Knitting

A witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, meeting in Seattle last week, charged that Eugene V. Dennett was a member of the Communist Party until he was expelled in 1947 as a Trotskyite. The same year, Dennett told reporters, he took up knitting on a dare from his wife.

When Steelworker Dennett took the witness stand, he picked up his needles and, with tight-lipped concentration, knitted at a purple and gold stole. He said that he is not now a Communist Party member, declined, under the Fifth Amendment, to say if he had ever been a Communist, and tugged at the ball of yarn in his pocket.

For the next three days, Dennett stuck to his knitting as he sat through the hearings. Then he changed his mind, went back on the witness stand and, without dropping a stitch, admitted that he had indeed been a Communist.

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