955.) He ordered some of
these books at that time, and then began collecting them in about 1950,
which he continued all of his life—particularly trying to find the rare
very early ones. Hal amassed one of the largest collections of ‘Little
Blue Books’ and ‘Big Blue Books’ in the United States. His collection of
thousands of these books is now housed in the Freethought
Library at the Center For Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y.”
Havis continues, “Hal Verb was a very active atheist and
socialist all of his life—very much dedicated to the social causes of
equality and liberty and rational thought. Let us hope that we in the
San Francisco Atheists, as well as other broader-based rational
organizations, will continue the sort of activism that Hal Verb
embodied.”
We
in Socialist Action likewise salute our comrade Hal. We are confident
that his work will live on with future generations.
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