The Maine Sunday Telegram’s Dec. 6 edition promised “Light shines on mysterious past.” The front-page story detailed genealogical sleuthing into the parentage of a Depression-era infant dubbed “Billy Sunshine” back in 1937. It’s the kind of a “finding your roots” story that’s become a cottage industry these days as people are encouraged to dote on genetic material they share with people they never knew, and discover … meaning?

The hyperpersonal focus occurs as a pandemic rages amid a climate catastrophe, in a country where the working-class majority daily slips yet further into “precarity” while the upper fraction of the 1 percent ferociously enriches itself.

The Portland Press Herald’s front page from 1937 is featured twice in the Sunday piece. It shows a nurse holding baby “Billy Sunshine.” But that bit is sandwiched into the (perhaps?) bigger story that day headlined: “Police Here Ready With Tear Gas … .”

Yes, dear reader, the Lewiston-Auburn shoe strike was on, and the so-called “first responders” readying their chemical weapons to defend the interests of the 1 percent. A very old story. “Billy Sunshine,” now an old man, is shown peering at his image in that 1937 Press Herald front page and the attending headline.

Careful readers might wonder what some diligent sleuthing might unearth if our institutions focused more on finding the structural roots of the majority’s accelerating downward mobility – lurking in labor’s mysterious past – rather than chromosomal side shows. But there I go.

Dreaming again.

Richard Rhames
Biddeford

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