Sasha Gates—Hubbell Gates

Sasha Gates and Hubbell Gates are a married couple whose early life together is marked by boisterous intimacy and shared political struggle, but whose later history carries the weight of Hubbell’s retreat from the convictions Sasha took seriously. Their relationship gives personal shape to the costs of postwar labor conflict: Sasha’s commitment to collective action and Hubbell’s wish to survive, provide for his family, and avoid the fate of political heroes increasingly pull in different directions.

Early Partnership

In the years after the war, Sasha and Hubbell set out for Hollywood together, with their young daughter Frenesi Gates between them in the car. Sasha drove while Hubbell played a Hawaiian ukulele and sang Down Among the Sheltering Palms. A shirt he had brought back from Pearl Harbor had become one of Frenesi’s easy-to-wash dresses. The domestic detail places their young family inside the unsettled optimism of the period: they were short of money and space, but their shared life still had the improvisational energy of a new beginning.

They lived in Wade and Dotty’s garage, part of a wider housing shortage that left people in Los Angeles living in trailers and even on the beach. Some evenings, Sasha and Hubbell drove the new Hollywood freeway simply for the pleasure of it. They passed a benzedrine inhaler back and forth and sang be-bop tunes, taking turns at imagined trumpet and saxophone parts. Their nights at the Finale Club in San Pedro brought them into a crowded musical world of low ceilings, sailor jackets, goatees, and straw hats, where they listened to Bird, Miles, and Dizzy. The memories show a couple sharing not only a home and child but a culture of music, movement, and possibility.

Shared Politics and Unequal Risks

Hubbell’s political commitment was once visible in his repeated participation in street protests. He faced fire hoses, tear gas, clubs, chains, beatings, and arrest. Sasha stayed up through the night to get him out. Her admiration for him was tied to this record of action; in the early period, she could be infatuated with him for having challenged authority at real personal risk. Their politics were therefore not simply a source of argument. They were also part of what first drew Sasha toward him and gave their partnership a shared purpose.

Hubbell tried to make a living while pursuing work as a lighting technician. He apprenticed when he could, repaired lamps and toasters, and took marginal jobs beyond the reach of the anti-communist machinery. Older electricians taught him practical ways to avoid fatal shocks, including working with one hand in his pocket so he would not ground himself. In Hubbell’s later account, Sasha turned that workaday posture into a political reproach: she thought he kept one hand in his pocket rather than putting it to work for the struggle. The same gesture thus carries two different meanings in their relationship—careful survival in his trade, and insufficient commitment in her political judgment.

Diverging Convictions

Hubbell understood Sasha to have lost respect for him. He did not claim that she told him so directly; instead, he read it in the gap between her political ideals and his own sense of limitation. He compared himself unfavorably with her father, Jess Traverse, a Wobbly who had taken a stand and been killed, and with the other heroes Sasha admired. Hubbell believed he was doing what was necessary for his wife and daughter, but he feared the consequences of taking freedom to its extreme. His account makes fear, rather than ignorance of the stakes, central to the distance between them.

That difference became concrete when Hubbell first reported to Warner Bros. studios and discovered that the job meant joining a group of strikebreakers recruited to defeat a IATSE strike. He was too slight for the role they wanted, but stayed long enough to understand what the assignment represented. Though he did not work there, he crossed the street and asked to join the picket line. A bolt thrown from a soundstage roof struck him on the head and knocked him out. The injury confirmed his choice to stand with the strikers, but the political struggle unfolding around him would draw Sasha more deeply into its details than it drew Hubbell.

The labor conflict sharpened the contrast. Technicians could regain work by leaving the CSU and joining the IA. Hubbell remained with the losing side for a time, still carrying the patriotism of his wartime years and assuming others saw the situation as plainly as he did. Yet he was politically unguarded: people could appear to agree with him while recording his opinions for investigative files. When work contacts stopped answering or he heard that his name had been raised before an inquiry, he was left wondering how the world had come to work this way. His candor and disillusionment did not amount to the durable political resolve Sasha expected.

Compromise and Retrospective

Over time, Hubbell’s own account becomes an admission of retreat. His old friend Wade, once beside him in card games and on picket lines, eventually switched sides, and Hubbell came to see that it mattered little who collected the deductions from a worker’s pay. The new Brute lighting equipment had also become something he felt he needed for his work. He eventually joined the IA and retired as soon as he could. He describes the studio worlds he illuminated—constructed interiors, exotic nightclubs, hotel rooms with neon signs, and rain-streaked train compartments—as shadows, valuable to their owners but still unreal. In his telling, he had exchanged his anger, his one precious asset, for those shadows.

This recollection is delivered much later, when Hubbell sits beside the exhausted Frenesi and tells her about the marriage. His account is not a record of Sasha’s perspective: it is a father’s effort to explain why her mother’s political ideals and his own choices had diverged. Its candor makes the relationship more complicated than a simple opposition between commitment and indifference. Hubbell did join a picket line and remained with the losing union for years; he also made choices that he later regarded as a surrender. Sasha’s greater immersion in political struggle, as Hubbell remembers it, becomes both a source of their early attraction and the measure by which he understood their later distance. The surviving account establishes estrangement in values and respect, but does not specify the couple’s final marital status.