Dear Reader: Growing up in Aberdeen’s working-class west end in the 1950s, the handsome houses on “The Hill” seemed a world away. Now and then, I rode my bike up Broadway to survey how the other half lived — more in awe than resentment. One of my pals at A.J. West School was less charitable. He called it “Rich Bitch Hill,” fairly spitting out the words as we splashed home through the mud puddles.

That’s all history now. The owl and automation devastated the Harbor’s forest products economy but democratized real estate.

Northwest historian Murray Morgan, a newspaper reporter here in the 1930s and early ’40s, called the local landed gentry “our sawdust aristocracy.” He remembered with glee how Aberdeen’s mill owners, managers and influential merchants were scandalized when Clara Weatherwax, one of their offspring, went Bohemian at Stanford in the Roaring Twenties and wrote an award-winning “proletarian” novel, a thinly disguised portrait of class warfare in her home town.

“They Tried to Cut It All,” Ed Van Syckle’s 1980 book on the history of logging and lumbering on the Harbor, is subtitled “Turbulent years of greed and greatness.” Of that era, no one in the subsequent 45 years has written so vividly or persuasively as Aaron Goings, who graduated from Grays Harbor College in 2000 and went on to earn a doctorate in history from Simon Fraser University.

Goings’ new book, “Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest,” explores Grays Harbor’s prominent role in the rise of organized labor in the lumber and maritime industry, and the Establishment’s frequently brutal, sometimes stealthy campaign of repression.

“The Red Coast,” Goings’ first book spotlighting Grays Harbor, was published six years ago. It included a chapter on Aberdeen’s shameful expulsion of its Chinese in 1890, part of a coast-wide reign of terror against the “heathen Celestials stealing white men’s jobs.” Goings also documented the celebrated Aberdeen “Free Speech Fight” of 1911-1912 when the irrepressible Industrial Workers of the World — the “Wobblies” — squared off with the city fathers. An axe-handle wielding army of 500 Chamber of Commerce stalwarts mobilized to rid the city of “anarchist vermin.” Earlier, George Emerson, Hoquiam’s pioneer lumberman, compared union activists to insects, saying it was necessary to “destroy … the caterpillars before they breed.”

Goings followed up with “The Port of Missing Men.” Published in 2020, it punctured the myth that Billy Gohl, the militant local agent for the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, circa 1910, was one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. Legend holds that Gohl dispatched his victims into the Wishkah River through a trapdoor in his office. Billy, no angel to be sure, was the Establishment’s living, breathing bogeyman. Goings argues they blamed and framed Gohl for the death of practically every hapless logger who ended up bobbing bloated in the bay after a log-raft mishap or stumble into the sawdust goo after a night on the town.

Good as those books are, “Red Harbor” now arrives as one of the most important sociological studies in Northwest history. Goings discovered, and fastidiously fact-checked, new information on the timber workers’ struggle for decent pay and safer working conditions during the first four decades of the 20th Century when Grays Harbor truly was the “Lumber Capital of the World.”

Theodore Roosevelt, the original Progressive, had railed against the “malefactors of great wealth” practicing capitalism without a conscience. The Bolshevik Revolution, during the first World War, terrified America’s captains of industry and ushered in the first “Red Scare,” with its breathtaking assaults on civil liberties. Then came the Ku Klux Klan’s second act. Fear and loathing metastasized across America. The Klan’s favorite congressman, Republican Albert Johnson, was from Hoquiam.

Particularly revealing is Goings’ research on the role the Harbor’s large, activist Finnish population played in the workers’ rights movement. “Finns were the most numerous, militant, and radical section of the Grays Harbor working class,” he writes. “It was within Grays Harbor’s Finn halls that radicals produced song, dance, poetry, journalism, literature, and unique forms of ‘hall’ radicalism.”

The Finns also embraced the Wobblies in more ways than one. IWW members are usually portrayed as irreverent boxcar hobos who rarely put down roots. Goings documents that many settled down here, marrying spunky Finnish girls. They landed sawmill and shake-rat jobs before emerging as talented labor organizers during the 1930s. Side by side with their guys, womenfolk of the movement joined the picket lines and protest marches, braving tear gas and truncheons.

In my 60 years as a journalist and historian, I have never met another researcher who set out, as Goings did, to comb Finnish-language newspapers and ephemera to illuminate Northwest labor history. A Fulbright Scholar, he twice lived in Finland to research and translate source materials relevant to the labor movement in Southwest Washington.

English majors like to warn that the more degrees you have, the worse writer you become. Not so for Aaron Goings. He managed to run the academic gauntlet to a Ph.D. without losing his gift for bright writing. “Red Harbor” is masterful history.

Goings, now teaching at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, will be at Hoquiam’s Polson Museum on Nov. 8. The lecture and book-signing start at 1 p.m. The museum will have on hand for sale a quantity of hard-back first-edition copies of “Red Harbor.” Museum members receive a 10% discount on the $29.95 cover price.

John C. Hughes was chief historian for the Office of the Secretary of State for 17 years after retiring as editor and publisher of The Daily World in 2008. This is the first installment in what we hope will become a regular column.