Edison 'Pinky' Fisk 1915-2009

'Pinky' Fisk, a Passionate Protester and 'Gentle Soul,' Passes at 94

Kitsap County lost one of its “characters” last week.

Edison “Pinky” Fisk, who gained local notoriety in the late 1960s in Bremerton as an antiwar protester, died at 94 on Friday the 13th, a notion he would probably find humorous, said his wife, Kay Wilson Fisk.

Those who knew him spoke of his complexity. He had a gruff exterior and the “vocabulary of a longshoreman,” according to Wilson Fisk. He worked as an electrician and had no formal education beyond high school.

On the flip side was a man who played the flute, wrote poetry and, according to his friend Kitsap pianist Dr. Irene Bowling, was in his heart a “marshmallow.”

“It grieved him to the point of tears to see the injustices and cruelties of the world,” Bowling wrote in an e-mail.

Wilson Fisk characterized the contradiction between the impressions he could leave and relationships he made by saying, “He could rub people the wrong way, but he was really a gentle soul.”

By Steven Gardner for The Kitsap Sun - November 20, 2009

Read more:
http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2009/nov/20/pinky-a-passionate-protester-and-gentle-soul-at/

Day 1 of Year 94

Happy Birthday Pinky!

Pinky says he was born on "The Real Memorial Day," which used to fall on May 30 before the creation of the Three Day Weekend.

It is a fitting day for the birth of a man best known as standing for peace.

Obscene Thoughts and Poetry

This blog will feature works from An Anthology of Obscene Thoughts and Poetry by Edison "Pinky" Fisk. Pinky wrote most of these words during the turbulent war protest days of the 60s and 70s.

Those heady days were recalled by columnist Adele Ferguson:

   "Edison 'Pinky' Fisk was Bremerton's most famous anti-war activist in the 1960s and 1970s, once getting himself arrested for carrying a sign downtown that read 'The Grateful Society, Bombs, Bullets, Battleships and B--- ----."
(Adele Ferguson, "Pinky Fisk recalls King's old idea," Kitsap Sun, 1/18/1993)

A decade later, the home town paper recalled:

    "For sheer eccentricity, small protests outside the U.S. armed forces recruiting offices in downtown Bremerton during the 1960s and 1970s are fondly remembered now by those who took part.
   "The protests, started during the Vietnam War by a local character in his 50s named Edison 'Pinky' Fisk, usually only attracted four or five people at most.
   "But they were Kitsap County's first war protests, and Fisk was arrested three or four times -- once for disturbing the peace when he paraded around with a protest sign proclaiming, 'The Grateful Society: Bombs, Bullets, Battleships and Bull----.'
   "The sign was returned five years later when charges against him were dropped."
("Kitsap County no stranger to big rallies," Kitsap Sun, 3/2/2003)

(Apparently by 2003 it was considered safe to print "Bull----.")

What you have to understand is that Bremerton, home of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, has always been a Navy town. To stand outside the Shipyard in those days with an anti-war sign took the kind of courage most of us will never muster.

Interestingly, Pinky says that he had better conversations about the war with many of the Shipyard workers than he did with his "liberal" friends.

This blog is going live today as a tribute to Pinky's 94th birthday, which we celebrated Saturday. He called Thursday to announce, "In two days I'll be an old man." Old in years, perhaps, but ageless at heart. His eyes and legs may not work so well these days, but his wit isn't in bad shape.

- K (the "k" in PinKy)