Edmond Kovacs, a lifelong socialist, died in Los Angeles January 15, 2010, at the age of 85. He was born in Austria in April 1924. His father was a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party and took part in the Schutzbund uprising against the protofascist Dolfuss regime in 1934, during which Edmond at the age of ten carried messages to the front lines. At sixteen his family emigrated to the United States. After high school he joined the army, where he enrolled in the famed 10th Mountain Division, ski troops that underwent lengthy training in the Rocky Mountains before being dispatched to Italy in the last days of the war, in early 1945. Edmond took part in the assault on Riva Ridge, a 1500 foot vertical assault on a heavily fortified German position in which the ski troops rapelled up ropes with pitons, an approach the Germans had considered to be impossible. His unit took 50 percent casualties.

Back in the United States he became a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Trained as a chemist, he worked in aircraft in Southern California until he was blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunt. At that point his father taught him watch-making and thereafter he made his living operating a small jewelry store. Under the party name Theodore Edwards for many years he hosted a weekly radio broadcast on KPFK radio and was a frequent speaker at party forums. A crack shot and an athlete, on several occasions over the years he defended himself from armed gunmen who tried to rob his store, once defending his mother who was in the store at the time. The last of these episodes took place in 1983 when three anti-Castro Cubans entered his store in Glendale. Two of them drew pistols while a third began to pull a shotgun from under his coat. Already facing two drawn guns Edmond grabbed his own gun and shot it out with the robbers, killing one, wounding another, and holding the man with the shotgun until police arrived. The SWP, then in the early stages of its planned break from the Fourth International, was looking for grounds to expel older members who were unlikely to agree to its still unstated new policy. Edmond was the first victim, being put on trial in Los Angeles and expelled from the party over a sudden sympathy for the robbers.

Afterward he was a founding member of Socialist Action, and later of Solidarity, in which he was still active at the time of his death. Until his late sixties he was a fine bicyclist, often going on hundred mile rides with other cyclists. His wife of some fifty years, Shirley Kovacs, died in late October, preceding Edmond by less than three months. Over the fall his breathing became extremely labored, which he attributed to asthma, from which he has suffered for many years. Finally, on January 12 he drove to his HMO, where he was hospitalized. An MRI revealed that he had a very large growth in his throat that was pressing on his airway. This proved to be a fast-growing cancer, which had also spread to his lungs. That night he lapsed into a coma from which he did not awaken. A small number of his friends gathered at his bedside this morning, and when his doctors confirmed that his situation was hopeless his breathing tube was withdrawn and he died. A fighter to the end, we saw that his heart continued to beat for ten minutes after he had stopped breathing. I first met Edmond in the fall of 1961 and was one of the few people who remained close to him in his last years. I will miss him greatly.