ABSTRACT
Common Folk,” and “Woody Guthrie Was a Fighting Man.” Th e Washington Post article focused on his being “helpless for years. At the end only his eyelids moved.” Before his illness, however, “he had been a traveling man, roaming the country for more than 20 years. He wouldn’t give up the road. Even when fame and a chance for big money fi nally came, he avoided comfort like the plague and kept on wandering.” Most important, he “was a poet of the down-trodden, the poor and the lost.” Th e three major TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) immediately carried the story of his death. He was cremated, and his family threw the ashes into the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island.1
