Harlan Baker will appear as Jimmy Higgins in a one man show he has written,”Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement”, May 30th at the Meg Perry Center in Portland, Maine. Baker is a teacher, an actor, a former member of the Maine legislature, a union activist, and democratic socialist leader. “Jimmy Higgins” has long stood for the name of the rank-and-file union and socialist activist.

On the eve of the 1960 president race a rank and file union activist is being interviewed by a college student about his life. Higgins recounts his days as a newspaper boy in Sandusky Ohio during the first World War, his meeting with Eugene Debs and other radicals opposed to American participation in the First World War, his experiences in Robert LaFollette Sr. run for president in 1924 and his experience covering the union organizing drives of tenant farmers and auto workers in the 1930s.