MARK MOSHER Community-minded Communist
He was blacklisted by the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) for his role in forming a rival union and for being a Communist. Twice he was refused entry into the United States (once when on a family holiday) because of his Communist membership. He ran in one provincial election and six federal elections, finishing last each time, never getting even 5 percent of the votes cast. When he and his wife Rosalyn faced a long court battle to retain custody of the two foster daughters they had raised as their own for almost ten years, a lawyer for the girls’ birth mother argued that his Communist beliefs would be a bad influence on the girls. Nevertheless, Port Alberni logger, longshoreman and farmer Mark Mosher gained the respect of his Alberni Valley community and was elected repeatedly to positions of leadership, including president of the longshoreman’s local and chairman of the school board.
Early Years
Mark Fulmore Mosher was born in Vancouver on January 17, 1916 to Thomas Trask Mosher and Bessie Mary Allen Fulmore. The family moved to the Alberni Valley two years later. Mosher’s father was a steam engineer in the Alberni Pacific Lumber (APL) mill, the largest sawmill on the Port Alberni waterfront. After Mark dropped out of high school after Grade 11, he worked briefly in a garage, then started work in the forest industry at age 19, first as a “whistle punk,” then as a fireman on the steam trains hauling logs out of the woods, and finally as a steam engineer. Sometimes, as the steam train crossed Cold Creek and looped through an area that had been logged in the 1920s, Mosher thought about living in that area.
There was little in Mosher’s background that predicted his involvement in union affairs and later the Communist Party.
“We were raised in a very conservative type of atmosphere,” Mosher recalled. “My dad was a strong supporter of the Conservative Party all his life, and mother was a Liberal, so I didn’t really get any left wing ideas from home...I don’t know too much about what Dad thought of the union. He wasn’t active, I don’t think.”
Mosher’s daughter Lindsay said her father’s Communist beliefs were a surprise because no one else in the family was a Communist, and many of his Nova Scotia ancestors were Baptists, Presbyterians or Methodists, including Mosher’s maternal great-grandfather, Baptist minister Rev. Jeremiah Bancroft of Annapolis.
Mosher was still in high school when he became aware of the Communists’ role in union activities. He and a friend came across a meeting in the community hall during a fisherman’s strike and the oratory impressed him.
“The lower hall was just chock full of people and it was the first meetin’ I’d ever been to,” he recalled. “I don’t know who the chairman was but there were a couple of guys there, I guess they were organizers, prob’ly Communists, and jeez, they were real fiery speakers...it must have made an impression, I guess.”
