Biography
Okey Odel was a rank-and-file leader of the onion-pickers’ strike near McGuffey, Hardin County, Ohio. John Marshall’s account in the Daily Worker of September 8, 1934, page 5, states that Odel was arrested and kept for ten days. After release he tried to rally the strikers again; a sheriff-organized vigilante mob then seized him from his house, severely beat him and left him by the roadside. Marshall describes finding him still in bed recovering during his August 31 visit. The ten-day statement concerns the earlier jail detention, not the subsequent kidnapping or an inferred sentence. No individual formal charge or exact custody endpoints are supplied. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n216-sep-08-1934-DW-LOC.pdf
Page 3’s August 27 McGuffey dispatch prints his name Okey O’Dell and reports that the onion-weeders’ leader returned after a mob kidnapped and beat him and expelled him from town. It says the mob took him from deputy sheriffs after an arrest, and alleges official cooperation including prosecutor Kaylor. His armed return and defiance document survival and continued strike organizing, not a new measured jail term or additional ten days. The previously documented ten-day jail stay remains distinct from vigilante custody. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n206-aug-28-1934-DW-LOC.pdf
Contemporary original newspaper source; individual page evidence retained in review audit 345. Exact individual custody dates and duration are not inferred from relative dates or collective claims.
Daily Worker, August 28, 1934; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
