c
v. I
;
University of California Berkeley
X
r
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Volume I
Louis Goldblatt
WORKING CLASS LEADER IN THE ILWU, 1935-1977
in two volumes
With an Introduction by
Clark Kerr
An Interview Conducted by
Estolv Ethan Ward
in 1978, 1979
All uses of this manuscript are covered by
a legal agreement between the Regents of the
University of California and Louis Goldblatt
dated December 4, 1979. The manuscript is
thereby made available for research purposes.
According to the agreement, the manuscript is
closed to all users until January 1, 1983,
except with the written permission of Louis
Goldblatt. All literary rights to publish are
reserved to Louis Goldblatt until January 1,
1990. No part of the manuscript may be quoted
for publication without the written permission
of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the
University of California at Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publi
cation should be addressed to the Regional
Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should
include identification of the specific passages
to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages,
and identification of the user. The legal agree
ment with Louis Goldblatt requires that he be
notified of the request and allowed thirty days
in which to respond.
Copy No .
Copyright (c) 1980 by the Regents of the University of California
LOUIS GOLDBLATT
1977
TABLE OF CONTENTS Louis Goldblatt
VOLUME I
INTRODUCTION by Clark Kerr i
INTERVIEW HISTORY iv
I FAMILY BACKGROUND AND CHILDHOOD 1
The Lithuanian Freethinkers 1
Walking Away From the Czar 4
Strikes and "Cossacks" 5
About Religion 6
A Quick Jump to Hollywood
Back to the Bronx
The Other Children 10
The Division of Labor 11
Women and Orthodoxy 12
The Family Scene 13
Friends and Enemies 20
Anti-Semitism 24
Musical Beginnings 26
The Work Ethic 37
Leftwing Politics 43
II ON TO CALIFORNIA 54
Education, Work, Political Action 54
Joining the Young Communists 69
Matrimony 78
Life in Berkeley 82
Law and Justice 92
The Great 1934 Strike 99
The Communist Candidacy 106
The Electrifying Speaker 120
The Dangers of Fascism 121
III THE MARCH INLAND 127
The Warehouse Organizing Drive 127
The 1936 Strike 142
The Move to the CIO
The Teamster Blockade 170
IV TROUBLES AND TURBULENCE 183
Strikes, Fights and Progress 183
The Hot Boxcar 186
The Master Contract 188
Problems About War-like Japan 197
The Crockett Struggle 202
More CIO Activity 219
The Pardoning of Tom Mooney 225
Disturbing War Rumbles 234
Labor Spies 237
Union Leadership vs. Leftwing Politics 242
A Lively Social Life 248
V EFFECTS OF THE WAR 265
First Mention of Hawaii 265
More About the California CIO 269
Concentration Camps for Japanese 281
The Power of Jewish Tradition 290
VI THE HAWAIIAN DRAMA OPENS 296
Aftermath of the Tolan Hearing 296
Studying Hawaii 298
Feudal Power - The Big Five 303
Discovery of the Natural Leader 308
A Boat-Ride to the Islands 310
Grass Roots Political Action 318
How to Quell Racial Friction 319
The Garbage Can Agreement 323
VII MEANWHILE ON THE MAINLAND 327
The Party Connection Dissolves 327
Work on the War Labor Board 328
VIII SCARING THE BIG FIVE 344
A Smashing Political Victory 344
Stories About a Wobbly 352
The Pre-Strike Legal Victory 357
IX A TEST OF UNION STRENGTH 366
Striking on the Big Five's Money 366
The Passion for Land 378
Smashing Racial Discrimination 384
The Tough Hotelman 393
That Awful Brown Rice 402
X FINANCIAL LEGERDEMAIN 409
Staving Off a Million Dollar Judgment 409
Waving Farewell to the Party 419
XI END OF WARTIME CONTROLS 432
"Free Enterprise" Again 432
The Committee for Maritime Unity 443
A Question of Sleep 446
Effects of the Cold War 455
"Hawaii for the Hawaiians" 457
Showdown! 464
XII THE "NEW LOOK" 476
Employers Turn the Other Cheek 476
Kindness to Union Men 486
Family Interlude 489
A Horrendous Period 499
XIII A STORY ALL BY ITSELF 504
The Great Longshore Strike in Hawaii 504
A Long, Difficult Strike 516
The "Dear Joe" Stories 519
The "Broom Brigade" 522
Fun on An Airplane 527
Strike-Breaking Attempts 530
The Ranks Hold Solid ' 543
A Rift in the Leadership? 548
XIV ZERO SPELLS SUCCESS 556
"No Stoop, No Squat, No Squint" 556
A Heave-Ho to the "Final Offer" 557
Dangers Abroad 562
Talking with Mr. Kruschchev 576
The International Blacklist 585
Blighty Lets Down the Bars 589
VOLUME II
XV PERILS OF PARALLELISM 596
More About Expulsion from the CIO 596
XVI THE "CONSPIRACY" CASE 611
And Other Headaches 611
More Trouble in Hawaii 623
Other Legal Harassment 627
The Man Who Turned 643
XVI I A SWEET REVENGE 654
The Lanai Strike 654
Oh! Those Early Fifties! 673
Fighting at the Dalles 678
Seven Key Words 680
XVIII A PACE-SETTING PENSION PLAN 685
One Hundred Bucks a Month 685
Death of Gene Paton 692
Reason Instead of Force 694
The Velde Committee 713
The Witness Lies 721
Relations with the ILA 726
The Shady Side of the Street 733
The Eastland Committee 736
The McClellan Committee 738
The Kennedy Brothers 750
XIX IMPROVING RELATIONS WITH THE TEAMSTERS 757
An Analysis of Jimmy. Hoffa 757
An Interesting Phone Call 764
XX NEW MAN IN THE PICTURE 781
A Very Smooth Operator 781
An Amazing Change 784
Mat son Gets the Brush-Off 785
Pensions, Dental Plan, Housing 787
How To Save a Million Dollars 793
"Conformance and Performance" 801
XXI THE MECHANIZATION PROGRAM 807
Velvet Glove on Steel Hand 807
Yarns of the Docks 811
Moans and Groans 814
An Evening with Chaplin 817
Comparisons with the ILA 824
The Guaranteed Annual Wage 825
What Are "Conditions"? 829
XXII END OF AN ERA 843
Conventional Operations Disappear 843
The Shorter Work Week 848
One Crucial Word 855
XXIII THAT CHARMING SCOUNDREL
A Bigger Share of the Pie
Fantastic Economic Power
Men's Opinions of Each Other
XXIV CLASHING PERSONALITIES
Changes in the Union Membership
The 1958 Sugar Strike
Whispers vs. Pacts
XXV COOPERATION WITH THE TEAMSTERS
Formation of the ILWU-Teamsters
Joint Council
Dealing with Jimmy Hoffa
Men with Brass Balls
Teamsters v. Farm Workers
How Kennedy Beat Nixon
XXVI BRIDGES-ILA v. GOLDBLATT
Sharp Disputes Among the Leadership
Ideologies?
Back to the Womb?
Bridges Makes a Switch
XXVII A MINUET WITH THE IBT
Definite Affiliation Negotiations
Problems with the ILWU Constitution
Problems with the IBT Constitution
How Not to Conduct a Strike
XXVIII EVENTS OF THE SIXTIES
An Historical Period
Lessened ILWU Activity
Tackling High Medical Costs
The Free Speech Movement
Protests v. the Vietnam War
Supporting the Farm V/orkers
XXIX THE SAN FRANCISCO NEWSPAPER STRIKE
Rank and File Discontent
Helping in the Printers' Strike
An Assist in the Guild Strike
Sixteen Unions Involved
Getting the Crafts Together
A Plan That Succeeded
862
862
866
870
877
877
880
886
893
893
896
898
909
914
918
918
922
927
931
934
934
936
937
939
943
943
944
949
952
955
961
971
971
973
978
979
982
986
XXX MORE ABOUT THE SIXTIES
A Very Tough. Clash
Cooperation Works Well
A Sociological Lesson
Health Plan Alternatives
Hoffa Goes to Jail
XXXI INTERNAL POLITICKING
The Fight for Vice-President
The Membership Questionnaire
Total Polarization
The Hawaii Hotel Negotiations
XXXII THE LONGSHORE STRIKE OF 1971
Bridges Snubs the Alliance for
Labor Action
Bridges Renews ILA Affiliation Plea
Another Try at the Teamsters
XXXIII VIETNAM AND OTHER PROBLEMS
The Full -Page Ad
More Internal Friction
The 1974 Sugar Strike
XXXIV THE $28,000,000 POKER GAME
But First, Open Heart Surgery
An Important Golf Game
The Ante Goes Up
Bridges Rocks the Boat
The Political Economics of Sugar
Corn Sweeter Than Sugar?
Goldblatt's Swan Song on Sugar
This Consultant Business
XXXV ISRAEL AND THE ARABS
The Israeli Groupings
Peace or Land?
Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic vs. Arab
Angry Discussions
XXXVI THE LAST WAREHOUSE PROBLEM
New Man Talks Tough
A Short, Sweet Strike
992
992
993
997
1000
1001
1003
1003
1008
1012
1020
1027
1027
1033
1037
1038
1038
1043
1045
1051
1051
1056
1059
1061
1067
1073
1075
1079
1085
1085
1089
1093
1098
1101
1101
1104
XXXVII THAT DELEGATION TO CHINA
The First Inquiries
Wives - A Strange Question
Finally, The Trip to China
No Inflation
Safe Streets
Industry Has Far To Go
Target Date Is A. D. 2000
Revolutionary Problems
Role of the Unions
Use of Incentives
No Grievance Procedure
XXXVIII THE AGE LIMIT PLOY
The 65-Year Rule
Goldblatt Calls the Turn
The Office Boss
XXXIX THE FOND FAREWELLS
The Dinner for Harry
The Affair for Lou
The Daughters
Family Doings
Ruminations
Hope for the World
1106
1106
1108
1111
1113
1113
1114
1115
1115
1117
1118
1120
1122
1122
1126
1130
1138
1138
1141
1143
1146
1154
1161
TAPE GUIDE TO BOTH VOLUMES
INDEX TO BOTH VOLUMES
1166
1171
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Regional Oral History Office gratefully
acknowledges the help of the following persons
in producing this manuscript:
First and foremost, Estolv and Angela Ward
who doggedly refused to accept no for an answer
after attempts to raise foundation funding for
an ILWU-Goldblatt interview failed, and who went
ahead anyhow as volunteers, following Regional
Oral History Office methods and format, to research,
interview, and transcribe Louis Goldblatt's oral
history.
Louis Goldblatt, who devoted countless hours
recalling and recounting his adventures on the
labor front, and then spent countless more hours
with Estolv Ward reviewing the transcript for
accuracy.
Clark Kerr, labor mediator and professor of
industrial relations, who read the transcript and
wrote the insightful introduction.
Andrea Nakagawa, administrative assistant of
The Bancroft Library, who pinched and scraped out
final typing funds from budgets that were bare.
David King, Hugh Bryson, Sidney Burkett, and
Ruby Silverstone, close friends of Louis Goldblatt
who came forward with manuscript completion funds.
In behalf of all the future readers of this
oral history, we thank you.
Willa Baum
Department Head
Regional Oral History Office
November 1980
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
INTRODUCTION
I saw Lou Goldblatt in action the first time I ever
visited the Berkeley campus. I met a friend in the coffee
shop at I House. We had just started to talk when a person
came through, with a small group behind him, shouting about
a rally to be held outside Sather Gate. My friend said he
was Lou Goldblatt, a campus radical, organizing a protest
against some policy of the university, then under the
presidency of Robert Gordon Sproul. The phrase I remember
was something about "storming the walls" of the University,
as though it were the Bastille.
This was the fall of 1932. I was at Stanford after
having graduated from Swarthmore. Lou had just come up
from UCLA. My interests were in the peace movement,
reflecting four years at Swarthmore and three summers as
a "peace caravaner" with the American Friends Service
Committee. Lou came out of the political hotbed of the
famous "alcoves" at City College of New York before UCLA
and was already a member of the Communist Party (from whioh
he drifted away a decade-and-a-half later) and says in
these memoirs that Communists were then a "very active
group at Gal." We were both, however, student political
activists, however far apart, and there were few of them
in those days. That Goldblatt incident was both my first
impression of Berkeley and my first viewing of a left-wing
political rally. Incidentally, Lou roamed around Sather
Gate once again in 1964 at the time of the PSM protests;
and he thought it all "wonderful." This was a view I did
not share. I thought it was, in many ways, an unnecessary
tragedy including creating a political base for the
rise of Ronald Reagan.
I saw Lou on many occasions thereafter beginning with
World War II as wage stabilization director of the War
Labor Board on the West Coast, and later as Vice-Chairman
of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska region, as Impartial
Chairman between the ILWU and the Waterfront Employers
Association, as arbitrator in Hawaii, as Vice-Chairman of
the National Wage Stabilization Board. And, of course,
with my field of teaching being industrial relations, I
heard or read a great deal about him. So I have known a
ii
great many of the people he talks about, been familiar with
almost all of the situations he speaks about, and
participated in a few of these situations at first hand.
The last situation was an effort he made to propose a
solution to the PSM controversy in 1964; an effort which
I rejected.
This background allows me to say what a frank account
Lou gives of a most fascinating life. History is not re
written, as it so often is. His account rings true from
start to finish. There is no effort at self- justification,
at retroactive revision of the record; just a straight-out
story of what happened and how it looked to Lou when it
happened. So many oral histories are cleaned-up accounts
of what came to look like antiseptic lives. This one is
not.
In reading it I was struck by a number of things,
including these few:
The goodwill toward and respect for several of
the employer representatives with whom he dealt.
His sadness over the break with Harry Bridges.
I once asked Harry in the 1970s about Lou and
his only reply was "That Maoist."
The tremendous change from class warfare on the
Waterfront in the 1930s and 1940s to the climate
of peaceful coexistence today; and from the
violent enmity between the ILWU and the Teamsters
to cooperation with Jimmy Hoffa.
The development of stable labor-management relations
in Hawaii out of the most nearly semi-feudal con
ditions that ever existed on U. S. territory
a transformation of historic proportions.
Lou lived through some great historic events,
including the March Inland beginning in 1935, the organizing
period of the CIO, the unionization of plantation workers
on the Hawaiian Islands, the rise and fall of influence of
the Communist Party and the Old Left in the United States;
and he made visits to Russia, Israel and China. He speaks
of all this with candor and in a most interesting way. One
need not agree with his political philosophy - and I never
iii
have - to recognize here a most valuable and even essential
contribution to the history of half a century of great
social change; and to recognize also that Harry Bridges and
Lou Goldblatt, together and apart, built an honest,
democratic, effective trade union that had great impacts
on the West Coast and Hawaii. Lou G-oldblatt walks through
these pages as he has through life as a man of the Left,
as an energetic participant in history, as a bright ob
server of the passing scene, as a realist, as a participant
in many battles but who could also stand outside of them
and above them, and as a person of more good will and good
humor than he appeared to be to some who knew him along the
way. He ends these many journeys, as he began them, with
hope.
Clark Kerr
President of the University,
Emeritus
21 October 1980
University of California
Berkeley, California
iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY
There is a rare thing about Louis Goldblatt that I
hope has been captured in this oral history. He has defied
the cynical adage: "He who does not believe in socialism
at age 20 has no heart; he who still believes in socialism
at age 40 has no head."
Although now far from the days when he had glib
revolutionary answers for the world's problems, at age 70
Lou Goldblatt still entertains the passionate and abiding
belief that the more unified all workers become, the better
the populace of this planet will fare. In one word, UNIONS.
I share that belief, and on this basis Lou and I have
been friends and occasional fellow workers in the union
vineyard since the days of the Great Depression.
Thus it follows that in 1977, after Lou's retirement
as secretary-treasurer of the International Longshoremen's
and Warehousemen's Union, a job he had held with honor and
distinction for 34 years, I knew he was in deep trouble.
He was almost literally a beached whale. By a decision
in which Lou himself was the final determinant, requiring
all the union's top leadership to step out as the best
solution to a prolonged internecine struggle, he found him
self with nothing to do. And Goldblatt fits the definition
of a "workaholic" to perfection. More important, his
union could still have used his highly valued services.
There were many fields of endeavor in which his experience,
knowledge, and fertile mind could still have been of use.
He was aware of this and so were thousands of union men
and women whose lives he had helped to make more livable.
Psychologically, he was a wounded man.
I and many others knew of his trouble. And I happen
ed to know that the Bancroft Library, that segment of the
University of California at Berkeley that has done so much
to preserve the history of the American West, had sought
his oral history. However, there was a financial problem
involved which displeased Goldblatt.
"I'll be damned if I'll have people go tin-cupping
around among my friends so I can blow my own horn," was his
dictum.
The project lay dead in the water until my wife and
I conceived the idea of taking his oral history on a
volunteer basis. My wife, Angela, is a former union or
ganizer who has given her own oral history to the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the California Historical Society,
and who respects the value of such undertakings. She also
happens to be an excellent typist and transcriber. We
agreed that if I could persuade Lou Goldblatt to submit to
the necessary interviews, she would transcribe the tapes.
At a Christmas Eve party in 1977 at the home of Bill
and Eva Maas in San Francisco I approached Lou and put my
question. His answer was neither enthusiastic nor scornful,
not yes and not no. I did not press the point, but a few
moments later I drew aside his wife, Terry, and told her
what Angela and I had in mind. I said that .as well as of
fering a significant contribution to American labor history,
it would be an excellent catharsis for Lou to talk it all
out; spill his grief and pride on his metaphorical beard.
Terry was instantly excited, hopeful. She was very worried
about Lou.
Nothing happened. After a couple of weeks I drew up
a list of questions I proposed to ask, based on personal
knowledge of some of his more exciting exploits over the
years, and mailed it to Lou at his home in Mill Valley.
That brought a phone call, an agreement for me to come
visit him "so we can kick the gong around."
Lou had two objections to my list of questions. He
did not want to talk about the Communist party or in detail
about Harry Bridges, his one-time friend and partner in
unionism who had turned against him. I understood his
reasons: on Communism he had no fear for himself, only
concern for others. He had never hidden his past connec
tion with Communism. It was friends and fellow workers he
had in mind. He did not intend to embarrass or damage
anyone, no, sir! On Bridges, Lou's instinct was to protect
and advance the cause of his union, and he could not see
how washing the union's dirty linen in public would serve
any good purpose.
I argued that he could discuss his own role as a
practicing radical without damaging anyone else; also that
as far as his situation with Bridges was concerned, word of
VI
it already had been bandied about in the press and many of
the details were known to thousands of union members. So
why be secretive? While he would not admit a change of
mind on these points, we did agree to begin taping.
The interviews took place on a more or less weekly
basis for the entire year of 1978, less a month during
which Lou and Terry took a long delayed trip to China. The
taping was done in the G-oldblatt kitchen, a large and
comfortable multi-purpose room with the telephone at hand
and a pleasant overlook of a wooded valley and the slopes
of Mt. Tamalpais. Not all of the sessions produced tapes.
Sometimes we would spend the entire morning with the tape
recorder set aside, discussing what should and should not
be said about some subject Lou considered sensitive.
In this regard, Lou surprised me. This man with guts
of steel, who had faced cops and guns and angry men with
baseball bats, who had stiffed process servers and con
gressional redbaiters and injunctions and lawyers trying
to get big money from his union, is a softy at core. He
visibly dreaded talking about some of the things I urged
him to discuss; he suffered while uttering the words. Even
long after his story was taped, I saw tears come to his
eyes on re-reading some of the passages in the transcript.
To him, exposure of the nest of nastiness his union head
quarters had become in the seventies was almost like
turning the knife in his own wounds. Things had been said
and done for which he never will be able to find a reason.
He still is puzzled, but he no longer mourns.
There was a witness to all the tapings an African
parrot named Yarrow. She delighted in supplying sound
effects for my recorder; sometimes she enlivened human
discourse with shrieks and whistles, demands for attention
which Lou pacified by going to her cage and giving her an
affectionate tweak of the beak. At other times she got
down on the bottom of her cage, under the newspaper floor
ing, where she rustled and bustled and scratched and
scrabbled, making sounds that came through on tape like
being next door to a raging forest fire. Lou's explanation
for her actions is duly recorded on the tape and in the
script.
Terry usually managed to be absent during the tapings,
but frequently came in toward the end of the session, to
make a disturbance something like Yarrow's newspaper
Vll
rattling by unwrapping parcels to put food in the refriger
ator. Fortunately I was able to explain to Terry with
much better effect than to Yarrow what happens to paper
rattling when it has been boosted electronically several
decibels. Occasionally we spent a morning when the
telephone rang very little. Mostly, however, we just had
to put up with many interruptions of this nature; the
daughters calling, or maybe the brother or sister; many
friends, union officials, long distance calls. Eventually,
however, we got the job done.
Then came the editing. Lou loves to tell stories, and
he has hundreds of them maybe thousands. If a story is
good he likes to tell it over and over again, and it was
physically almost impossible to stop his repetitions. Also
I found it unwise to stop him, for quite often the repeti
tion developed a new and interesting phase of the subject
under discussion. In order to bring the transcript under
some semblance of control, I have had to edit out from ten
to twenty per cent of the verbiage.
Furthermore, there were instances where Lou had after
thoughts about events such as his trip to the Soviet Union
and his 1967 visit to Israel. These are inserted according
to context, not according to the sequence in which the
taping actually took place. Also, his version of the China
trip is taken at his request from a report he wrote, and
does not appear on the tapes.
Lou dropped hundreds of names which were either
incomplete or had to be verified. Dates had to be checked,
quirks of memory ironed out; Lou himself did much of the
checking. In this work, in addition to the monumental
task performed by Angela, I gained assistance from quite
a few other sources. The most prominent of these was
Carol Schwartz, the librarian at ILWU headquarters in San
Francisco. Some of my questions she answered almost off
hand. Others took her hours of research. She is to be
thanked for whatever claims to accuracy the completed
script might offer. Others who helped include Saburu
Fujisaki, education and membership service director, Local
142, Hawaii, and Ah Quon McElrath of that local's staff;
the army historian at the San Francisco Presidio; the
Japanese-American League of San Francisco and the Jewish
Community Library of BJE (Bureau of Jewish Education),
whose staffs gave valued assistance.
viii
Also I would like to express gratitude for the en
thusiastic support, encouragement and guidance given
during the post-interview phase of the work by Dr. James
Hart, director of the Bancroft Library, and several members
of his staff; these include Andrea Nakagawa, Willa K. Baum,
head of the Regional Oral History Office, and her assistant,
Judy Johnson.
In conclusion, I would like to give a quote from
Louis G-oldblatt that does not appear in the script. At
his seventieth birthday party recently, he made a short
speech in which his final words were to propose a toast
"to the survivors who haven't sold out."
Estolv Ethan Ward
Interviewer-Editor
15 October 1980
Berkeley, California
VOLUME I
I FAMILY BACKGROUND AND CHILDHOOD
(Interview 1: 15 February, 1978)##
The Lithuanian Jewish Freethinkers
Ward: The interview is taking place at the Goldblatt home
in Mill Valley. Lou, since we have known each other
for over forty years, there is no point in my calling
you "Mr. Goldblatt." So, let's begin - first of all,
the best thing to do is to ask you when you were
born and where.
LG: I was born on June 5 1910 in the Bronx, New York
City. I think the address was 1244 Washington
Avenue. That's fairly close to the lower part of
the Bronx; Washington was one block west of Third
Avenue where the "L" used to run. The family moved
shortly after I was born to 1376 on the same street,
a block up. There I do recall spending a lot of my
early years; almost up to the time I went to high
school -
Ward: In the Bronx?
LG: In the Bronx - because -
##This symbol indicates that a tape or a segment of
a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the
tapes see page 1166.
Ward: Where did I get the idea of Chicago?
LG: Only because there's a Goldblatt Department store
to which I am not related.
Ward: I see - okay, we're back in the Bronx -
LG: The school I went to is Public School 2. In the
course of discussion with someone some years ago
when I visited New York this person insisted that
P,S. 2 was no more - that the buildings had been
condemned. I was curious, got a car or a cab, drove
up to that section of the Bronx. Part of it had been
torn down and there was some low-cost public housing.
Ehe balance of it was extremely run down - they were
primarily tenement houses; but there was the public
school too. You had to look carefully - you could
barely distinguish it because of the dirt. The
whole thing was all blackened.
Ward: How many years after your boyhood was this?
LG: Oh, it was a long time afterwards - it must have been
about 15 years ago, 16 years ago.
Ward:. I see, well, then - in your boyhood, it was not as
dilapidated a neighborhood?
LG: No. When our family first moved there it was a
generally mixed neighborhood.
Ward: Mixed in what sense? What kind of people, ethnically?
LG: Ethnically, I would say there were a good many
Germans living there, garden variety Americans of
various kinds; a lot of non-immigrants. I think
that my family must have been one of the early
immigrants who moved into that area; my father and
mother came to this country, she somewhat ahead of
him, about 1904 or thereabouts; my father got here
about 1905 or the end of 1904 -
Ward: Where did they come from?
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward
LG:
Came from the same town in Lithuania - a town called
Kaunas .
How do you spell that?
It's spelled KAUNAS; not among the Jews, though
and I'm not sure among the Lithuanians either,
pronounce it Kovna.
Kovna?
They
Just as you would spell KOVNA- Kovna. At one
time it might have been the capital of Lithuania.
I understand that Vilnius is now the capitol. I
recall my folks talking about Vilna, apparently an
adjacent town to Kovna; they're sister cities across
a small stream, or something. They "both came from
there.
Did they know each other before they came to this
country?
They did. They were both active in the Socialist
Bund. Mind, this is the early 1900s. And they were
both part of the general wave of migration that had
taken place in the 1800s and the early 1900s.
Initially they settled, like most immigrants did,
among their friends, people they knew. That was on
the East side and -
Let's go back just a moment, if you don't mind; the
Socialist Bund, was there any connection with the
1905 revolution or rebellion there?
I don't believe so, - I think both of them came
before the 1905 uprising.
I'm not sure that the 1905 uprising had that much
of an impact on Lithuania, although it was a part of
Russia at the time. I assume that the basic language
was Russian, not Lithuanian, which was quite a
different language. I gathered that they had both
languages - Lithuanian and Russian. My mother spoke
some Russian, but only fair. My dad spoke a very
good Russian, in fact held on to it all his life.
LG: As to whether the 1905 uprising penetrated that
deeply, I'm not sure. In her case, migration was
not all that difficult, inasmuch as from all I could
gather there were no great impediments. There were
Jews moving out of that section of the world.
Whether she went directly from Lithuania or the way
many of them did from Poland, I'm not sure.
In my father's case it was quite a different
scene. There was compulsory conscription into the
Czar's army; in the event that a boy from a family
was called up and failed to report, then the family
itself could be penalized in various ways; their
material possessions taken away, or others in the
family conscripted. So he went into the army.
Walking Away From The Czar
LG: He was stationed in the Caucasus and apparently
got to be a pretty good horseman. To his dying day,
he would never eat mutton again, or lamb, because
that was their basic diet down there. He got to
hate it so badly that he would never touch it. Terry*
once served him some lamb which she thought was
pretty thoroughly disguised and he took one bite and
said, "That's it."
Anyway, apparently they were both quite active in
the Socialist Bund. I gathered he kept in touch with
the Bund while he was in the army, and I was told
that it was his job as a member of the army to fin
ally try to get guard duty.
Apparently, there were some political prisoners
being held in the Caucasus. He finally managed to
get this guard duty, and at this point arrangements
were made for my father and the prisoner he was
guarding to leave together: they left from the port
of Batum which is on the Black Sea -
Ward: BATUM?
*Wife of Louis Goldblatt
LG: That's right. That's the port that would "be
directly across that peninsula "between the Caspian
Sea and the Black Sea. It might "be one of the first
oil pipe lines ever built, because they had discover
ed oil in Baku, the other side of this peninsula -
Ward: The distinction between Batum and Baku - ?
LG: Yes, because Baku is on the Caspian Sea. I got to
it many years later - 1959. Batum is at the other
end and, as I recall from a bit of reading and
talking to my Dad, it was primarily an oil and bulk
port.
I assume that the arrangements were that they paid
off the skipper to take a couple of stowaways. My
father left that way. He did some bumming around
Europe - worked in Holland for a while.
Ward: Did he have any skill or occupation before going into
the army?
LG: Oh, yes. He'd been apprenticed at the age of nine
with a cabinet maker and he had become a very skilled
cabinet maker; remained that way all of his life.
He had apparently not too many problems in finding
work in different cabinet shops. In those days all
this type of work was small industry work - a man
might employ a half a dozen. Ten people was a big
outfit. He used to have some stories and yarns about
his travels there before he got to the United States.
Strikes and "Cossacks"
LG: So both my father and mother knew each other.
There had been strikes there. I knew about that
because my father carried a wound - I guess it was
the Cossacks or the armed forces; they called all
the policemen and the armed forces "Cossacks". It
was a nomenclature they used; in this country they
called the cops on horseback "Cossacks" -
Ward: That's right - it got to be a pejorative word.
LG: That's right. And he still carried the scars where
they had "broken up a workers' demonstration with a
lot of shooting, so that -
Ward: A scar - you mean a physical scar?
LG: Yes, on his foot - he had been wounded in the foot -
it never interfered with his walking. Apparently
in those days that was the way a demonstration was
taken care of.
It was an interesting thing while they were both
very hostile to the Czar, they were not hostile to
Russia as such. If anything, my father and mother
still saw it as Mother Russia; all their lives they
were basically Russophiles. In most respects they
were freethinkers, as against the orthodox thinkers
there -
About Religion
Ward: They weren't what you'd call religious Jews, then?
LG: They were non-religious. My mother was indifferent
to it; my father was a pretty aggressive atheist.
Not that he'd make that much of an issue of it,
but he would make it quite plain. I recall, for
example, when Passover came along - that's usually
quite a Jewish holiday; several Seders - it's a
commemoration in part for the exodus of the Jews
from Egypt - the Seder. One of the reasons for
matzos (they don't use bread) goes back to the
concept that they did not have yeast; it was un
leavened bread. Well, my father and mother didn't
see any good reason why they shouldn't have some
good dinners and have friends in, the game as other
people did. My father would insist that there be
bread on the table as well as matzos.
Nobody went through the various religious
ceremonies at the passover dinners. I recall as kids
that the most pleasant thing about it was that there
LG: was an enormous variety of food and plenty of it;
company coming by. Questions were sometimes asked,
"How come you have bread on the table?" - which
according to the religious people was not supposed
to be there. And my father would simply answer,
"Look, I have all kinds of friends; some people like
bread, some people like matzos; they can help
themselves." It was in these forms that his atheism
showed up. My mother never felt much differently
than that, though she wasn't quite as aggressive
about it as my father. . And he used to have some -
oh, some imitative dovening -
Ward: Imitative praying?
LG: Dovening is praying among the Jews. Words that were
not particularly flattering to the rabbis and to the
religious people. I recall him going through a
ritual which was pure fun as far as he was concerned.
It was in the same sing-song the rabbis use and the
people in the synagogue use (here is Goldblatt
singing.) which sounds very religious, but only means
in Yiddish that the goats pick up their tails and the
rabbis sniff, (laughter) Obviously, a little bit
scatological.
So, that was the background; and they maintained
it all their lives. They were what you call
"yiddishten" and continued that way, even though it
was a dwindling group to which they belonged.
Ward: Why was it a dwindling group?
LG: The reason it was dwindling was that the ones who
were really "yiddishten", felt very strongly about
the Yiddish language, about Yiddish culture, Yiddish
songs; their roots were primarily among their friends
who were from the same part of the world and who
thought very similarly to them. Like they belonged
to an organization called "the Kovna Old Friends".
It obviously was a dwindling group - they died off.
Ward: Oh, when the old friends died, that was it?
8
LG: That's it. For example, I still understand some
Yiddish; I can sort of labor my way. Terry under
stands none. The kids have a few words, that's
about all, but among the Yiddishten such as my
father and mother and their friends Yiddish was a
very basic language, even though my dad, who was in
the outside world most of the time -
Ward: He had to learn English?
LG: He learned good English and learned it very well -
taught himself to read blueprints; he was a highly
skilled man. On that score they were bilingual
entirely -
A Quick Jump To Hollywood
Ward: He was tri -lingual?
LG: He was tri-lingual because he could transfer to
Russian almost as easily.
There's a bit of a story about him that I
remember. Dolores Del Rio - she was an actress -
Dolores Del Rio, perhaps the most beautiful woman
in the world. I remember working on a set when
she first turned up there; we were working on these
catwalks rigging up some scenery -
Ward: Oh, we got on to Hollywood now?
LG: Yes, it's an example of how good his Russian was.
The first time I saw her I damn near fell off the
thing. I think the man who brought her over here
married her. Edwin Carew, the director. Edwin
Carew.
Ward: Edwin Carew?
LG: Right. They brought Tolstoy's son over here as sort
of a technical advisor to this movie "Resurrection",
in which Dolores Del Rio was featured. This was
before the talkies, which sort of destroyed her.
LG-: And my father, who was working at Tec-Art at the
time, was also used in the capacity of a translator,
My mother was fair at Russian and when they
wanted to talk "between themselves so that the kids
wouldn't understand, they would not talk in Yiddish
or in English; they would use Russian.
Back To The Bronx
LG-: Going "back to my family, in the Bronx, they initially
lived in the East Side - I think what they called
Howston Street, (what we call Houston). That's still
true in New York today - it's pronounced Howston.
Ward: That makes sense.
LG: Yes. My father and mother decided to move out of
that neck of the woods when the family was just
being formed; I think my sister had just been born.
She's older than I am by a couple of years. I was
born in the Bronx.
When they decided to move to the Bronx - to many
of the Jews this was a completely strange world like
a transplanted Jewish settlement in many respects.
Some of my parents' friends asked my mother,
"Well, why do you want to move up there? What will
the neighbors think?" In other words, this whole
feeling, was she going to be accepted? And her
reply was really quite simple. She said, "I've
been there and I've seen the neighbors and I sort
of liked them. I wouldn't like it very much if they
moved out." She was going to move, and that was it,
Yeah. Even though they moved there they still
maintained their ties with their old friends; they
continued to maintain them even after they moved to
the coast here.
Ward: When did they get married?
LG: Either in 1905 - 1906 perhaps - yes, 1906.
10
The Other Children
Ward: And then the first child was your sister -
LG: Yes, my sister -
Ward: Then you and other children?
LG: Then my brother, Sam; he's three years younger than
I am and my sister is two years older than I am.
Then there's a "bit of a gap and a younger brother
became part of the family - Saul -
Ward: Oh, yes, I remember -
LG: You might have met him -
Ward: Oh, yes, he entertained us in Paris -
LG: That's right because I recall -
Ward: He was very interested in the making of the movie
Hiroshima, Mon Amour -
LG: He was a sort of amateur photographer. He was
also interested in the mime -
Ward: ,Y g s, he was a theatrically inclined person -
LG: Yes, he did some work with Marcel Marceau; he made
a short film that was shown in the festival - the
festival here - and also the one at Cannes. It was
a picture of the mime built around the idea of a
store where you could change your head. If you
weren't happy with the one you were wearing, you
could make a switch. It was a fairly good short
film.
Ward: Let's see now, there were four children -
LG: My brother was a chemical engineer. That was his
work; he worked for a big outfit there - Loomis.
They designed primarily these cracking plants that
are used by oil companies. They take the raw oil
as it comes out of the ground -
Ward: And they crack it into its various component parts.
11
LG: Right, right.
Ward: Well, then, there were the four children. Did your
mother - was she a housewife or did she work?
The Division of Labor
LG: Well, she started off working in New York as a garment
worker, although I don't believe she ever went back
to work once the family was being formed.
The old Jewish traditions pretty well prevailed
in the community, regardless of whether they were
orthodox, non-believers or atheist; namely, the
division of labor, where the mother had responsibi
lity for the children and the house. The man's job
was to provide the living. This was more progress,
in my opinion, than among the highly orthodox Jews,
where the men were considered to be doing their
entire day's work by studying the Talmud; they were
professional doveners -
Ward: Professional what?
LG: Prayers -
Ward: Oh, yes - the same word again.
LG: Yes, they would go through the whole ritual from
putting on the tfillim - those are the little
square boxes, together with the philacteries that
they wrap on their arms. What they all represent,
I'm not quite sure.
These things grew over the years - and the
yamulka - the small prayer cap; the day would have
to start that way. And among some of these orthodox
Jews that was the balance of their life.
Ward: That was a pretty easy life.
12
LG: It would strike me that way; the raising of a family,
as well as somehow making a livelihood, fell on the
woman, "because the man was doing the Lord's work.
So that it was definitely a form of progress where
a woman was only burdened with the house care and
the children and not with trying to rummage up
enough so they could feed the family as well.
Ward: So the division of labor was more equal?
Women and Orthodoxy
LG: No question in my mind. Yes. Sure. Still to
this day highly orthodox Jews live in one section
of Jerusalem, go so far as to dedicate one room in
their house so as to augment this religiosity;
the same pattern persists in terms of the role of
women.
The other features of the orthodox group were
thoroughly benighted - women shaving their heads
when they got married and wearing a wig -
Ward: What was the purpose of that?
LG: They wore a wig, their hair made up again as a wig.
Whether this was part of the marriage vows or the
business of being married - in other words, where
hair has always been associated with the beauty of
a woman ....
Ward: Oh, yes, she would make herself repulsive to
everybody except her husband -
LG: Yes, that might have been it; an off -shoot of mona-
gamy. It also might be a carry-over, the whole
attitude of orthodox Jews toward women which has
changed a bit, primarily because the women have
gotten tougher.
The whole divorce system which is extremely
rigorous and entirely under the aegis of the rabbis,
was one where the woman stood behind the man and it
was the man who stepped forward and announced the
13
LG: reason for the divorce. The woman sat there quietly,
or stood there quietly. He was the one, under an
orthodox Jewish divorce. For example, if the woman
couldn't "bear children - things like that. It could
go back to the role of women as chattels, practical
ly under the initial kings of Israel.
The Family Scene
Ward: Well, let's look at the family scene. You were the
oldest son -
LG: Yes.
Ward: Did that position give you pre-eminence among the
four children?
LG: Not particularly, there again the folks were free
thinkers. They placed enormous emphasis on
education, music, culture. My mother read a great
deal, but always in Yiddish.
Ward: Was there a good spread of literature in that
language available to her?
LG: I'm not sure how large that spread was, but there
was enough around; for example, Sholem Aleichem
wrote in Yiddish. I suppose they read everything
Sholem Aleichem ever wrote. Sholem Aleichem was
their kind of person because as he himself used to
say, "There's enough literature for the sheiner
menschen, I'm writing for the proste menschen."
Ward : What?
LG: Sheiner menschen would be something like "the
beautiful people" - proste menschen is 'common
man."
Ward: I see.
LG: Sometimes used in a derogatory way, "he's a proste
yid." But Sholem Aleichem didn't take it that way
the proste menschen was his ambience and he wrote
14
LG: for them. My folks always subscribed to Jewish,
papers; they were original subscribers to the
Freiheit, probably kept subscribing to that until
their last days.
Ward: So you saw the Freiheit around the house as a
child?
LG: The Freiheit around, yes, but there were a couple
of papers you never saw there. One was the Forward.
Ward: That was the conservative Jewish paper?
LG: Conservative Social Democratic Jewish newspaper.
There was one that was a little further to the
right as I recall - that was Per Tag, the daily.
That went out of print.
Ward: In other words, obviously right wing literature was
not seen around your home?
LG: I suppose a lot of the literature that my sister
would bring home or that I would get at school or
check out of the library maybe fell in that class.
In terms of ideologically rightwing literature the
answer is "No".
Ward: Well, I gather that a family like yours would be
pretty articulate. There must have been a lot of
talk around the dinner table and during the evening,
in which you probably got some ideas. Can you
recall any particular form the conversation would
take which interested you?
LG: There was always a lot of discussion around the
dinner table. On most occasions we ate together,
although not all the time, partially because of
the schedules that the members of the family kept.
I do recall that there were a number of conver
sations about Debs* I think they attended every
demonstration in support of Debs that ever took
place in New York City. Remember, he was not only
a candidate for President on the Socialist ticket;
he ran while he was in jail.
*Eugene V. Debs, famous Socialist
Tillie Goldblatt (above)
Boris Goldblatt (below)
Born in Lithuania
Louis Goldblatt
ca. 1914
15
Ward: That would have been when you were 8 or 10 - before
you were 10?
LG: Yes; even after Debs was gone, they still talked
about him. I recall later conversations around
the table - oh, this must have been when I was ten
or thereabouts, about Tom Mooney;* whether there
was much about Sacco and Vanzetti* I'm not sure
myself.
Ward: Well, Sacco and Vanzetti didn't come on until later -
LG: - until later. I was a bit older and I might not
have been spending that much time at home. I was
away a good deal.
Ward: You were about 18 then -
LG: Seventeen or eighteen - 1927-28.
There was a lot of discussion; articles in the
Freiheit; some of the features - they had favorite
writers. The Freiheit carried short stories or
even serials. Not only discussion of these things,
but sometimes they would be read aloud because of
certain phrases used.
Ward: Who would read aloud?
LG: My dad or my mother, either one -
Ward: Either one?
LG: Right.
Ward: It was exclusive?
LG:
Yiddish Schools
No, none of us ever became that proficient in Yid
dish. I could read a fair amovmt of it because I
went to the Sholem Aleichem Folk School.
*Mooney, a Socialist, and Sacco and Vanzetti,
Anarchists, were sentenced to death after highly
questionable convictions for murder. Mooney was
finally pardoned; the others were executed.
16
Ward: That would "be after hours at the public school?
LG-: Uh, uh; the progressive Jews and freethinkers like
my mother and father thought of Yiddish not only as
a language but as a culture. They were thoroughly
attached to it. They wanted to maintain this whole
concept of Yiddish for the children, but neither
would they send us to the usual cheders or schools.
Ward: The Yiddish schools?
LG: Well, these were cheders, a combination in some
cases of Yiddish and Hebrew.
Ward: Could you spell that word?
LG: C H E D E R. All of these finally consolidated a
bit, partially because the schools were decimated
by the mass exodus.
Ward: Let's get that a bit more clearly. The schools were
decimated; why?
LG: A lot of the youngsters just rebelled against them,
including even youngsters from the orthodox families
Ward: And why did they?
LG: Oh, both because of its irrelevance, its rigors, the
kind of faculty; the first schools were literally
impossible. Everything was taught by rote. It was
completely irrelevant.
If a youngster learned some Hebrew, he would
simply learn enough so he could recite certain pas
sages and finally the great culmination might be
that he would learn enough so as to take part in a
Bar Mitzvah when he was thirteen, at which point
all of it went blank. He didn't know what the
Hebrew was in ninety percent of the cases.
Ward: He was a parrot?
LG: Simply learning by rote; use of corporal punishment,
if the kids didn't know their lesson, bang! it was
the ruler on
17
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
- On the hands?
Yes, ruler on the hands. In many cases the early
cheders were considered by the youngsters as taking
away time they could have "been playing ball or doing
something else that might be more important, compared
to going tolhis religious indoctrination.
While parents like mine were anxious to maintain
Yiddish, they didn't want any part of this cheder
concept. That's the way the Sholem Aleichem Polk
Schools got going.
I see. It was the preferred alternative.
Yes. There the objective was to simply teach the
Yiddish language, get to read some Yiddish books,
learn something of the Yiddish songs. It was
completely non-religious.
Held on Saturdays? Evening after school?
No, it was generally an hour or so after school, and
I didn't find it all that obnoxious. I never was
that happy when the rest of the kids were out playing
baseball, and I wasn't.
Did you have to go?
go?
What happened if you didn't
Not a great deal. I think it was just a feeling on
my part - family pressure. In some cases, also,
because my peers were there; it wasn't all that
distasteful.
The whole technique must have been on a much
better level than the cheders, although true, the
Sholem Aleichem Schools finally faded out too; fewer
and fewer children were interested in learning
Yiddish. That's the reason; right now, Yiddish might
only have another few years to go.
All right, well now aside from the Jewish aspects
of your upbringing, I gather that social conscious
ness pervaded in your family.
LG:
Yeah.
18
Ward: It "became - do you have any recollection - a special
thing in a social way that influenced you? A demon
stration? An injustice you had witnessed? A good
thing that you admired?
LG: Not during those days in particular. Some of the
things I liked a great deal -
Ward: Like what?
LG: I had gone to some of the gatherings of my folks
with some of their old friends. They belonged to
a number of organizations which were of a progres
sive bent- things like the Workmen's Circle - social
groups with perhaps some people who had become more
prosperous than others. Still basically they had a
left-wing tilt in the sense that they were funda
mentally Socialist.
I used to both enjoy and admire these groups
because the meetings were all in Yiddish. They
would generally start the evenings with several
songs, something that appears to be almost gone, -
also in Yiddish. It was not too uncommon for them
to have a "reader" come in. It might be some local
person who could read poetry or read sections of a
novel or short stories; even later on when the family
was in L.A., there was a woman named Gina Medem -
she used to write for the Preiheit once in a while.
This was one of the ways she got by in life.
She'd be paid a little bit for coming to one of
these sessions and reading. She made the rounds of
any number of organizations; I doubt if she had any
other means of support.
Ward: What kind of stuff would she read? Poetry?
LG: Poetry in some cases - stories by Sholem Aleichem -
things of that sort; other poetry of some of the
Jewish poets. I was greatly impressed by a person
like this, and I guess just as much by the group who
were there and felt that keenly about having somebody
19
LG: such as Gina Medem at their gatherings. It was such
a complete contrast to everything else that I could
see on the outside world.
Ward: In contrast to your public school, for instance?
LG: Contrast to the public school, to the dances I
was going to, contrast to the get-togethers in other
homes, part of which were religious get-togethers,
part of which were just social gatherings.
I thought there was more cohesiveness and genuine
cultural identity in a group such as these yiddishten
than among other people. I can still remember as a
kid going into a house where they had all the
accoutrements of a completely religious household.
Dishes on which you could only eat milk products,
dishes on which you could only eat meat products,
special dishes that were only used at the time of
Passover -
Ward: Did they wash these different dishes in the same
dishwater?
LG: I doubt it. I guess they were doing it in confor-
mance with the Xasruth.
Ward: The what?
LG: Kasruth - I think that's a section of the Talmudic
studies that delineates all the dietary laws of the
Jews, some of which are based on legend and some are
based on ignorance.
Ward: Some of the dietary laws were based on the lack of
refrigeration in those days -
LG: You could understand a dietary law where they would
not eat pig. At one time, uncured ham was the
primary cause of trichinosis, so I can see that
being barred. But it was not put on that basis.
The question was whether or not an animal had a
cloven hoof; also the question of how an animal was
butchered.
20
LG: I could understand why they "barred shellfish "because
all of us know now, if you eat mussels out of season
you are lucky to be around the next day. It was
easy to bar all shellfish because shellfish are
fundamentally scavengers. That makes sense. But
then they went on to say that anything taken from the
ocean had to have scales, which is another way of
saying that anything like a mollusk -
Ward: Mollusks do not have scales -
LG: Mollusks do not have scales, but on the other hand,
they also barred eel because some people, even to
this day, think that an eel does not have scales.
It does, but they are very tiny scales.
There are a lot of contradictions; while some of
it might have had a logical basis, after a while it
didn't have any. To this day there is sharp
conflict even among the Jews.
For example, when I happened to be in Israel about
two years ago, a little less than that, I was making
the rounds of some of the outlying areas where there
are kibbutsim. We passed one which we had visited -
S A S A - because they have an educational institute
where kids are taken out of the slum areas and
integrated with the kibbutz families. And as we were
driving away the guy I was with said, "Big rabbit,
we've got - it weighs 300 pounds."
Of course, it was a pig. They saw nothing wrong
in keeping some pigs. Then of course you have to be
pretty careful about slaughtering and curing which
is another story. Some of these things have never
been resolved, to this day.
Friends and Enemies
Ward: Well, now, any other things that you remember that
particularly repelled you as a youngster? What about
the boys you met in the public school?
LG: Actually, in the public schools I don't recall any
incidents -
21
Ward: No fights?
LG: Oh, yeah, sure - all kids have fights, but I don't
recall fights between Jews and goys or something
like that, or between racial groups. Of course,
all kids belong to gangs; that's part of the business
of survival in the tenement district. You had to
have friends -
Ward: Something to do with -
LG: Survival, everybody belonged to a group. They
called it "gangs", but they weren't gangs. There
was also the basic framework of the baseball teams.
Ward: You had friends?
LG: Right. There were certain district rivalries. I
remember there was always a rivalry going between
the kids who lived on Washington Avenue and Park
Avenue, which is a block away up in the Bronx.
Ward: Was there any fundamental difference, outside of
the names of the streets, between the two groups?
LG: Not that I recall. There was a pretty fundamental
difference between the part of the Bronx we lived
in or, say, the part the people lived in, in the Van
Cortland section, or the Concourse or "Concuuurse"
as people would talk about it; that was supposed
to be an uppity neighborhood - people on the rapidly
upward mobile escalator. Sure there was a clear
feeling that we belonged to different economic groups,
but I don't recall having any great conflict with
any other groups because they were goys and we were
Jews.
On that score I'd say we got along fairly well
except for the periodic gang fights - like all kid
gangs - based on imaginary insults. Just letting go
of a lot of energy.
Ward: But no knives - no guns?
22
LG: No, the closest to that was rock fights. There was
a quarry about a block or so away. It was always
a great meeting ground for this sort of thing.
People improved their pitching arm, but nobody got
hurt.
Ward: All right, so you went on demonstrations for Mooney
and Debs at times?
LG-: I remember mass meetings - I don't recall demonstra
tions as such. It wasn't a question of my mother
and father trying to indoctrinate me. They were
simply determined to live their own life style; it
was a very clear and distinct thing that they had.
It had nothing to do with religiosity, nothing to
do with staying within the confines of the East Side.
They saw no reason at all why they couldn't spread
their arms.
The usual tradition, not just among Jews, but
among many people, of the eldest son carrying
certain responsibilities or having the rights of
primogeniture, was not terribly important to the
family. Initially they felt it was just as important,
or more important, that my sister secure an education
so that she could be independent to teach or do
something other than sit around waiting for a swain;
.and she was a good student. As a matter of fact,
while we were still living in New York City, she was
going to Hunter, (the women's counterpart of CONY).
Ward: Is she still around; what's she doing?
LG: She's retired now.
Ward: She's a teacher?
LG: Yes, she became a teacher; she went to Hunter College.
After going to U.S.C., she went off to the Sorbonne
in Paris.
Ward: What did she do at the Sorbonne?
LG: Took her doctorate there. I remember seeing her
doctor's thesis - she sent me a copy - on some
esoteric French poet. I don't recall his name; I
23
LG-: labored through a few pages and realized it was
strictly a doctor's thesis in every sense of the
word. And -
Ward: Piled it away?
LG: Filed and forgotten. And if anybody's tracked it
since then, I don't know. But she was one of the
first women at the Sorbonne - at least one of the
first American women at the Sorbonne to get a
doctorate; they found that equally important.
Ward: Did she ever marry?
LG: Yes - married three times. Two adopted children.
It's an interesting business, I'm sure it wasn't
just because she wouldn't have to change the towels -
Ward: The towels?
LG: The towels because each of her husbands' name began
with a "V", which is a pretty rare thing. It's hard
to -
Ward: Was anybody superstitious about that?
LG: I don't think so - it was not a "v" for victory -
or anything of that sort. I think it was just pure
coincidence. She was married to a Frenchman for a
while, an artist by the name of Vigereux. She was
first married to a man named Varnum. I sort of
vaguely remember him.
Yigereux came from the town of Dijon, I think,
and he was a fairly good artist; not a really
successful one. Eventually, he came over to the
United States and settled in Hollywood, worked
around the studios where my dad worked, my brother
Sam worked and my brother Saul worked. Later on,
Fay broke up with him and a few years later she
married another man named "Vinock" - again another
"v" -VINOCK-
Ward: What nationality was he?
LG: I think Vinock was Jewish, but -
24
Ward: These others - the first two were not Jewish.
LG: No, Vigereux and Varnum were not Jewish.
Ward: Did your family object when she married non-Jews?
LG: No. I don't think they saw it as anything of any
importance - it just wasn't their thinking; they
accepted people as people.
An t i -S emit ism
LG: I'm not saying that during those years I wasn't
conscious of anti-semitism. I was - you couldn't
grow up in New York without being conscious of it -
Ward: How did you feel it?
LG: For example, you'd see still ads in those days of
"Only Christians Need Apply" -
Ward: Yes.
LG: Very simple things; you knew perfectly well that
'there were certain clubs where only Christians
belonged. I can recall when I first went to CCNY,*
there was some guy who started talking to me in the
gym - I was working out. At that time I felt I could
do something in gymnastics, -
Ward: You were a bit of an amateur gymnast?
LG: Oh, no, not really. I just couldn't put in all that
time on it, anyway; it's practically continuous
repetitious practice. Well, this guy approached me
and apparently they had something it wasn't
really a fraternity, it was a club. There were no
fraternities, or if there were they were sort of
s emi -und e r gr ound .
City College of New York
25
Ward: This was when you were a freshman at CCNY?
LG: Yes, at CCNY - and he wanted to know if I was
interested in joining this club. I asked him what
it was all about. He said, "Well, there are certain
people who ought to stick together." I said, "I
don't know what you're talking about, but my name
is G-oldblatt." There was no further invitation.
So, you were conscious of these things. But in
terms of any overt, aggressive anti-semitism, I don't
recall any of that at P.S. 2 where I first went to
school, or at P.S. 55 in the Bronx, a few blocks
from where I lived. This was like a Junior High
under one of these acceleration programs, which was
an educational fad of the times -
Ward: Oh, that's because of your I.Q. - you were put among
the bright kids -
LG: Yes - why, I don't know -
Ward: Don't be unduly modest.
LG: No, I'm not being unduly modest, but I don't recall
any particular testing or whether this came out of
recommendations that originated at the lower school.
They had these accelerated programs where you did
three years in two; the net result was that I entered
and finished fairly young. I was just a bit over 16,
and then went on to CCNY.
Ward: Let's see, then you were not yet 17 when you became
a freshman at CCNY?
LG: That's right - about sixteen and a half. It was
around February 1927 when I went to CCNY.
I don't think that this acceleration program was
confined to New York City. It spread all through
the educational structure. I doubt if they do that
any more, and in some ways I'm not sure it's the
best thing anyway. I would have gotten more out of
school, and I think I would have been able to handle
it better, if I'd just gone along a normal education
al course in high school.
26
LG: Instead of getting out at the age of sixteen and a
half, I would have gotten out at the usual age of
18. Then you are with your peers. That resulted
in all kinds of dislocations, plus you feel as
though you're a punk. You don't feel that you can
take part in many things when you get to college.
In high school it was no great problem because
your peers might be a grade behind but that made no
difference; you would still see a good deal of them,
You could still be playing ball with many of them.
But when you got to college, it was a different
break - some of them went and some didn't go.
Musical Beginnings
Ward: Before we get into college, let's go back a little
earlier to another phase of your life - the music:
that must have started pretty early.
LG: Yes, I'm not saying that it really started because -
Ward: Something happened?
LG: Yeah, no question about it. The family felt that
it was very important to have a piano, musical
instruments, around the place. These were charac
teristics of these people which, if they are lost,
would really be quite tragic.
I don't think anything was quite as precious in
a house as musical instruments and books. This
strong feeling on the part of these Jews, not just
as people who believed in their Jewish culture, but
who also felt very keenly about the whole cultural
structure of families and the world, was that
learning music - some kind of learning - was terribly
important; so we had a piano. Naturally, my sister
started first; she stayed with it for some years,
and then dropped it.
Ward: Was it an upright?
27
LG: It was an old Wurlitzer, as I remember, yeah. Even
though my dad - this is a sidelight - you know when
he first came to this country - and, as I said, he
was a good cabinet maker - he went to work for Stein-
way; it must have been about 1906 just shortly after
he came here. Recently we tried to find out whether
he could have done some of the work on an old piano
we have here. Terry and I picked up a Steinway when
we were living in the city -
Ward: This one here? (mentioning a grand piano in the
living room)
IG-: No - no, this one belongs to Liza, (the Goldblatts*
youngest daughter) We picked up an old Steinway in
quite good shape. Very, very reasonable, I think it
was something like one hundred bucks or two hundred
dollars and really in fine condition. In trying to
check the date of the piano, the best I could figure
out was that it was made somewhere around 1905 - '06,
When Liza was in New York for a while, I gave her
the number on the piano and she made an attempt to
see whether the Steinway people, who keep a good
record of all their pianos, could trace the exact
date and whether they would have any record of my
dad working there.
Ward: Let me interject here a moment for the sake of the
record. Lou is talking about one of his daughters -
Liza - who is a very talented musician and who is a
professional now, I believe.
LG: No, right now she is at UCLA* getting a doctorate in
musicology. That's a brand new field to me.
We took piano lessons - bear in mind that there
was no way for a family like ours to judge who was
a good piano teacher. My dad, for example, played
the mandolin. He taught himself entirely. He
decided he wanted to learn the mandolin, went out
and bought one -
Ward: Could he read music?
LG: No - no.
Ward: He had a musical ear then?
* (University of California at Los Angeles)
28
LG: Yes, just as he had an amazing ear for languages.
So did my sister and my brother. Sam inherited
more of that than I did. They're all good linguists.
My dad spoke not only Russian, he could get by in
Polish, and I'm not sure whether he learned any
Dutch. My sister learned many languages.
Ward: But he had this ear for music? Did your mother have
any musical ability or talent?
LG: If so, it never showed other than she could carry a
tune very well; she was not a monotone or anything.
Ward: She sang to you when you were kids?
LG: Yes; and she'd also sing when she worked around the
kitchen - Yiddish songs, a few of which I remember.
That passed the day for her and she liked it.
I studied the piano with some man who taught in the
neighborhood. Of course, they would schedule as
many kids as they could - they were trying to make
a living. I forget what it cost a lesson. I recall
that this man was not an outstanding piano teacher,
because later on I realized I hadn't learned a single
thing about musical structure or harmony, or anything
of the sort. Again, it was learning by rote; you
learned the scales, and his objective was that you'd
be able to pick up a few small tunes, so that when
he had his annual performance when the kids would
show off at the Aeolian Hall -
Ward: That's a good name -
LG: Nothing less, of course 1 You have to have a good
name on it; I'd say I probably could have done as
well by just picking out tunes by myself.
I had no trouble hearing something like a popular
tune and picking it up. I did learn a little bit
about reading music, which was helpful because then
as a kid in New York you formed a band. A band
could make a few pennies, nickels, playing at some
thing like a wedding, you know; a local dance. No
street corner musicians.
29
LG: Oh, I'm not saying any of us were that good. Maybe
some of the kids were; I wasn't. Actually, I learn
ed a great deal more in the. year and a half or two
when I was older - eighteen, nineteen. I spent some
time with a piano teacher in L. A. who at least knew
what he was talking about. So, yes, we worked on
the piano.
Ward: Did you practice a lot?
LG: That is a hard variable because if there was a good
baseball game going on, that took precedence. And
there was a peculiar thing; I mean, the attitude of
the folks toward baseball was not too bad.
There were some sports they didn't think too much
of. Basketball was all right, but they had some
questions about it. Why? Because of some distant
relative who had played basketball for NYU (New York
University); Stern - that was his name. He'd gotten
a hernia. They figured out that this was caused by
his stretching, and playing too much basketball
caused it. They didn't have too much use for that.
Later on, for example, when my brother, Sam
played a lot of ice hockey -
Ward: Oh, that's a rough game I
LG: That was barred completely when some kid of one of
the families who were close to us lost an eye as a
goalie. Baseball is sort of accepted; after all,
it's a kid game .
Ward: What was your position - what did you play?
LG: Mostly first base because a left-hander would play
mostly first base; that's obvious. A left-hander
could not be a catcher, right?
Ward: I didn't know you were left-handed.
LG: Yes, not when I write but I am left-handed.
Ward: Then you are sort of ambidextrous?
30
LG: Not completely, though. I'd play first "base; once
in a while they would let me pitch. I had a
tendency to get a little wild, so it wasn't too
often. We were still living on Washington, and we
had a good kid team there.
You'd play a lot of stickball during the day
right on the streets. That was just using a soft
ball and a broomstick and bang it around. But we
had a regular team and we played another team -I
think it was Park Avenue again. The old running
feud was still going on.
Somehow my folks got wind of the fact that some
local characters - none of these guys were high
rollers - were betting a few bucks on the game.
And when they found that out, they said, "Forget
it." That was different; that was gambling.
Ward: That was immoral?
LG: Right, right. They wanted no part of that.
Ward: Your folks were rather strict in certain ways?
LG: They had fixed ideas on some things - no question
about that.
Ward: They weren't going to let their little boy get in
trouble if they could help it?
LG: Yeah, on that score they thought as most Jews did;
in a place like New York City if any Jewish kid got
in trouble or landed in jail or found himself in the
headlines for some crime, this was bad for all the
people.
Ward: That this was damage to the Jewish community?
LG: Right. They saw nothing contradictory in being
strong Socialists who wanted to change the whole
system and being law-abiding. They would vary;
they would be law-abiding, yet if the Cossacks,
as they called them, broke up a strike demonstration,
that was a different story; the Cossacks were
breaking the law.
31
LG: They could understand why the workers would fight
back, which was also my dad's characteristic. He
was the same way. On that score they felt very
strongly; yet in the daily routine, such as Jews
getting mixed up in the rackets, they had no use
for that and were very hostile to it.
Ward: Well, the music again. So you had a little group
and played for a wedding or a dance?
LG: Not too well, but we got by. At weddings the most
important thing was the noise. When you hit Chasen
Kaleh, Mazeltov, the friends, because these were
not religious weddings, well, sometimes they were -
they would sing a song: Chasen means bridegroom;
Kaleh is the bride, Mazeltov is happiness and there
is a song Chasen Kaleh, Mazeltov. They had to come
out good and strong in that song.
Ward: That's something getting that spelling.
LG: Oh, I don't know. Some people spell Chasen and they
use a "k", simply assuming that somebody else knows
what it means. Some people use a "ch" - it's a
"khuh" sound - it's not a sound we have in English.
They tell a story that this fellow studied very,
very hard to be a rabbi, but he couldn't "huh", so
he never made it.
Ward: I can imagine; like Hanukah is beyond me.
LG: There are all kinds of "khuhs"; it's Germanic, I
guess. Chasen would be spelled CHASEN, but
you would not pronounce it "chosen".
Ward: And the next word is -
LG: Kale - KALE or Kaleh.
Ward: And then?
LG: Mazeltov - that's MAZELTOV.
Ward: That one I have seen many times in print. Well,
I've heard you sit down at the piano and start
playing classical and whatever. You don't practice
now and you haven't practiced for years, I bet.
32
LG: No, I haven't practiced for years. The last time
I did any practicing, Liza happened to be living
at home and we'd play some of the Mozart duets.
There I could still hold my own and read well
enough to get by.
When I went to high school - by that time we had
moved from Washington Avenue to Jackson Avenue.
That was a bit of an improvement because instead of
being a tenement, it was a two-story house.
Ward: And you had that to yourself as a family?
LG: No, we had one floor; it was a larger house, and it
was very close to my high school and across the
street from the playground. I could play until
dinner time - until I felt I had to come in and do
some practicing on the piano.
I went to the Sholem Aleichem School up until
the time I went to high school; whether it
continued beyond that I don't know. The family
was quite close. My sister was going to college
before I got there. There was no feeling around
the family of poverty. My dad was a very good
worker.
Ward: Your economic situation, considering everything,
was fairly good?
LG: It wasn't too bad. I don't recall the family ever
going hungry. It was not a family that had many
luxuries - you needed new clothes, but we weren't
that interested in them, either.
Ward: You had a piano - a mandolin?
LG: We had a piano, sure, and books. I think it was
Sam or Saul who tried the violin for a while.
Yiolin, to the Jews, made more sense than the piano
in the old country.
Ward: But why?
33
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward;
LG:
V/ard :
The only explanation I've heard which makes a bit
of sense is that it is both easily hidden and
easily transportable. If a Jew were evicted from
a shtetl a violin was something he could take along
with him.
A shtetl?
Jewish communities. If they had to move or were
forced out - these were cities within a city, some
were ghettos - the violin could be transported.
The other thing was that enough of them were
craftsmen so that they could make one; making a
piano is quite another story. Transporting a piano
would be more of a problem. You can understand
somebody being a fiddler on the roof; but a pianist
on the roof is impossible.
You never played the violin - why?
The piano was enough,
that too much.
Hardly got around playing
Have you ever heard of the raonotonic ear as
compared to the polytonic ear?
Having absolute, true pitch, you mean?
No - polytonic; for example, the possibility to make
chords, a combination of sounds whereas monotonic
is just one sound.
Single notes. There are those who will tell you
that learning a violin is easier, once you have
picked up the technique of fingering, because you
are playing single notes. I have always been con
vinced that somebody who plays a monotonic
instrument, as you define it, would have a much
easier time say, playing in a chamber music group
than a pianist, because the reading of single notes
obviously moves much more quickly. It's like
reading everything monosyllabically.
Well, did you use the piano, or your talent for it,
psychologically? For instance, when you were angry
or when you were upset, that sort of thing?
34
LG: Later on, yes, not then. There were times when I
resented it, even, because I didn't consider it
quite as important as baseball. Other times I did.
I think better teachers would have made a lot of
difference. If you start learning piano by rote,
it's hardly anything of a challenge at all.
Ward: But your finger dexterity?
LG: That becomes a fascinating thing by itself; in some
ways I would enjoy more playing scales more than
the stuff by rote. The family would finally say,
"For Christ sakes, stop the scales. Play some
music."
The finger dexterity in itself would be a
challenge, you see, to see how fast you can travel
and do it without making any mistakes. But even
there I don't recall being taught enough about
minors or majors and chords and things of that sort;
know how to transpose - make that transition between
a major and a minor, which I learned something about
later on.
I don't think I was all that fond of the piano
teacher. As a matter of fact, I caught him sort of
napping at the end of the day. He had a rough time -
Ward: This was your first teacher you're talking about?
LG: Yeah - the rest I learned by myself. After a while,
I found it more fun to pick out tunes. I didn't
know enough about the various keys, so I played most
of my tunes in the same key.
Ward: What was your favorite key?
LG: That was the key of A. I must have been at the tail
end of his schedule. That poor bastard had to make
his living in that short period of time between the
kids getting out of school and the kids going to
dinner.
In an unusual case he could get a family who
would take lessons after dinner. But then, of
course, you would run into all kinds of problems.
35
LG: If the old man has had a rough day, he might want
to hit the kip and go to sleep. One thing he can
do without is a piano lesson.
Ward: Quite an education you got!
LG: Yes. At least I did learn to read music a bit out
of that. I like the piano in the sense that it was
a love, not just for the instrument, but what could
be done with it. You see, there are still those
who figure that the piano had -
## (Interview 2: 21 February, 1978)
Ward: Lou, we were talking about the piano and your love
for it and you were caught in the middle of a
sentence there -
LG: Oh, yes. There had been a running controversy as
to whether the kind of music that could be gotten
out of a piano is better than what's gotten out of
a string instrument. There is no question that a
vibrato on a violin has a certain emotional quality
to it. There's an expression among Jews that "he's
a good violinist because he's playing from the
heart." In other words, a really emotional
instrument.
Ward: Mischa Elman? (famous violinist)
LG: Yes, Mischa Elman is a good example. The argument
went that the piano is primarily a percussion
instrument, which it is. That argument has gone on
over the years. I've never felt that it had that
much validity because if you listen to a good
pianist such as a Richter or a Gilels (Sviatoslav
Richter, Emil Gilels, Russian pianists), there's
no question that what they can get out of that
instrument is enormous. I think it measures up to
all the standards of a violin or a cello.
Ward: Did you ever hear Horowitz? (Vladimir Horowitz,
Russian pianist).
36
LG-: Yes, I've heard Horowitz play and I was lucky
enough to hear people like Bauer (Harold Bauer),
who had been a violinist and then later, at the
age of around 30, decided to become a pianist.
I was quite lucky because even as a kid we used
to go down to the concerts and to the theatre. In
many cases, I was sort of in tow by my sister. I
liked the theatre very much; liked the concerts.
I recall going to the Eva LeGallienne Theatre.
They had this repertory theatre something like
ACT, (American Conservatory Theatre). They had a
wide variety of material and you could sit in the
upper balcony. They were not regular seats; they
were benches and that was 25 cents. So we had the
chance to see at least a part of the legitimate
theatre. And I recall going to some of the Yiddish
theatres - the Yiddish Art Theatre I believe it
was - to see some of the Yiddish plays. I still
recollect as a youngster being highly shaken up by
this dramatic thing called "The Dibbuk" -
Ward: What does it mean?
LG: The Dibbuk was literally an unchained soul - a soul
that was still wandering and could not find its
peace. There were all kinds of things that went
with that play; to a youngster it was quite an
experience, a bit frightening with all the off
stage noises.
Ward: How old were you when you were so shaken up?
LG: I'd say I was around 11 or 12. I remember going
down to listen to Polly Adler, who was one of the
first of the great Jewish women comediennes, as
well as doing some singing.
This, I think, was one of the fundamental
diversions for many Jews. Something like the
Jewish Art Theatre in Yiddish represented a major
outing, an opportunity to see something that they
felt meaningful, in the same way that a reading of
Sholem Aleichem would be. They wouldn't pay so
much attention to some of the other things which,
on the other hand, my sister was very fond of. She
was growing up in an entirely different environment,
particularly around Hunters College.
37
Ward: She was interested in other things besides Jewish
drama and folklore?
LG: Right. It was through her that I got a chance to
get introduced to things such as the theatre and
the Philharmonic; we'd go to that. They also had
specials, and that included students at very low
fee. The idea that kids would have to pay the
same for tickets that adults would was ludicrous.
Of all the times to be introduced to something
like the theatre or the ballet or symphony, that's
the age.
Ward: You never forget it. Did you ever think of be
coming a professional musician or actor?
LG: Not really. I wasn't that good a musician.
Ward: No desire to walk the boards and declaim?
LG: No, my only acting experience was being dragooned
into a part in an amateur theatrical. This was
when I was at Berkeley, though. I think it was
"The Lower Depths".
The Work Ethic
LG: One other thing I might mention: even when I was
a youngster there was I guess for want of a
better word-what you'd call a work ethic. Even
as a kid you started making some side money. I'm
not sure that it had to do with dire need on the
part of the family, because I don't recall my sister
ever looking for part-time work. In my case it was
just sort of taken for granted; I don't recall being
pushed into it.
At first you'd pick up a couple of bucks by
distributing circulars door to door in the Bronx.
Somebody had a sale on someplace; a little bit like
our local merchant papers. We got paid a dollar
per thousand - something like that. Later on I
recall getting a job as a page boy at the library.
That didn't pay a great deal, but I enjoyed the
work there; being around books was pleasant and the
librarians were very helpful
Ward: This was in the local neighborhood library?
LG: Neighborhood library, yes, public library. When
I was about 15, 16 perhaps; I got a job working
in a shoe store for awhile. There was always some
sort of part-time work; it was easy to come by in
those days. Life didn't seem to be quite that
rough in terms of making a living.
V/ard: You didn't have to turn your pay over when you got
home?
LG: No, although sometimes if I'd had a full day's
work I'd never hesitate to give it to my mother;
she'd sort of parcel it back out to me. It was
not a business of my saying, "Here's my share of
support to the family". I never felt that.
V/ard: What'd you do with this money you earned? Did you
save it, or did you go out and whiff it away?
LG: I don't recall either saving it or whiffing it
away. It could go for something very essential,
such as a baseball glove, which wasn't cheap, and
a new pair of sneakers. I don't think that there
was that much interest in buying things. It didn't
occur, for example, to go out to buy an automobile,
like kids think of now; putting their money away
to buy that second-hand car. Getting a pair of
ice skates would.
V/ard: That was possible?
LG: Sure, that was possible, realistic; and it was
something you definitely used and enjoyed. There
was no feeling of trying to buy something so you
could just look at it, or just say you owned it.
Ward: Did you have money enough to last between paydays,
or were you broke half a day after you got the
money?
LG: Well, we didn't use that much money. What for?
I was going to high school at the time. Hadn't
been to college yet; when I went to college I'd
need money, yes, for carfare; and you bought some
of your books, not many.
39
LG: There were some nominal fees, "but very small.
Then you needed some cents, yes, particularly in
case you wanted to buy a sandwich and hadn't
"brought your lunch along. In high school you
didn't have the hangouts that the kids have today -
a Macdonald's, or a Jack-in-the-Box or something.
There a certain amount of money is essential, if
for no other reason than peer status. About the
nearest thing to it would be the small candy
stores which prevailed all through the neighborhood
then.
If there were some essential things you wanted,
those would be available. Getting a new baseball
was a big thing. We used one until, believe me,
it lost all spin and all liveliness and was sewn
up around a dozen times and hardly resembled a
baseball; to get a really round one was rare!
These things we considered to be fairly substantial
expenditures. What they cost I don't remember.
By the way, you asked me about my dad or the
family, as to whether there was any feeling of my
dad being a tyrant. He wasn't; although to say
that there wasn't punishment in the family would be
false. There was. And again there was a division
of labor.
The mother was in charge of the house, the
children, keeping them clothed, keeping them well,
keeping them fed. The mother was also in charge
of keeping track of the kids; whether they were
doing their piano practice, or whether they were
listening and being cooperative.
Yet, in the event that any discipline was called
for, it was the father who was called upon to
administer it. You always had that division in the
family. And there were times when some of us would
get completely wound up in some local game or
something that you never got home in time for
dinner. Or you'd been particularly mischievous
that day.
40
LG: Then the head of the family, the father, would be
called upon, and he'd give you a strap across your
"bottom. If it was called for, you would get it;
that's all. But none of this gives me any feeling
of the kind of corporal punishment that people talk
about, behind the woodshed.
Ward: Well, did your mother ever say - "Wait until your
father gets home"?
LG: Oh, you'd hear that once in a while. Sure.
Ward: You said your family was strict about some things.
What would they be?
LG: Homework - that had to be done, period. I guess
a good deal of the tempo was already set by my
older sister. She was a good scholar and highly
devoted to it. They were strict about the whole
business of practicing on something like the piano.
If they could calculate the results, I don't know.
I think that was one of the reasons for these
periodic reci'tals, to prove to the family that
something had been accomplished. In these areas
they were strict. They were strict in a general
law-abiding way; this was not law-abiding in any
redneck fashion - none of "that's the law".
Ward: What about bad language?
LG: Bad language was not acceptable around the house.
The business of the kids getting mixed up with the
wrong crowd - word would travel very fast in the
neighborhood that some of the kids were making a
quick buck by, oh, looking for a drunk and rolling
him.
I can remember as a child, some guy probably
pretty well gone, standing on an iron grill that
led to cellars all along the streets, and one of
the kids was taunting him a bit; asked him if he
had any change in his pocket. He must have said,
"Sure," and took out a handful of change. One of
the kids whacked the change all the way down to the
cellar, and one of the kids went down and picked it
all up.
41
LG: These were things that were definitely frowned
upon. On the one hand, to them a picket line was
a legal, unquestioned institution that should never
be challenged. If the cops took out after the
pickets, their attitude was they were just a bunch
of Cossacks and strikebreakers; it was their own
concept of the law.
Ward: Was there any occasion when the cop was a friend
rather than an enemy?
LG: Not particularly, really.
Ward: If there was any trouble, you solved it among
yourselves?
LG: Solved it among ourselves. There was a good deal
of carryover from the old country, a general
feeling among Jews that you don't take your head
aches to the court or to the man. You try to
resolve them among yourselves. There are endless
Jewish stories about attempts to resolve disputes
by going to the rabbi.
Ward: Partnerships, I imagine?
LG: Partnerships, domestic quarrels, arguments over
property; in the old country there apparently was
always some sort of a structure there where you
settle these things through your peer. If it
wasn't a religious person it was some person who
had standing in the community.
Ward: The rabbi usually had quite a bit to do with
mediation, didn't he?
LG: The rabbi at one time was the mediator and he was
the interpreter of the Jewish law - whether it was
written out or not.
One other little item about my mother. She was
a very, very strong woman. When she determined to
move, or do something, she'd do it.
A little bit of local knowledge: one of the
delicacies was a good herring, what they called
a "schmaltz" herring. These herring were soaked
42
LG-: in brine, and they would come in barrels, a barrel
being maybe three feet tall; big, round barrel.
They came from somewhere in Europe. The idea was
to get a schmaltz herring that wasn't all bones.
It had to be good and fat.
I recall going shopping with my mother; a barrel
of schmaltz herring was there, and some of the
Jewish women there were trying to get the fattest
schmaltz herrings. Naturally they would get down
to the bottom of the barrel, so that before long
the herring that had been at the bottom were all
up at the top. The heavier herring, I guess, would
have a tendency to go to the bottom of the barrel.
Ward: The fat ones?
LG: Right. My mother would do her shopping and let
the other women pick over these herrings; when she
was ready to buy herrings she would just take the
one on top, because by that time all the bottom
ones were on top. There are some people who simply
sit and wait and have a certain amount of patience
until that turnover takes place in a situation.
Ward: You were very fond of her, apparently.
LG: I was fond of both of them.
Ward: It must have been a good family.
LG: I think it was, really, in that there was a good
relationship. Look at that table over there, in
the dining room. My dad made that for me. And
there was another table that he made. When Terry
and I first set up house - not when we lived on
Telegraph Hill, it was later during the time we
lived on Green Street that she wanted this table.
She went by Gump's and they showed her this table.
This was it.
My dad happened to be up here visiting, so he
came down and took a look at it, and says "Sure".
So we bought the lumber, all maple or birch, and
even then it ran quite a bit a square foot. This
table was turned out. It cost around fifty bucks
instead of five hundred dollars, which it would
have been at Gump's.
43
Ward: Well, are you ready to go on to ?
LG: Sure.
Ward: Did you have any particular major in mind when you
started at CONY?
LG-: Not particularly, because as I recall you didn't
select a major, really, until after your sophomore
year. All your freshman courses were the same,
compulsory.
Ward: When the time came along when you could select a
major, what did you think of, select?
LG: At that time I selected economics and political
science.
Ward: I would have guessed that.
LG: Yes. Although how much of that work I'd done at
CCNY I I don't think it was a great deal. I
think most of the time I spent at CCNY was pretty
well with the established courses.
Ward: How long did you go to CCNY?
LG: I went there for a year and a half. I entered
there in the winter of 1926-27; I'd be about
sixteen and a half. I was there until the finish
ing up of the spring semester in 1928.
Ward: Was there anything particular about that year and
a half that you wish to reminisce about?
Leftwins: Politics
LG: A couple of things that struck me about CCNY I
still recall with considerable fondness. One was
the alcoves, as they call them. There was a sort
of a large dining area made up of little alcoves
where different groups would sort of hang out or
just sit around in bull sessions. The amount of
discussion that went on there and it was almost
44
LG: always political - was amazing.
It was during that period where a lot of the things
that I had already begun to take up in different
ways - partially through the family, partially
through their friends, and partially things that I
had read - began to jell. Here were a lot of bright,
bright youngsters no question about that most
of the time I just sat and listened - -
Ward: These were working class neighborhood boys and girls,
weren't they, pretty much?
LG: CCNY at that time was a boys' school.
Ward: Oh, it was a boys' school?
LG: Right. The girls went to Hunters - Hunters College.
CCNY was a boys' school, and I'd say that at least
80 percent of them came from working class families.
And 100 percent of them came either on foot, by
subway or train - or by bus. Anything such as some
body owning a car was unknown.
Ward: Bicycles?
LG: Some bicycles, yes, a few. Strictly a streetcar
college, that's what it was. And the school had a
. reputation of turning out some very, very bright
students; still does.
Political debate was really beginning to rage at
that time. It was after the Russian revolution in
1917. It was after the formation of the Communist
party, even though the Socialist party was still a
large and rival group.
It was still during the period of Norman Thomas,
(a Socialist leader) a very colorful and effective
advocate for whatever he was thinking about, talking
about. It was still during the period of Eugene V.
Debs. I think he was still around.
45
LG: By that time I think that some of these factional
breaks that later consumed so much of the time of
the whole left, such as the Lovestoneites (a faction
that abandoned the Communists to follow Leon
Trotsky) -
Ward: Oh, the Lovestoneites?
LG: Yes, after there had been a split in the party.
Ward: Jay Lovestone (leader of the pro-Trotsky group)?
LG: Jay Lovestone, right. The whole Trotsky thing had
come to a head in the Soviet Union around 1924, '25,
so that by '26 that was also being debated. These
were not quiet arguments. They were real screaming
drills and they'd go on endlessly.
One thing you had to admire; the youngsters who
were taking part in it did their homework and when
they debated their case it was not just a vitriolic
expression, not just to overwhelm the other person
by yelling them down - that didn't get very far.
That was an education all by itself, just as much as
the classes. There was so much coming through in
the way of political discussion, debate, about World
War I, which was not that far behind us ....
Sacco and Vanzetti were coming up?
I don't think Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested
at that time; they might have been.
Well, the Red raids had occurred; they must have
been something that was talked about.
The Palmer raids - Palmer - yes, they had occurred.
I recall discussions about the Wobblies, (members of
the Industrial Workers of the World) even though
they were primarily located on the west coast. They
had come east and led some of the big strikes, such
as the one at Paterson, New Jersey; also in Lawrence,
Mass.
Ward: That was the one I was thinking of. John Reed
(famous radical writer) had to do with both of them,
at least Paterson, I know -
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
46
LG-: Those were among the shoemakers and textile workers
of the day. The Wobblies had come east for these
battles: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (famous woman
radical) was very active. There were discussions
about the Wobblies and their peculiar type of
tradition, their own contribution, an odd thing.
I found it very difficult to accept the nature
of the Wobblies. To me it was a strange thing that
guys, for example, thought nothing of being on the
road all the time, of riding the rods. Why? Be
cause to a kid raised in New York City, a freight
train was a rare thing to see. If you. saw any trains
at all, it was these passenger trains that went on
to Yonkers and that section above the Bronx, and
primarily along Park Avenue. They had subterranean
trains, you'd see them once in a while.
Ward: You didn't run away from home at any time, did you?
LG: No, like every kid you always think about it, but
the whole idea of this kind of existence ....
We're city people.
There was actually no feeling of the land, even
though my mother made a heroic effort to get the
kids a bit of fresh air during the summer vacation
time, partly to escape the heat. I recall we spent
several summers in a little town in the Catskills,
off the Hudson River, called Accord.
Ward: This has a political significance to me; a homo
geneous group in this town, or what?
LG: Not particularly; a lot of them knew each other.
In those days you didn't read about these places.
It went by word of mouth. One person knew about
it and told another person.
Ward: The patrons mostly Jews?
LG: Primarily, and not all of them of the same mind,
because you'd hear political debates going on
constantly. Some of the families might know each
other, or at least a few of them did - some of them
did not.
47
LG: This was a place that the family could afford, which
is important. It got you out of the city during
some of the hot summer weeks. As I recall, she
worked awfully hard, because this was not the kind
of a summer camp where everyone was served food.
There was no kitchen help. The women shared the
kitchen, and that was not always a happy thing.
Ward: In other words, who got the stove, who got the sink?
LG: Right. Three or four women in the kitchen - and I
don't care what generation or what they are - always
get the same results; not very happy ones so there
was a great deal of work for the family.
Actually, it was a pleasant enough place. We
would get picked up at the railroad station by the
farmer or the guy who owned the place, with a horse
and wagon, and taken off to the farm. That was the
chance we had to see something of another world; it
was not a city ....
Ward: Cows?
LG: There were cows around; horses -
Ward: Milk didn't come in - ?
LG: Glass bottles, right. We knew it couldn't come in
those big gallon cans because we couldn't figure
out how a cow could sit on one of those. They
weren't gallon cans, they were about ten gallons.
You've seen them - for a long time the farmers used
to use them to transport their milk.
They were a source of continuous enjoyment for
the kids. One of the major games that the kids
would play was how many of these things could you
jump over - line up two, three, four; the object
being to jump, hit the last one with your hands and
still make it. Whether any permanent damage was
done to some vital parts, I'm not sure.
Ward: Was milk homogenized then?
LG: You mean pasteurized?
48
Ward: No, homogenized. You saw the cream rise?
LG: Yes, you saw the cream rise. At one time you used
to go down to the corner to pick up your milk. I
recall once my dad being a bit irritated at every
body, including the kids, because he had to go get
the milk; so he went down to the grocery store and
had the man put a quart of milk in a brown paper
bag and carried it home that way. My mother was not
enthusiastic but he thought it was funny as heck.
But later, during the winter, by that time they
were delivering milk bottles. It was terribly cold
on Jackson Avenue and the milk in the bottle would
begin to freeze. The paper top on the bottle was
about two inches above the bottle itself because it
was all cream. The mothers separated the cream
from the milk; they used it for things like cream
with their coffee or their tea.
Ward: All right, that explains why it was difficult to
relate to riding the box cars and the other reasons
why it was difficult to relate to the Wobblies, more
fundamental than the means of transportation.
LG: The other one was this whole concept of their being
on the move constantly. They'd move from lumber
camps, say, to places like hop fields, or work in
the mines. Not in the coal mines - I'm talking
now about the western mines. These were a little
bit difficult to relate to. Later on, I began to
understand a great deal more about it.
##
Ward: Okay, Lou, now with the Wobblies, did they talk to
you about the use of violence?
LG: At that time? No, that was later on. I didn't get
to know any Wobblies when I was in New York City,
I first met some on the west coast.
Ward: All right, but you heard people talk about the
Wobblies. Did they talk about the Wobblies 1
feelings and about the propriety of using violence?
49
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
I don't recall. After all, during the Palmer raids
there was a lot of violence, but the violence was
against the Wobblies. I'm not sure whether John Dos
Passes, (an author) had come out at that time with
42nd Parallel.
We were more accustomed to things like those
grisly stories about what the vigilantes did to
the Wobblies, like the story of Wesley Everest (a
Wobbly). He was hung under one of the railroad
bridges.
Who? Wesley what?
Wesley Everest - that was in the Northwest, I think
in Centralia -
But this Wesley Everest - that name is unfamiliar.
It strikes me that you're discussing all these
divisions among the left; were there any capitalist-
minded kids at CCNY?
If there were, they sure as heck weren't in that
alcove. They were in some other part of the
building.
And never the twain shall meet. Is that it?
I don't know. It could be that they didn't spend
any time in the alcoves, that their interests and
thinking were somewhere else.
No, I don't recall any kids holding forth on the
beauties of the capitalist system. I think that
would be pretty rare in any school, even today.
Though a lot of people are in favor of it and
completely conditioned by it, I don't think they
carry it on their sleeve.
So that's the way it was. If there were pro-
capitalist arguments, they were not much in evidence
You'd get more of those in the classroom; with
studies of Adam Smith and the principles of free
enterprise; in the economic subjects, there you
would get it, but not in the alcoves, not among the
youngsters.
50
Ward: What about the professors? Were there any
professors that made lasting impressions on you?
LG: Only two that I can recall. One of them was not
a professor of mine - he was the head of the Music
Department and a good organist. They had an excel
lent organ at CCNY - beautiful thing - and he made
it a practice to play almost every afternoon, every
thing; a lot of the Each which is written for organ;
the fugues, preludes. Those were wonderful
afternoons, just sitting around and listening to him
for an hour or two.
There was a professor I had in Public Speaking,
a very competent man and also a good person in his
thinking about things.
Ward: At that time were you doing any public speaking or
identified with it?
LG: No.
Ward: Did you try to imitate him?
LG: I tried to imitate him very consciously in terms of
some of the things he hammered away at that make up
what people call "New Yorkese."
Ward: You mean like "thoid"?
LG: Yes, like "Thoid Street" and "goink", the k's
instead of g's. He had these things figured out,
and he was determined that if some youngster got
through his course at least he would speak something
that people in other parts of the country could
understand. He might have had some background or
training in New England. In retrospect, I think a
lot of his speech more closely resembled Bostonians
than anyone else.
Ward: Mass Ave.
LG: Right. Another feature of the school which in
itself manifested general rebellious feelings among
the students, ROTC was compulsory, partially because
51
LG: of federal grants, or the method in which the
school was set up, just like in the state college
system.
Ward: By law?
LG: Right. Every youngster had to take ROTO and there
was Lewisohn Stadium, right alongside. That's the
place where they used to have the summer concerts;
it was also the athletic field, the place where the
ROTO would practice. In very inclement weather
they would try to have ROTO drill in tunnels that
went beneath the "buildings of CCNY, so that you
wouldn't have to walk through rain or snow to go
from one building to another building.
It was one of the most ludicrous things that the
school could do. The kids were mostly violently
opposed to the whole system of compulsory military
training, a lot of them on political grounds; a
lot of them were just pacifists; and then there were
some kids who could think of nothing but some form
of mischief.
A few incidents stand out in my mind. Every
time they would have parade drill or whatever it
was; "march in squads," "right turn," "left turn"
or "to the rear march," there would always be one
or two kids there who would take these rolled
leggings that came out of World War I that looked
like a big Ace bandage - same size. If you put
the thing on right, it would stay up, but there
would always be a couple of kids there who would
see that they weren't fastened properly; soon as
the parade would start, sure enough they would be
come unravelled. You could just see the scene
there with somebody stepping on those things every
few steps; the whole parade would fall apart.
Pretty soon the man in charge would blow his cork.
I remember another incident where we were doing
ROTC in one of these tunnels. Some youngster
complained that they couldn't try a bayonet drill.
52
LG: A hard-headed leader said: "Oh, we can try it,
we're not going to try any fancy stuff, you know,
any charging or crap like that." They had no sooner
started the drill when some kid started screaming
and yelling, holding his eye saying somebody had
stabbed him (laughter). Nothing of the sort had
happened, but the whole thing broke up in conster
nation.
I had a feeling that the instructors there
realized that ROTC was not taking on at CONY, that
this would never be an outstanding example of how
it should be done.
The president of the school towards the last year
when I was there - I think he was named Robinson -
the director or the president . . . There had been
a clash between the administration and some students
who were determined to hold a demonstration. What
it was all about, I don't know. It might have been
a general free speech thing. Apparently, he lost
his cool and attacked the demonstration with his
umbrella; from then on he picked up the name of
"Umbrella Robinson". They would never refer to him
in any other way. How long he lasted, I don't know.
If I had been in charge of the school, there's
. one thing I don't think I could have won; that was
an open clash with the students - it could not be
done.
Ward: How many young men were there?
LG: I don't think it was all that big. The figure of
1500 stands out in my mind. I think it has become
larger since. You had a number of other schools
there that were considered more desirable; there
was NYU (New York University), Columbia, not too
far away, Fordham, Cornell - universities all around
there.
Ward: Well, why did you go to CCNY? It was the nearest
to you?
LG: Nearest my home, right, and also, no tuition. No
body felt that it was a lower calibre school. I
think most of the CCNY students and graduates felt
that if you could survive CCNY, you could survive
the world.
53
Ward: Oh, I see - great pride.
LG: Right. You have that in the whole school structure
to this day. For example, Stanford students have a
tendency to downgrade Gal students. You find that
even in high schools; Lowell students in San Fran
cisco have a tendency to play down a place like
Poly High.
Ward: Scholastic nationalism?
LG: Scholastic nationalism; and a lot of it reflects
economic "background and things of that sort.
54
II ON TO CALIFORNIA
Education, Work, Political Action
Ward: So, after a year and a half, what happened? You left
CCNY, why?
LG: Well, what happened was this. My father had been with
the studios beginning quite early in the whole film
making -
Ward: In New York?
LG: In New York. I remember he worked for the old
Biograph. He even worked for a while with the old
Crystal Films, and I remember going with him to the
Hearst Cosmopolitan Studios.
Ward: He was a cabinet maker. What did he do for the
studios?
LG: In those days they built all their sets. Movies were
made indoors other than Westerns, which were called
"locations". The challenge to a good cabinet maker
was to build any kind of a set that was called for.
To him this was a continuous, almost daily challenge
to his abilities as a cabinet maker and carpenter.
There was nothing he couldn't make of wood, except
maybe a wool carpet. If he was given a picture, for
example - and in many cases they were not given blue
prints, just pictures, although he had taught himself
how to read blueprints and he had taught himself
English.
55
Ward;
LG:
And he could turn out a French provincial chair or
a Louis XIV -
That's right, or a curved stairway which was supposed
to be the set of a mansion. He could do all these
things. I'm not sure what year he went to work for
the studios. My hunch is that it was around 1914,
maybe later. I recall taking some expeditions with
my father, either to the Biograph Films or to Ashbury
Park for a so-called "location," or to the Hearst
Cosmopolitan. By that time I must have been ten or
eleven; he had already been with the motion picture
industry for some time.
About 1924 a number of the studios were beginning
to close in New York City. The boom was taking place
in Hollywood and some of the big studios had already
been set up in Hollywood; Paramount Films, Warner
Brothers, Fox.
My father decided to take a look at the Hollywood
scene. He had a chance to work there with a new
company called Tec-Art. That was located on Melrose
not too far away from Paramount, across the street.
He went out there, not as a partner but it was some
sort of small shares in the outfit; he was in charge
of construction as well as working in the carpenter
shop. He was a hard worker.
I'm not saying he hadn't done other cabinet work.
He and some other chap went into home building, but
obviously he didn't like it much and he went back to
the studios. So, after 1924, he began to go out to
Hollywood, except for visits home, particularly around
the summer, primarily to see whether the studios were
going to take hold there. It was doubtful whether
many of them would hang on in New York City.
By 1928, he had concluded that New York City was
washed up in terms of motion pictures and that he
definitely would move out to the west coast. So in
1928 the entire family moved out to the west coast.
Ward ;
I see, so then you went to UCLA?
settle in L. A.?
Whereabouts did you
56
LG: It was one of the larger motel courts.
Ward: What part of town would that be?
LG: It was in Hollywood. We were not there too long
before we moved out to this place on Beachwood. I
think it was 2626 or 2626-^, a large flat in one of
these four-flat affairs, and fairly comfortable.
I went to UCLA in the fall of 1928, the September
semester. At that time it was located on Vermont;
sort of the border between Hollywood and Los Angeles.
You were a few blocks away, so that it was an easy
trip; sometimes if you felt energetic you could walk
home. I was at the Vermont campus until it moved
over to Westwood.
Ward: The Janss Investment Company . . . ?
LG: That's right - the Janss Investment Company; this was
the subject of a great deal of discussion at Vermont,
as to how much Janss was making on the thing. The
land on which UCLA is now located was contributed by
Janss at Westwood because that then would give the
Janss properties a chance to develop all around it.
Ward: How long were you at Vermont?
LG: My recollection is that I was only there about half
a year. Maybe it was a year, but I sort of doubt it.
It could very well have been that it was around
January-February of 1929.
Ward: At the height of the boom?
LG: Oh, yes, it was still the boom period and many of us
felt that the move out to Westwood was to get rid of
all the poor kids.
Ward: Mmmm - that made a difference to you, coming from
Beachwood to Westwood?
LG: Or any part of Los Angeles. On the Vermont campus,
you had kids from all over Los Angeles, including as
far away as Boyle Heights; they could make it by
57
LG: street car. We had a fairly good street car system,
and it wasn't all that expensive. Westwood was
another story. The nearest you could get to the
campus was on Wilshire and that was quite a walk from
there.
Ward: Oh, yes - some ten blocks or so.
LG: Eight or ten blocks, right. Then there was the whole
business of eating; if you were stuck late going to
the library, there was no way of going home and get
ting some dinner and coming back. So, there was a
good deal of feeling that this was an attempt to
upgrade the school by automatic, economic elimination.
But we went out there, all right.
Ward: Did the family move?
LG: No, the family stayed exactly where they were on
Beachwood.
Ward: That was handy for your father with the studios?
LG: Right. From where we lived on Beachwood, it couldn't
have been more than five, ten minutes to work. By
that time he had a car, and even when he went to work
at other studios they were all within reasonable
distance. Westwood was another story. The only thing
close was Westwood itself, or places like Beverly
Hills, and nobody in the family was giving any thought
to living in Beverly Hills.
V/ard: What about the student body that you got into at
Vermont? There must have been a great difference be
tween that and CONY. There were no "alcoves", for
instance.
LG: There were no alcoves, but the student body I got to
know pretty quickly. Many of them came from a similar
cultural and economic background like - oh, the kids
that came out of Boyle Heights.
My folks knew some of the people out there; again,
I think, because of their cultural ties. It wasn't
too long before they had one of their organizations
going - old friends - the people who came from Kovna
58
LG: or around there; Lithuanians in the main. The
youngsters from those families were also at UCLA,
so that this group gravitated pretty quickly towards
each other.
Ward: So, you didn't feel uprooted?
LG: I did in part. I got to be very fond of New York
City as a youngster. I walked almost every inch of
it. I didn't think too much, for example, of start
ing off at home and walking the whole length of
Manhattan down to the Bowery, taking different streets
each time so that one time I'd be going through
Yorkville and another time going over towards Colum
bia and then walking down.
You could take the subway back from the Bowery and
for a nickel you were home again. I got to be very
fond of the city, so fond that in the summer of 1929
I took off and went back to New York.
Ward:
Oh, that was after you had been in college a year?
LG: I had been at UCLA about a year. You bought a ride
by sharing gas, very common. I forget what my share
was. I had been working in Hollywood and I was saving
up some money. Perhaps I had this at the back of my
mind, plus the fact that towards the latter part of
that year my father decided to get rid of an old 1924
Buick; I inherited the thing, so transportation was
a bit better. Running a car was a bit cheaper in
those days -
Ward: You were working?
LG: I worked around the studios on holidays, in part.
Ward: What kind of work were you doing?
LG: They called me a "grip", but actually it was laborer's
work, helping to rig sets, working along the catwalks
and things of that sort.
Ward: So you had the old Buick and you were saving some
money and you wanted to go to New York?
59
LG: Yes, I bought my way to New York, sharing driving
and so forth. Whoever the guy was who owned the car
was in a hurry to get there because I don't remember
stopping along the way. We slept in the car; stopped
for a meal once in a while and go to the can. We
just drove day and night. It took a little over four
days, driving day and night along Highway 66; north
around the Panhandle to that part of Texas that tied
on to another highway, and got to New York.
I worked in New York for a couple of months,
selling shoes; that was it; I had done some of that
in Hollywood. You did all kinds of odd things. So,
I sort of got it out of my system - the homesickness
and thought I might as well come back, which I did.
I had left before the semester was finished in
1929: when I got back there was a question as to
whether I would move on. The profs I was talking to
agreed I could go on the next semester, because by
that time I would have been a junior.
Then at the end of that semester I took both the
exams for the previous semester and the ones for the
semester I was in. I was able to make it up all
right; there was no great problem. The general
attitude of the school was that they weren't all that
anxious to lose students.
Ward: They weren't nit-picking?
LG: No. Bear in mind that Westwood was still considered
the southern branch; people from up here never talked
about UCLA. They simply talked about the southern
branch of the University of California.
Ward: So, you got into the junior year all right?
LG: I got into the junior year all right. I was taking
economics, accounting - -
Ward: Accounting?
LG: Yes; I decided that it wouldn't do me any harm. I
might learn something.
Ward: Some poli sci (political science)?
60
LG: A little bit of that, right. Those were the principal
subjects; got to meet a number of friends, who
continued friends. It was about that time that I met
Aubrey Grossman (who became an attorney for American
Indians, etc.) - 1928; it could very well be that
that was when he started UCLA. Aubrey is a few years
younger than I am.
By that time the campus was a little more livable;
when we first moved out there about the only things
that were completed were Royce Hall and the Library;
not even the Student Union Building. All of it -
it was built out of brick on what amounted to barren
dunes. I recall a number of professors talking quite
openly that Janss had really made himself a deal
because the university was on an earthquake fault.
Whether they were right or wrong, I don't know. So
far it's still there.
Ward: So are the buildings.
LG: Right. One of the reasons they were arguing so much
about brick is that brick is one of the few things
that cannot withstand an earthquake worth a damn; but
that wasn't our problem at the time. Dust. The wind
would blow out there and the dust was just unbeliev
able. It would fill the cars, and you would find
yourself shutting the windows, shutting the doors
Ward: Suffocating?
LG: Yeah, suffocating. Now it is a very pleasant univer
sity because they have done a great job landscaping,
a lot of grass around there, although the buildings
have gotten pretty crowded together. But there were
no dorms there at the time. Some people were just
beginning to build apartments and downtown Westwood
had the first few shops, including an ice cream
parlor. It was a sort of headquarters for the kids.
Ward: So, economics, poli sci, accounting. By that time
you were getting close to coming of age, huh?
LG: Yes, by that time I was 19. It was while I was at
UCLA that my political thinking began to fall into
place; not just myself, but also a number of my
friends.
61
LG: There was Aubrey, there was May Solomon, Corinne
Silver, - some others; most of them were from similar
backgrounds; some of the people in some of the
fraternities; oh, guys like Percy Solotoy, who later
took over this company Brown-Saltzman, furniture
builders. Percy remained a friend for many, many
years. I knew his wife very well - Sonya. She died
some years later - cancer.
Percy belonged to one of the fraternities; so did
Joe Aidlin. They had a fraternity house near the
Vermont campus, because I remember going over there
during one of their rushing periods. Decided pretty
quickly that I could do without it; just wasn't my
scene, period.
A number of youngsters, both at Vermont and then
at UCLA, were part of the Young Communist League.
Some were also members of the "Blue Blouses," I think
they were called.
Ward: "Blue Blouses"? That would indicate a Russian - ?
LG: No. They just wore a blue blouse that was like a work
shirt; they had small singing groups and acting
groups - things they put together for meetings. I
heard about an organization called Young Pioneers;
that, I gather, was centered primarily around Boyle
Heights; part of the Jewish community.
Ward: Oh - was Meyer Baylin a - ?
LG: Meyer Baylin was part of that group. Baylin did not
go to UCLA as far as I know. One reason I remember
Meyer Baylin is because Meyer Baylin was one of those
who unofficially closed the Olympic Games when they
jumped out of the stands and ran around the track -
not at Olympic speed - with "Free Tom Mooney" signs
on them. That must have been 1932.
Ward: Yes - it was.
LG: They went from there right to the city jail, and
Meyer Baylin
62
Ward: Oh., and Leo Gallagher; he got fired from some little
university where he was a law professor "because he
defended them, (and who later defended Georgi Dimitrov
in the Reichstag Fire trial).
LG: He defended them, right. I got to know Leo Gallagher
later on. A marvelous old guy; and Al Wirin -
Ward: Gallagher was a devout Catholic . . .
LG: Yes; and he and Al V/irin ( a prominent Los Angeles
attorney) worked closely together, you recall. Al
Wirin was active in the Civil Liberties Union. He
died a few days ago. So, I began to meet a number of
these youngsters and of course the political dis
cussions were going full blast.
Ward: You found more anti-radical sentiment at UCLA than
you did at CCNY, didn't you?
LG: I'm not sure that it was so much anti as indifferent.
The professor didn't seem to give so much never mind.
Some of them were taken with it because it would
liven up some of those classes, which were deadly,
deadly dull; did not seem to be disturbing to them.
You didn't have anything at the time that resembled
an Un-American Activities Committee or organizations
of that sort, so there was no fear on the part of the
professors. Some of them actually felt, as a pro
fessor should, that that is exactly what a school is
for; that if it is not a market place for ideas, no
place ever will be.
It was during this period that I became active with
the politically active kids in many ways. I guess it
was my age, getting into that period of life when
everything is opening up for you.
Ward: And you had to go to meetings?
LG: A few, although for a while I was primarily interested
in doing everything under the sun. I decided I wanted
to go back to the piano; luckily picked a professor
who really knew a great deal about it. He had been
both a musician and also sang with some group in
Europe; at least I learned a little bit with him.
63
LG: I also decided that I ought to stay in good physical
shape. It was not only a question of walking almost
everywhere; I remember buying a set of weights with
out any instructions, which was foolish. Weights -
you can hurt yourself - -
Ward: Unless you know what you are doing.
LG: Although I got to the point where I could snatch and
jerk two hundred pounds. Press is much more
difficult. Weights, piano, as well as being in school
taking a full program.
My schedule got to be such that while the family
was very tolerant, there was only so much they could
take. If I decided that in addition to doing my work
in school, working out on weights, and doing my hiking,
I would start to practice the piano at 10 or 11
o'clock at night - it wouldn't work.
Finally, my dad solved the problem for me. He
talked to somebody down at the studios where they
had a couple of grand pianos on the sets. So, he
said, "Look, you can go practice all you please."
##
LG: I was talking about my schedule v/hich always seemed
to run 24 hours a day, or very close. Under this
arrangement where I could practice down at the stud
ios, I recall one instance where I must have gotten
started pretty late at night. The work crews were
just coming in as I was getting through, so it
must have been around six o'clock in the morning.
The guy who ran the studio came by and I was
practicing something or other and he said, "Look,
the guys are about to start work. I don't mind your
playing the piano, but play something a little bit
faster, something in marching tempo; see if we can get
any life around here."
Ward: So you did?
LG: No, I just called it a day.
64
Ward: Then, you had just about played all night.
LG: No - I don't know what time or how late I started.
What I distinctly recall about that whole period was
very intense work and activity.
(Interview 3: 28 February, 1978)
Ward: Lou, where did you sleep those days?
LG: When did I sleep or where? I think all young people
get the idea that four hours sleep is enough - five
hours is plenty. With that kind of a schedule, that
was about it.
Most of the time I stayed where my folks lived on
Beachwood Drive. Later on, at least a year after
that, some of us chipped in and rented a summer
cottage or cabin in one of those canyons leading off
of Sunset Boulevard. It wasn't Topanga Canyon, but
it was in that area, only about five minutes from
school. It gave the advantage of being able to sleep
there if you worked late at the library or thought
you were losing a lot of time on everything else.
It was also a general hangout for some of the
kids. The rent on the place was twenty bucks a
month, or something like that. By that time I had
my father's Buick; it was a sedan with a canvas top.
I remember one time being in a great rush, flying
down this canyon, making a turn and the car swaying;
the top of the car hit a truck - not the body of the
car, just the top; it had these posts that held up
the touring top. After thinking about that for a
while, I thought I might as well have an open car,
so I cut off the entire top and left the wooden base.
Well, it became an open five-passenger roadster. It
suited me fine, except for the winter weather.
Ward: So you just put on rain gear?
LG: I guess so.
65
Ward: Do you want to talk about the people who were your
companions up there in the little cabin?
LG: Well, I remember some of them who went there; Aubrey
was there for a while; Sonya who married Percy
Solotoy, used to come by there. Another person,
Corinne Silver - I lost track of her. There were a
number of others who would come through at one time
or another. It was sort of like a hideaway from
school, a gathering place.
Ward: You'd call it a commune today, I suppose?
LG: No, I don't think it would be called a commune at any
time because there wasn't much work going on around
the place. About the nearest thing it came to a
commune was sharing the cost of hanging on to it.
Ward: I think you said something about using your education
in accounting. You worked for somebody - kept his
books?
LG: Yes, I was making some money, at least enough to pay
my share and buy gasoline for the car and get books.
Gasoline was very, very cheap then. I remember price
wars that would reach the point where you got ten
gallons for a dollar; offering eleven gallons for a
buck, an extra gallon thrown in like a baker's dozen.
Things like clothes weren't all that important;
the amount of outside entertainment was miniscule;
there was no such thing as going to restaurants to
eat. If we wanted food at the shack, we'd fix it
ourselves. Groceries were not very expensive either,
so that getting by was not that much of a chore.
I managed to get myself a pretty good part-time
job; it was either two half days a week or two half
days and Saturday. For a while I was hanging on to
that job and working also at this shoe place on
Hollywood Boulevard.
Ward: You were on your own?
LG: Pretty much on my own, although I still had my room
at the house with the folks and spent time there.
Anyway, this guy had this drugstore for years, but
none of his books had been taken care of. They
66
LG: actually were in no shape for any kind of an inspec
tion.
Whether it was the Internal Revenue or another
government agency that would do periodic inspection
of drug stores, I am not sure. It was some federal
agency, the primary reason being that the drug stores
had "become one of the legal outlets for alcohol. I
would also help out in the store; but by and large
my job was to try to get those books straightened
out. After a couple of months of working on it, with
the little knowledge I had, at least he had a set of
ledgers and some idea where the money was being spent
and how much money was being taken in. And this went
along okay until one day he came to me and said, "I
have cashed this $800 bad check. You'll have to put
that down as a bad check." I said, "Frankly, I don't
think if anybody goes through those books they're
going to believe that."
I'd seen some of these guys coming by there. They
were bootleggers who were bringing what I guess was
straight alcohol. They'd either sell it that way or
mix it a bit; sometimes give it a medicinal name.
There were individuals who even had prescriptions
from doctors, so that there was always a certain
amount of cover going on. But this was a bit too
blatant, this $800 check, which was his way of paying
off these guys, cashing their checks and then writing
them off. He told me: "That's just a plain mistake
and that's the way I want it done."
I said, "Well, if you want it done that way, you'd
better do it yourself. I don't see any purpose in
trying to handle books that way. I don't think the
job is worth enough to get myself in that kind of a
stupid jam, because if they do come around and inspect
your books again - somebody had been around there and
decided the books were in fairly good shape - they're
not going to ask just yon, they're going to ask me
'how in the devil did this $800 bad debt come along? 1 ;
ordinarily people like druggists or a grocery store
owner won't cash any $800 bad check." No, pretty
unusual - -
Ward: Eight dollars maybe, but not $800
67
LG: Eight bucks in those days perhaps, yes, or if you
knew somebody very well, make it ten; but 800 bucks
was a lot of dough. The net result was that we
parted company.
Ward: How much was he paying you?
LG: I think it was somewhere around 30, 35 cents an hour;
maybe 40, which in those days was - it sure as heck
wasn't big pay or anything, but it wasn't the worst
thing around because depression had gotten under way.
Bear in mind that this was after the stock market
crash, and in those days there was an economic time
lag between the east coast and the west coast. The
impact of heavy unemployment and everything else had
a certain time lag.
Later on it became very manifest in California,
just as it did all over the country. There was no
minimum wage. It wasn't adopted until 1936-37,
thereabouts. I was being paid about all you could
expect; for part-time work it wasn't too bad.
V/ard: Somehow from previous discussions I get the figure
of $15. You worked a lot of hours at 35 - 40 cents
an hour to make $15.
LG: Oh, yeah - an awful long time. After all, if you're
getting two bits an hour you get 2 bucks a day. I
have a figure at the back of my head that I made
around $15 a week.
Ward: How long did this type of employment continue?
LG: Oh, I was on that job about six - seven months, and
I still got some other work. I would pick up odd
jobs in the studios once in a while. Those jobs
were dependent on whether I could be available for a
full day's work; the studios had no use for part-
time people. When they hired somebody, it was for
the day.
Ward: Your father would be helpful there, wouldn't he?
LG: Oh, sure; that would happen during vacation periods,
holidays and so forth; then I might be able to pick
up a couple of bucks. My father, by the way, never
68
LG: believed there was any purpose in working with him
because he could not conceive of any left-hander
becoming a carpenter; just no way.
Ward: It's odd that you should be left-handed in everything
except writing.
LG: Yes; when I was in school they would practically
force you to write right-handed.
Ward: Also at that time you and probably your family, too,
maintained some hope that you might become a musician,
isn't that so? Professionally?
LG: Not particularly. Among the Jews in those days, a
good professional musician - and by that they didn't
mean jazz, either - had certain standing and prestige.
On the other hand a musician who sort of played
around in little bands or nightclubs to make a living,
I don't think that ever struck them as a yiddish
nachus; nachus is something you enjoy. I don't think
they entertained that idea so much.
If anything, they had the usual hopes that some
of their children would move into one of the profes
sions. I know that they felt very strongly about my
sister's ambitions to not only get a PhD, but to go
into teaching, which was the obvious logical step,
in the case of a woman particularly. She was doing
her work in literature and languages, that's where
she wound up too - a very good linguist. I don't
think it occurred to them that I had the ability or
the talent to become a musician.
Ward: Still, it seems to me that anyone who practices half
the night is pretty eager to do something with all
that.
LG: No, I was fascinated with the piano; it is a different
instrument. People can say, "somebody is an excellent
violinist; he can make a violin cry." I've heard
some of the greatest pianists in the world, people
like Rubenstein (Artur Rubenstein, another famous
pianist) and Horowitz, Gilels, Richter, and some of
them have been so amazing as to their technique and
knowledge that they might bring the piano to its
knees, but they could never make it cry.
69
LG: The fascination with the piano has an awful lot to
do with the intricacies of chord structure and every
thing else. Finger dexterity. I am not sure that
some of this practice accomplished all that much.
If you had done it first thing in the morning when
you woke up and were alert you might pick it up in
half the time. The practice itself was an enjoyable
thing .
Ward: Obviously, it must have been. So here you were along
in your junior year - senior year by that time -
LG: Let's see, I graduated in February 1931, the winter
class. I was in my senior year by 1930, yes.
Joining The Young Communists
Ward: So, other things were pulling at you - left-wing
politics?
LG: Yes.
Ward: Could you tell me anything about - any interesting
circumstances?
LG: I think that by that time a lot of my thinking at
least had begun to crystallize. Some of the things
that I had heard argued in the alcoves of CCNY,
some of the things I had begun to read, were liter
ally being confirmed by the economy; by that time
the economic crash had taken place in 1929. Before
long you were reading about these enormous unemploy
ment lines and these soup kitchen lines on the east
coast.
Everything was adding up to convince anyone who
was at all alert that the economic system just
wouldn't work. This was being confirmed almost
weekly because it wasn't merely a crash of capitalism
in this country; all of Europe was equally plagued.
Ward: The western world was all involved -
70
LG: The only parts of the world that weren't as
immediately affected were the colonial world; we knew
nothing about it. So little was said about what
happened to a country, for example, that depended on
the export of ore, while here the steel mills were
closed down.
Obviously, the impact on that country must have
been unbelievable. Like all colonial countries, they
were the source of raw material and a market for
finished goods by the controlling country, so they
must have gotten the backwash of this same economic
situation. Countries like Cuba ....
Later I began to do a lot of work on the whole
background of sugar, its price fluctuations, market
controls, growth areas, exporting as against im
porting countries. And I found out that in Cuba by
the end of 1930 or '31 the price of sugar had gotten
down to the point where a sugar worker v/as paid a
sack of rice and a pair of jeans for the season -
what's called the "safra". They wouldn't even see
money.
Ward: Wait a minute - what's it called?
LG: SAFRA- It 'sa Spanish word for the harvest
period.
Ward: Well, you heard the arguments between the various
leftist sects in the alcoves of CCNY the followers
of Trotsky, the followers of this, that and the
other?
LG: Some of those arguments didn't even discuss things
like Marx (Karl Marx, famous revolutionary theorist).
A lot of those kids must have taken it with their
mother's milk because they simply assumed it; they
assumed that any knowledgable youngster had to be a
Socialist or a left-winger; and in support of Russia
and the revolution. Then, obviously, you had to
lean toward Communism, which had not taken any form
until after the Russian Revolution - or just before,
after the breakup between the Mensheviks and the Bol
sheviks.
Ward: Then these kids must have been the children of 1905ers
to a considerable extent, yes?
71
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
I should think so, yes; and a lot of them carried
the endless debates that had gone on in the Eastside
right over to CCNY, with practically no interruption
except for the subway trip.
That's quite a political picture. So, along comes
someone who says, "Would you like to join the YCL?",
I suppose.
Yep.
You were ready for it?
Yes; everything you saw around you confirmed what was
being argued - the feeling at least on the part of
the young people I ran around with. The feeling on
the part of my folks was very intense anger about
the foreign invasions of Russia that followed the
1917 revolution. We all had in mind the armies from
21 different countries that were invading their
borders, and a surprising confidence that the Russians
could hang on.
Anyway, with this joining there was a lot of in
tensive reading. We began to go through all the
literature - everything from things like Value,
Price and Profit to What Is To Be Done, familiar
pamphlets. Then there was heavier reading. I began
to tackle Das Kapital - at least made it part way
through. Later on, I made it the other way through.
We were pretty outspoken on campus about our
beliefs. I recall, for example, a raucous debate I
got into at a political science class I was taking.
I don't think the professor was a bad egg, but
people like myself thought, "Here's the goddamn
capitalist world falling around your ears and you're
talking about political science, which in itself is
a contradiction in terms because it is not a science;
in effect, nothing but a description of all the
techniques of ideal democracy, as they have it en
visioned; great textbook stuff.
I made the flat statement that a lot of this stuff
was pure bunk, that the government belonged to the
people who owned the country; that's how simple it
was -
72
Ward: And - ?
LG: It was a question of power -
Ward: And this professor took issue with you?
LG: Yeah, he thought that the democratic structure
offered an opportunity for all people to make their
changes through the legislative forms.
My position was very simple; if they could make
some changes, how in the hell come we had this
depression? Why can't they put people to work?
After all, a pair of hands is supposed to be an
asset, not a liability.
Sure, very simplistic stuff, but it was still all
wrapped up in the conviction that a capitalist
economy had these periodic crises. This concept of
periodic crises dominated any discussion of poli
tical science because the ten year cycle of economic
set-back was almost as though it started the same
day every ten years going back to 1800.
Ward: Did you go into the generation cycle of wars?
LG: No, except that we began to talk a great deal about
things like imperialist wars. We felt that World
War I, without any question, was an imperialist war;
just a struggle for empires, colonies. Noboby bought
this business of the war having started because some
archduke got bumped off in Croatia or Yugoslavia or
whatever it was -
Ward: Yes, Yugoslavia -
LG: Sarajevo. The interesting thing is that after more
than fifty years, a single fact like that still
remains in my mind, including the name of the man.
Ward: Well, what kind of a mark did you get from that
professor?
LG: I don't recall. I got by all right.
Ward: I asked because you said the debate was rather
raucous -
73
LG: Yes, but I also had a feeling that he was sort of a
nice guy; I could expect him to defend what he had
been teaching for many years.
Ward: Cr do you think he was just protecting his job?
LG-: No. This was long before people in the academic
field were walking on eggs.
Ward: Well, first of all you had duties. You were assigned
stuff to read. And you followed your own inclination,
also, in reading. You had to make reports now and
then on what you knew and what you were doing, to the
YCL?
LG: The big bulk of the sessions that took place com
prised not just reports on current events, develop
ments which inevitably ran to the economy in the
main; included in many cases were reports on what
was happening on the other side of the ocean. And
then there was invariably discussion on some piece
of literature that everybody was supposed to have
read. The discussions were worthwhile; not merely
a repetition of what you had read to prove you had
read it.
Ward: You attempted to adapt what you had read?
LG: There was always an attempt -
Ward: To describe the whole situation and what you thought
and what your comrades thought?
LG: That's right. It wasn't like the kind of discussion
you'll sometimes have at the dinner table with a
group of friends, all of whom have read the same
article in the Nation.
Ward: Well, so it began; a period of demonstrations here
and there, little things - ?
LG: Oh, some street meetings, mostly around Hollywood;
distribution of leaflets, primarily on the question
of unemployment. I think that the Workers' Alliance
(an organization of the unemployed) had started by
then; urging people to give it a hand. The cops
74
LG: were not very friendly to meetings; Los Angeles at
that time, as I remember, was under the aegis of
this guy called Red Hynes (a Los Angeles police
officer) - you might remember his name -
Ward: HYNES-
LG: Right. He was a professional redbaiter, the expert
on Reds -
Ward: He had the support of the Los Angeles Times of that
day?
LG: Yes, the Chandlers, (Harry Chandler and family, own
ers of the Los Angeles Times). They had their Red
squad and everything else, which later on other
cities had, including San Francisco. So, a lot of
the demonstrations were rousted around, sometimes
just broken up. Nobody thought of going to court
for an injunction against the cops or anything like
that.
Ward: Well, it would hardly have paid to do it.
LG: That's right.
Ward: You'd have had a hell of a time getting a lawyer to
do that for you.
LG: Yah, even though later on we found that there were
all kinds of very fine lawyers in L.A., like Leo
Gallagher and Al Wirin. I guess it was partly we
didn't know them and partly we thought it was just
a waste of time.
Ward: There were a lot of things that went on down there
that I have heard about, including taking pretty
young girls who had joined any one of the left-
wing outfits and trying to get them to entice the
sailors who were on the town to go to meetings and
all that sort of thing. Do you have any familiarity
with any of that sort of stuff?
LG: No, in fact, I think this is apocryphal. There were
efforts made to get leftwing literature into the
hands of the fleet or anybody else; no question about
that. But this business of enticement and having
special cadres, this was all stuff that came out of
75
LG: the professional redbaiters. Look, those guys had
to make a living and keep their jobs at the Los
Angeles Times; if they didn't invent a story, I
think they would be off the payroll.
Ward: All right, so these things began to happen. Anything
that you would like to discuss about your political
or labor activities in your last year or so at UCLA?
LG: We decided we ought to make an attempt to organize.
At that time the TUUL was around - Trade Union Unity
League - which was leftwing dominated. Happily, it
did make some progress in some of the textile plants
in New Jersey. I think they made a contract at
Patterson, New Jersey, where Big Bill Haywood (leader
of the Wobblies) had helped to lead a strike, he and
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (a famous female Wobbly who
later became a leading Communist). The strike had
been broken, so an attempt was made to set up this
rival federation, which had sporadic success.
In San Francisco, even after I moved up here a
few years later, they still had the Marine Workers
Industrial Union around. I automatically joined it -
even though I never went to sea. They never did
get a contract as far as I know. They had some un
believably dedicated, hard-working people with them -
guys like Harry Jackson (a speaker and organizer for
Communist causes).
Ward: His real name was Glickson.
LG: Right. At that time he was Harry Jackson; after the
MWIU finally folded its tent, Harry Glickson got a
job in Warehouse; he was a good, solid member of
Local 6 until he was pensioned off. He died a few
years ago.
Ward: The last time I saw him was in a natural place -
a demonstration in front of the San Francisco City
Hall about peace.
LG: And there were very few demonstrations that Harry
Jackson would miss. But in L. A. we tried to do
something with the TUUL.
Ward: What types of workers did you approach?
76
LG: Well, in 1931 the Hollywood unions had a strike and
were pretty thoroughly dismantled. They never did
really get back in their original shape for some
years. I remember working down there with a chap
named Wolfe, who was an old-time studio worker and
a leftwinger.
We tried to form a motion picture workers' in
dustrial union. There were a number of sign-ups,
but never really enough to make a go of it.
Remember, there was no such thing as a National
Labor Relations Board. If a guy signed up and the
boss found out about it, didn't like it, he would
just kick his ass off the job.
My dad never dropped his union membership. He
just remained a member of the Carpenters (Union) all
the time - good days and bad days. Wolfe was a good
egg and we worked together. I was just lending a
hand, helping him to distribute leaflets and things
of that sort.
I didn't have as much to lose as somebody
permanently attached to the industry. In those days
you did not ask a guy who was working full time in
the studios to go out there and distribute leaflets.
That's just another way of asking a guy, "Why don't
you quit your job?"
I recall in 1931 distributing leaflets to the
Max Factor workers, the cosmetics place; still has
a big plant in Hollywood, now under contract with the
ILWU.* Has been for some years.
I remember distributing leaflets. Most of us
youngsters distributing leaflets were driven off and
a few of us were picked up and spent the night in
the clink. And I gave some other name and the next
day, they kicked our ass out, and that's all.
Ward: No charges or anything?
LG: No, they didn't bother with charges, and it never
occurred to you to go back in there and make a
protest, either. What the hell good would it do?
Obviously, Max Factor could get just about anything
they wanted from the Hollywood police.
*ILWU (international Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's
Uni on )
77
Ward: Well, those activities went on -
LG: Any number of unemployment demonstrations were going
on, too, and I remember attending those. Many of
those were downtown in front of City Hall or places
like that; or out in Boyle Heights; some of them in
that Olivera Street section, which later became the
Mexican section.
##
Ward: Okay, Louie, you were in the middle of - something
happened downtown, I believe.
LG: These demonstrations, or most of them, were directed
toward the economy, unemployment, jobs; most of them
were broken up by the cops. During that time a num
ber of us went down to San Diego to help out in an
unemployment demonstration. One of the guys who came
along was Will Geer (a movie actor). He's the guy
who acted the part of Walton in the Wai tons on TV.
Ward: There's a Geer who played the part of the sheriff
in Salt of the Earth.
LG: That could be - Will Geer. There was a bit of a
riot that followed the demonstration and the cops
were breaking it up. Some of the guys tore apart
a park bench. I remember seeing Will Geer with a
piece of it in hand, swinging away at the cops.
Whether he prefers to remember that or not right
now, I don't know. He's one of the actors in Holly
wood that had a rough time later on after the Dies
Committee, the McCarthy Committee.
So there was a great deal of activity along this
line. I remember the unemployment marches in those
days, a number of them. One thing about unemployment
in those days; it was the most democratic thing in
the United States because everybody from every walk
of life was in that same goddam line - college
professors, engineers, secretaries, laborers, you
name it.
Ward: Well, you got a degree in February of '31 from UCLA;
in what?
78
LG: In economics.
Ward: Now, to something else - there were girls, I suppose,
along the way; you made some experiments. You got
married somewhere in there, didn't you?
LG: Right, I got married later in '31. When I graduated
in February I decided not to apply to Berkeley until
the fall semester; part of the time was spent in
working a bit; a lot of YCL activity at the time.
Ward: What kind of work were you doing then? Studio again?
Matrimony
LG: Whenever I could catch a job - almost anything.
It was getting rougher and rougher to find work. I
got married during the summer to Dorothy Shenkman -
Dodie. As a matter of fact, we went off to Yuma to
get married. I was also trying to make a couple of
bucks so as to go to Berkeley.
Ward: You went to Yuma and sometime later you went to
Berkeley?
LG: Yes, but before that I worked on two things: one
was - my father had bought a lot with the hope of
building a house around 1929 or 1930. It was on
Glen Green. Glen Green was a dead-end street that
ran off of Beachwood Drive, a little further up to
ward Hollywoodland.
In 1931 the studio where he had been working all
those years since 1924, Tec-Art, was having a very
rough time. They finally went under. They owed my
dad quite a bit of money, wages that had accumulated,
and I recall a family session where he finally
decided that his chances of getting the money were
very slim, if any. If workers' liens on wages even
existed in those days, nobody thought of it in those
terms.
On the other hand, the guy who ran the studio,
Hamilton - an interesting and pleasant guy - though
the poor bastard committed suicide a couple of years
79
LG: later - went along with the idea of my dad getting
his money out by ordering building materials. The
studio credit was apparently still good. He figured
that he sure as hell didn't want to beat my dad out
of any money; if he was going to owe anybody, he
would prefer to ov/e it to some big building supply
outfit. After all, they were good customers of all
these outfits because most of the sets were con
structed from scratch.
My dad is one of those who finally began to
resolve some of these problems of building the sets
from scratch because he introduced a jack which
could be used for storing flats; a flat being, say,
the side of a building. He invented a jack; you
fastened one to each end and you could lift the flat
on a few wheels. The thing was stable with quite
wide wheels and then you could shove it in a place
and store it in one of these big studios, upright.
It was depression time, there was nothing to do
except go ahead with the building, because the
supplies were there. So my dad worked on the
building, I worked on it, my brother, Sam, who is
a couple of years younger than I am, he worked on
the thing. My other brother, Saul, was too young.
We finally put together a good solid four-
apartment place with a very tiny apartment on the
street level; the whole thing was on a bit of a rise.
Ward: What v/as the tiny apartment for? A manager?
LG: For any one of us - no manager; they never had a
manager. They always lived there themselves. I
don't think he used an architect. We worked on the
house and I recall carpenters coming around trying
to get a job for even a buck or two a day, which
my dad wouldn't tolerate. He paid the union scale.
Ward: What was the scale then?
LG: Maybe the scale was five bucks; I'm not sure. Wage
scales were much lower in '31. You didn't even have
the minimum wage. There were no such things as
fringes and Social Security deductions; they didn't
exist.
80
LG: Whatever the union scale was, he paid. Tine, he
didn't hire any more than he had to. If we had to
sweat it out, we sweated it out. If you put in a
12-hour day, you put in a 12-hour day. Packing
lumber there was quite a job, uphill to the second
story and climbing over these rafters. I packed
the lumber.
I also learned a lesson on work that I never
forgot. We had to mix concrete. A lot of this
stuff was mixed by hand - these troughs, you know,
a certain amount of cement, a certain amount of sand,
a certain amount of lime and then you'd put them
together.
He hired a laborer to help on this. We built the
forms for both the foundation and a retaining wall
that went mostly around the building. Well, I
thought I was in pretty good shape. I was young and
full of piss and vinegar, and hell! I was going like
a ball of fire; we were shovelling and this man
worked at a slower pace than I, but very evenly
paced. At the end of around four hours I was ready
to drop.
Luckily, there was a luncheon break where I could
nap for a while and get some food. Then I realized
something; look, this man is going to keep going the
whole day at the same pace and I'm just going to
have to quit. From then on I watched him, just tried
to work at his pace. He knew what he was doing.
Ward: All right, so it was along in there that you got
married. Where did you live? Did you set up house
keeping some place or what?
LG: We set up housekeeping for a short while there. A
bit later, after we finished on this, I took a job.
Some guy came around and said, "There's only one way
you can make a buck, if you want to go to Berkeley.
I've gotten a franchise for selling publications. I
know all kinds of areas around here that are untapped,
including places in Pasadena, where people can afford
these things."
I said, "Fine." The guy's name was Harry Gervitz -
G E R V I T Z. Later on he became administrative
secretary to one of the governors up in Sacramento,
81
LG: and then I think he was dean of either Santa
Barbara or some part of the University of California.
Ward: Really! He sounded to me at first like a con man.
LG: Yes, "but he wasn't; he worked himself. He provided
the transportation and he got a couple of extra
bucks for that. We really did quite well.
Ward: Did you have to put any money down to get this?
LG: No; I wouldn't have had any money, anyway. He
supplied the gas and oil. He's the one who drove
us to Yuma, too.
Ward: Then he was your best man, practically?
LG: Yeah, though I think it was one of those justices
of the peace things. But we did fairly well. We
hit a lot of live ones in Pasadena.
Ward: What kind of magazines were you selling?
LG: Popular magazines. Sometimes we'd sleep in these
tiny motels if we were too far away from L.A.
Sometimes I met Dodie very early in the morning -
everything else was done on foot, you see.
Ward: Cn foot?
LG: Oh, yes, you walked. In other words, if you went
to an area in Pasadena, you just spent your day
walking.
Ward: Oh, but you didn't go from Pasadena to Westwood?
LG: Oh, no-no - that's when he'd pick you up. He
would drop different people and then he would take
his route. Then he'd pick you up at the end of the
day. Another place that stands out in my mind,
we went up to Santa Maria because that was a good
distance from L. A., beyond Santa Barbara.
Ward: Well, anyway, what was Dodie doing all the time?
LG: She was doing some modeling and some other kind of
work, trying to make a couple of bucks. Everybody
82
LG: was scratching. The reason this Santa Maria stuck
in my head is that I ran into a whole group of
Japanese farmers. I figured no use spending much
time there; those were mostly market farmers,
vegetable growers; produce.
I discovered, on the other hand, after sitting
around with a couple of them that they would look
through the publications. They would always ask
about certain publications; then I realized that
their main interest in buying them was not for
themselves but for their kids.
Apparently, they had this real pressure on to
make sure that the kids became Americanized, even
though it was very probable they were sending their
kids to Japanese language school. Anyway, I made
enough dough there to make it to Cal and to get by
there.
Ward: How long did this period for getting money to go to
Berkeley last?
LG-: About three months.
Ward: Well, anyhow, this represented the gap between
February 1931 and the start of the fall semester.
LG: Plus there was another period in there of working
on the house; there wasn't much idle time.
Life in Berkeley
Ward: So, then you came to Cal. Did Dodie come with you?
LG: Yes; as a matter of fact, we hitch-hiked up.
Ward: So, you came with the intention of doing graduate
work in what?
LG: I wasn't too sure myself. I knew that the chance
of getting any kind of a steady job in L. A. just
wasn't in sight. It was the heart of the depression;
83
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward ;
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
"by that time the full impact had been felt on the
west coast. I liked the idea of going back to
school. I played around with several ideas; one
was law school, which I did for a year. That was
something that my parents regarded with high favor.
Oh, the professional man?
The professional man; I registered at Boalt (Boalt
Hall, U.C. law school) and there was no problem
getting in, but at the same time I decided I would
do some graduate work in economics. I will concede
that my attendance schedule at Boalt was not out
standing.
There were some profs there that I enjoyed a
great deal, particularly old Max Radin, who had a
great sense of humor, one of the erudite sort of men,
And as a matter of fact, we became quite friendly -
and Ballentine, (Henry Winthrop Ballentine) I liked
him; he was another -
That was Betty Ballentine 's (a San Francisco news
paper reporter) father?
Yes, Betty Ballentine 's father. Another prof I
remember taking a course with, a person I really
enjoyed was called Captain Kidd (Alexander Marsden
Kidd) -
His last name was Kidd?
That's right -
Know his first name?
I haven't the slightest idea, and I don't think he
he knew himself. Everybody called him Captain Kidd
To his face?
Oh, yeah - well, no, Professor Kidd; but outside his
presence everybody talked about Captain Kidd. He
was a short, gray-haired fellow. Later on he did
some arbitration work for the ILWU, (International
Longshoremens' and Warehousemen' Union).
84
Ward: Y/hereabouts did you live in Berkeley?
LG: We lived up on Euclid approximately three-quarters
of a mile or a mile from campus.
Ward: Did you live up hill from the Rose Garden or "below
the Rose Garden?
LG: No, we were a little bit below the Rose Garden.
Ward: Apartment house?
LG: Yeah, one of these wooden apartment houses with
these sort of cubby -hole flats. It might have been
a home at one time that was then carved up into a
lot of flats. There were several people around with
whom we became quite friendly; one guy I remember
in particular. I think his background was Mexican
or Spanish and he'd think nothing of starting the
morning with some operatic tunes, some of v/hich we
could have done without. He wasn't in the best
voice but a good guy, good company.
There were a number of people up there who were
transferees from L. A.; UCLA had no law school at
the time. As a matter of fact, I believe, no
graduate school; or if it did, it might have been
in a couple of limited subjects.
Ward: Were you working at all while you were going to
school?
LG: Not so much during the week. I had enough money to
pay the rent; transportation to and from school was
no cost item - you could walk there. Tuition was
just about non-existent. You paid a little bit in
law school but that was for certain books you had to
use. All books were purchased second hand. I
forget the name of the place which was the main
shopping place for students for required reading;
it was right near Sather Gate (main entrance to the
campus at that time).
Ward: Oh, yes - well, that whole block from Sather Gate to
Bancroft (Bancroft Way, one block south of Sather
Gate) is gone now.
85
LG-: That's right - it's part of the university. When
I went there Sather Gate was just outside the
university grounds. They had this old iron fence
which was never closed -
Ward: They had a sign up and once a year they closed
everything so the cars couldn't cross the campus,
except where they wanted them to.
LG: Right - and they had those right of ways.
Ward: And Dodie, did she go to school, too?
LG: No; she did register for some classes, but I think
a good part of the time she tried making a buck too,
the same way a couple of other gals did, like Line
Fairley's (Lincoln Fairley, former research director,
ILWU) wife - what was her name then?
Ward: Bert (Bertha Stone) -
LG: I can't think of it - Bert - she was one of the
people, among the first we knew on campus. Dodie
would pick up some money as an artist's model, which
was hard work.
Ward: Well, Dodie was very pretty.
LG: Yes, Dodie was very pretty. A number of us got
work on Saturdays. During the week it was pretty
hard to tie in with working. The number of jobs
around the campus were not all that many; a few
people would work in the Golden Bear restaurant to
get a meal. I doubt if they paid them any money
because everybody lived on a shoe string. Money was
practically non-existent.
Ward: What would you say it cost you and Dodie a month to
live? You were getting by for less than $100 a
month?
LG: Oh, yes; the figure that was just going through my
mind was somewhere between $40 and 50.
Ward: Really? How much did you pay for rent?
86
LG: Twenty, maybe eighteen; rents were cheap. The
Berkeley campus was small then. I don't think that
the entire school, graduate and undergraduate,
exceeded 5,000 students.
Ward: North Hall was there -
LG: Boalt Hall was four stories - you would walk up,
no elevator. The Economics department was in an old
wooden shack, right next to the Campanile - whether
that's still there I don't know. They had a Student
Union, but it was a very small building, not too far
from the Faculty Club.
Ward: The Faculty Building was right across the way.
LG: Right - you crossed a small bridge, that was the
Faculty Building; students didn't go there unless
invited by a faculty member. It was a small campus.
I remember scouring around to find some work there
and I never hit anything. Finally, a number of us
got together. I'm trying to remember the guys
involved, whether Aubrey was there. Joe Segal, I
remember his name, a few others, at the Farmers'
Market on lower Washington Street -
Ward: On Sixth Street in Oakland?
LG: Right - Oakland. I think it's all been torn down,
but there was a Farmers' Market where farmers could
bring in produce on a Saturday. They would come in
around three or four in the morning with their
produce and set up their stands. I think they paid
a nominal fee.
For those people who couldn't afford the regular
grocery stores, this was the place to do your
shopping. The farmers were a good bunch, in the
main, and they needed workers for that day. I sup
pose many of them preferred students because there
was no problem that the students might say, "Look,
I need some more work." It was a one day job - we'd
come in and goodbye.
87
LG: We worked things out so that each of us would get
a job in a different section of the Farmers Market;
somebody would work in vegetables - certain kinds
of vegetables. Some in fruits -
Ward: Did you wrestle the boxes?
LG: Wrestle the boxes, take them down, put them on the
counter. Nothing like a fancy grocery display; you
sold the stuff very quickly on Saturdays. At the
end of the day, if there was a lot of produce left
over, they said, "Help yourself."
If there was fruit left over that they thought
might keep, they would take it. In many cases ,they
would say, "Okay, you can have this box of oranges."
Tomatoes were a good example; they knew perfectly
well that tomatoes wouldn't be worth a damn in
another week. You didn't have refrigeration. Same
thing would be true for things like eggs, butter and
milk, poultry -
Ward: You mean, you'd get that in addition to a little
pay?
LG: Yeah; I think we got four bucks for the day's work;
we worked hard and fast. The farmer felt you were
giving him an honest count. It never occurred to
anybody to take the farmer's money - although once
in a while, I'll admit, if the wife of one of our
friends came by, she got extra measure if she bought
something.
We'd then gather at somebody's house close to the
campus, taking our loot back with us - the stuff the
farmers gave us. V/e'd divide the stuff up so that
everybody had his groceries for the week. So, I
wouldn't say we were in penury.
Sure, sometimes there were certain meals you had
to make do with. Aubrey insisted he was a good cook,
which is a lot of bunk. But we never could tell him
to his face because -
Ward: Then he wouldn't cook?
88
LG: That's right; at least once a week, Aubrey would
make one of his famous omelettes. I didn't realize
until years later, what he was trying to do was to
make a Joe's Special (an omelette in a famous San
Francisco restaurant).
He would use hamburger, one of the things that
you could invariably get - rarely saw steaks; you
did see chickens - onions, spinach and everything
else he could chop up, chuck it all in there and
stir the thing up, until finally you had this
famous omelette. That would make a full meal, just
like a Joe's Special does. He loved ketchup and
tomato juice; there was more tomato juice in that
stuff than anything else and then on top of that,
the ketchup.
Ward: And no red wine to help it down?
LG: No, though later on in Berkeley - maybe it was the
first year - some guy joined the crowd. He was a
non-political character, just a friendly guy -
Ward: Most of you were a bit political?
LG: Oh yes, pretty much believed in the same things.
Among the girls you had people like Dodie, Liz
Salz - Andy Salz' (Andrew Salz, who became an
attorney in Honolulu) sister; she's dead, died of
cancer many years ago and Edith Arnstein Jenkins
(a prominent Bay Region liberal). They were all
highly political. You put that together and you're
not so badly off. The only major transportation
cost you paid was the street car fare to get all
the way downtown -
Ward: Or to get to the city?
LG: Yes, you'd walk down to Shattuck (Berkeley's main
street) or wherever it was. I think there were
street cars running in those days, and you could go
all the way down to Sixth Street and there you were
at the Farmers' Market.
About red wine; somewhere along the line this
chap joined our group, that v/as some time in '31.
He'd worked around as a laborer - he was older than
we were, about 25-26. He had a car, which was
89
LG: a big deal too. Once a month or so we'd go on an
outing with him; we'd take that old road over to
Walnut Creek, the Fish Ranch Road. It was a winding,
winding road; "barely enough room for two cars.
At Walnut Creek there were a lot of Italian
farmers; there we used to pick up a gallon of wine
for 25 cents; we'd get three or four gallons of wine
and then you'd be having red wine with your dinner.
Prohibition was still in effect, but the farmers
were friendly enough about that. They knew him.
So you had your red wine as well as a good diet; at
least it was a fairly balanced one. We had loads of
vegetables - plenty of fruit. That was no problem
at all.
The big thing that would happen once every couple
of months was to make a trip over to San Francisco;
that was quite an outing.
Ward: What was the attraction, particularly?
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
San Francisco, itself, which we were very fond of -
the ferry ride. We'd land at the old Ferry Building
because all the ferries came in there.
Did you go to any shows there?
No; whatever shows we went to were around campus;
whatever music we'd go to listen to was around campus;
shows in San Francisco were out of sight -
Too much money?
Yes. The place we'd hang out most was Izzy Gomez 1 ;
we'd walk there from the Ferry Building. It wasn't
all that much of a walk.
Walking right through the old produce market?
Right, it was a busy place but only late at night.
If we walked through there at around six-thirty or
seven o'clock in the evening, it was deserted.
Ward: Walking back at midnight was something else.
90
LG: Beginning midnight, the trucks would come in. If
you stayed some place there and started walking
back around four or five in the morning to catch
the first ferry "back, then it was the most amazing
jumble of traffic and everything else in that
produce market. Ch, there must have been about 400
500 guys used to work there.
And we'd go to Izzy Gomez'. He was very good
company. I liked him, and a lot of newspapermen
hung out there; just listening to them was fun,
meeting a few of them here and there.
Ward: Ever hear him called the Duke of Africa?
LG: Oh, yeah, he always wore that big, black hat.
Ward: You never saw him with it off, did you?
LG: If you did see him with it off, you'd understand
why he wore it all the time. I understand he was
as bald as an eagle; but Izzy was good. He'd ask
us first, "How are you fixed?" I usually figured
that I had to make that whole outing on somewhere
between four and four and a half dollars, plus your
ferry fare.
Ward: .Oh, you could do a lot on that.
LG: Yeah; I told him "Okay, we've got four bucks."
"That's enough." You'd sit down, he'd bring you
some grappa. We'd get a couple of shots of that.
If you could drink that, you could drink anything.
Let me tell you, it was a deliberate plan to see
if anybody's stomach could stand up.
So, you'd get a couple of shots of grappa, a
glass of red wine, and he'd make you a steak. He
didn't do the cooking at all. He was behind the
bar and he had this pal of his who was also a
Portuguese, a thinner guy who never wore a hat and
did all the cooking. There were just the two of
them working the whole restaurant.
91
##
V/ard :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Okay, Lou, you were saying and talking about Izzy
Gomez and the food and drink there; saw dust on
the floor, old tables. One other question: what
caused you to finally drop off the law course at
the end of the year?
I decided that the law wasn't really my bag. One
of the things that bothered me was that the law
had very little to do with justice.
All right - let's call it off.
It would take quite a while to get into that.
92
(Interview 4: 7 March, 1978)
Law and Justice
Ward: All right, Lou, do you want to expand a little bit
on the relation of law to justice?
LG: I want to make it clear that there are all kinds
of really wonderful lawyers who have taken up
difficult and important cases; surely no denigra
tion of people like Clarence Darrow; "but those were
the rare ones.
The impression I began to get and which is still
true today - a good lawyer who gets you off if
you're guilty; that becomes a definition. There is
no attempt to evaluate a lawyer in terms of securing
justice. The general evaluation is, if you're in
big, serious trouble, go to Mel Belli or one of
these lawyers.
Ward: F. Lee Bailey, uh?
LG: F. Lee Bailey is as good an example as any.
Ward: Okay, so you left the law school, but you didn't
leave Gal.
LG: No, I finished the year at law school, admittedly
not attending an awful lot of sessions. I remember
taking the exams at the end of the year.
By pure coincidence, a couple of years ago I was
asked to attend a retirement luncheon for a man who
had been on the Workmen's Compensation Board for I
don't know how many years, an attorney.
This man who was retiring had asked that a mutual
friend get me down to this luncheon. When I got
there I realized that the fellow who was retiring
was the one who had called me just before the exams;
it was the commonly accepted method of swallowing
a lot of knowledge within a week or so and then re
gurgitating it and promptly forgetting the whole
93
LG: thing the day afterwards.
This chap had called me; he had no one to cram
with and wanted to know whether we'd work together
in preparation for the exams. I saw no reason why
not, so we both took them and we both passed.
However, while I was at law school I began to meet
a good many people in the Economics department;
people like Bob Brady (Professor Robert Brady), who
wrote a very authoritative job on fascism - The
Spirit and Structure of Fascism, I think it was
called; an excellent guy" I'm not sure whether he
was a Marxist, though much of the time he sounded
that way.
There was a Professor (Norman S.) Buchanan,
highly competent and very open for discussion. A
lot of classes there were seminars. G-ulick (Charles
G-ulick) was another prof there - Flugel (Felix
Flu gel) was another one. There was a Madame (Jessica)
Pexiotto; that, by the way, is a sephardic name.
Ward: A woman?
LG: A woman, and she was in the Economics department; a
delightful older woman, who enjoyed having some of
the students over to her house for tea and endless
discussions.
I was doing a good deal of reading at the time,
not just in the material required by the seminars
and the courses but also in the whole field of
Marxist thinking - everything from Sngels 1 Fueuerbach
to A Critique of Proudhon. That was an excellent
piece of work b^F Marx, practically positive, filled
with humor. That's something you never caught try
ing to read Das Kapital.
This was definitely a forensic sort of thing; the
debates were endless in that whole Marxist period.
So, there was a good deal of personal attention and
a great deal of rapport between the students who
were really interested and the professors -
V/ard: They got to see a professor and talk to him?
94
LG: No question - yes. If you felt that you were
tackling a subject regardless of the degree of
controversy or differences, you were more than
welcome. The outlook on seminars was that they
were completely different from undergraduate
students - lecturing.
The professors in many cases would measure their
success by the degree to which they could induce a
lot of discussion; whether it was mild or sharp
made no difference to them. But as long as there
was an exchange of ideas, it came closest to the
definition of a university, the market place of
ideas. I spent more time there than at Boalt Hall.
In the following year I dropped out of Boalt;
again, partially the business of trying to figure
out how in the devil to make a living.
Ward: I was wondering -
LG: Yes; that was constantly under discussion. Bear in
mind - 1931-1933, we're speaking about now. The
depression had really taken hold; people were
scratching, but badly, before any of the pickup
took place with some of the New Leal programs,
whether it be WPA, CCC (Works Progress Administra
tion, Civilian Conservation Corps), or what have
you.
Ward: None of those things had yet come into operation?
LG: No, because I finished in May or June of 1933.
(president Franklin D. ) Roosevelt had gone into
office in March.
Ward: You finished what?
LG: I finished as much as I was going to do at Gal. .1
was playing around both with the idea of "What do
I do once I get out," and "Is there something to
take at the university that might give me a handle?"
At the same time I gave some thought - which I
eventually dropped - to going on for a Ph.D. in
economics.
Ward: Did you get a Masters?
95
LG:
Ward;
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
I don't believe so. I decided to pick up a second
ary credential. Perhaps I could then get work as
a teacher; it was something that appealed to me.
The thought of being a teacher?
Yes. I spent a portion of that year doing what they
called "practice teaching," down at University High.
That would be in Oakland - Broadway near 50th?
That sounds about right - the Oakland side.
What were you teaching there?
Poli sci, current events, some economics. The
courses in education given at the university were
absolutely the most deadly things under the sun.
In education?
It was so much drivel. The so-called techniques
of education didn't include things which today you
could say have some justification.
You just went through a whole group of textbooks
that meant absolutely nothing. I could never figure
out how a so-called School of Education warranted
its existence. But you attended the courses once
in a while; you took the examinations. I don't
think it meant that much to the professors either,
(interruption)
You were talking when we were interrupted about
the dry-balled nature of the education courses.
Yes. During that time I was still taking some of
the economics courses, as well as being active in
all kinds of other things.
Yes, well, what kinds of other things?
Primarily in the left-wing movement.
Were you active in the YCL?
In part. A lot of our activity was spent around a
group called the "Social Problems Club," which
sometimes was not referred to very kindly by the
96
LG: other students, who agreed we were social problems.
There was a good deal of that activity.
A Fling At Teaching
Ward:
LG:
Ward ;
LG:
Ward ;
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Then again, doing practice teaching ate up a fair
amount of time. You were assigned to certain
classes under the guidance of a regular teacher at
the school. The best I could do that year was to
pick up a secondary credential, take some addition
al economic courses, and continue my activities
with the rest of the progressive group on campus.
Was there any pay for this practice teaching?
No, none.
What were you using for money those days?
I had a few dollars that I had made during the
summer time. I went south during the summer. I
went out again with this same character on these
magazine sales. I picked up some work around the
studios, at Tec-Art. So, I had enough to get by,
and Dodie worked.
Mostly as an artist's model?
kind of work?
Did she do any other
She might have, but I don't recall; we had enough
to get by. Getting back and forth to L. A. was
pretty commonly done by hitch-hiking, although I
do recall on one trip from L. A. - I don't think
Dodie went along then - I decided to go by ship.
I took one of the old Admiral Line ships and they
had some very low fare, around $6.
Sit up all night?
No, they had some cots in what looked like steerage
below deck; just a big, open space and oh, a lot of
the crew hung around there. So, I took the ship;
it was a trip by itself. I can understand how the
Admiral Line finally went out of business. These
97
LG: were old tubs, rolling like the devil, and the food
left an awful lot to be desired.
While doing the practice teaching there were a
couple of amusing things that happened. I was
assigned to a group of seniors in high school, a
number of whom were a bit on the difficult side.
Ward: Any racial or ethnic distinction?
LG:
Ward
LG;
Not particularly. This was a group of youngsters
who just wanted to finish and get out. They were
not that fond of school. After a couple of sessions
with the class - unfortunately I had not spoken with
the head teacher - some of these youngsters were
creating much more difficulty than it was worth.
I was not much older than they v/ere.
I finally turned to them and said, "Look, there
are some of you here who obviously just don't feel
like sticking around for the course. If you feel
that strongly about it, just go ahead and leave.
I'm not going to report you as playing hookey or
anything. Take off and let those who want to do
some studying stick around." None of them did
leave.
None of them left?
No, they quieted down. The other thing was that in
the course of some of these current events, I got
my hands on a group of posters that had been put
out by the Soviet Union. They were promoting dif
ferent things like sanitation, public health.
I saw nothing wrong with just giving them examples
of how a government that thought differently would
go about tackling the general issue of public
education. In those days the illiteracy rate in
Russia must have been pretty heavy and a lot of
these things were being told by pictures.
This went quite well, and the supervising teacher
didn't look particularly askance, but I recall go
ing to one of these sessions and the whole back row
was taken up by the administrators, the principal,
98
LG: some guys from the Board of Education; everything
but students. I suppose that they had a bit of the
jumps and jitters about the whole thing, but this
did not affect the attitude of the supervising
teacher.
Quite to the contrary, she was most encouraging.
I asked her, "Look, if I'm way off base on this
thing, tell me." She said, "No, I hope you stick
with it and go on teaching." So I got through
in fine shape; I got a fairly good recommendation
from the supervising teacher.
Ward: Did these school officials say anything to you?
LG: Not a word. All of us get a bit gun-shy in these
things. They might have come because they were
just curious and interested.
Ward: They must have talked among themselves about it.
LG: I'm sure they did. It didn't come out as a
subscribed course in any of the future curriculums,
though.
Ward: Well, all right, so you got through that. You
weren't working for a living, then.
LG: A group of us still had this job down at the old
Farmers' Market on Saturdays; Dodie did some work
in some of the restaurants around there - the Golden
Bear, or one of those.
Ward: You were still living up in North Berkeley?
LG: Still the same place.
V/ard: So, you were just about at the end of your studies
at Cal?
LG: Yes, I went back to L. A., not enthusiastically.
I had gotten quite fond of the bay area; but I
thought I might at least have some chance of get
ting some work down there. I really didn't know of
anything I could move into in the bay area. I went
back to L. A., but things there were just as bad
or worse.
99
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
What did you finally land down there?
relief down there - no CCC -
There was no
No, there was relief; where you got it in the form
of goods, in kind; you could pick up canned goods,
rice and a few other things, staples.
What agency would distribute that sort of thing?
Well, I'll be damned - I don't know. I don't re
call the agency. I remember putting in some time
on a WPA project, leaning on a shovel. I finally
got off of that too; I had no use for it. I must
have stayed in Los Angeles about a year. I made
periodic trips up here, for some friends I wanted
to visit; for some YCL meetings. I recall speci
fically coming up here for International Youth Day,
Hay 30, 1934.
The Great 1934 Strike
Ward: That was just when the waterfront was beginning
to -?
LG: The waterfront was on strike. The strike on the
waterfront started May 9, I think. Some of us were
trying to help out as best v/e could.
Ward: How could you help out?
LG: Oh, people to be seen around Hollywood. There were
a number of progressives; the object was to raise
a couple of bucks to give them a hand.
Ward: I see - you prepared lists or helped to prepare
lists?
LG: I didn't have the lists so much as some others did.
Ward: You went around with the lists in your hands
soliciting money for the strikers?
100
LG: I remember visiting Erskine Caldwell who's quite
a good writer; he was fairly generous. The word
we had from people around Pedro (San Pedro) was
that some of the guys were in difficulties and
perhaps it wasn't too wise for them to stick around;
so we^had to raise a couple of bucks and give them
a hand in that respect. May 30th, as I said, a
number of us came up because it was International
Youth Day.
Ward: Do you remember where you met?
LG: No, but we had a demonstration on Market Street -
lower Market Street near the Embarcadero. The
turnout was not very impressive, 200 or 300. The
longshoremen did not participate in the demonstra
tion. I heard later that the reaction of the men
was "Well, if the kids want to try demonstrating,
that's their business." We were broken up by the
cops.
Ward: Well, what were you demonstrating for?
LG: In support of the longshore strike -
Ward: Did you go to 121?
LG: . Yes, 121 Haight Street (California headquarters of
the Communist Party), right. I went there a number
of times before and afterwards, but that was not
the locale of the demonstration. We may have had
our meetings there.
One reason I recollect this breaking up of the
demonstration was that when these cops came at us
on their horses, swinging their clubs, there wasn't
much you could do except get out of their way in a
hurry.
I remember ducking in a doorway just as a cop
was swinging his club and the guy he whacked on
the head was Pete Macchiarini, who later became a
jeweler, a very successful one; still has a place
in North Beach. When Terry went in there to get
something, he still remembered me, though I hadn't
seen him for years.
101
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
During that time I was sort of bouncing back and
forth; a bit later in 1934, I poked around a bit
to see if there was anything doing in the teaching
field. As a matter of fact, I remember going as
far as the Escondido mountains, between the coast
and Imperial Valley, that area. They were shopping
around for somebody to teach there, but nothing
came of that, either. Things were sort of at a
dead end for me in L. A.
You managed to still get along?
Yes and no; things began to come apart.
Pretty rough situation; you were only 21 when you
got married, weren't you? Dodie was about 19 - 20,
wasn't she?
About 20, yeah.
And then all this uncertainty?
It was an impossible period. Lots of grief, no
money; I think the marriage was a casualty of the
depression and unemployment. You finally get to
the point where you simply say "Hell, this thing
isn't working - may as well take off and get a
fresh start, somewhere, somehow."
A lot of things were done in those days out of
sheer economic deprivation and frustration. So,
when I moved back to northern California, I went
to live with a man who is still around, named
Kaplan; Irving Kaplan and his wife, Dorothy; they
lived on Roosevelt Way in San Francisco. He was an
economist for PG&E, (Pacific Gas & Electric Company)
although a dedicated left-winger; and his wife, a
very fine, warm person.
So, they befriended you -
Yes, I had known them before that because they knew
a good part of the circle of friends in Berkeley.
For example, Al Van Tassel, an awfully nice guy -
saw him about a month ago; and Bea; she married Van
Tassel. They moved east later on; remained friends
102
LG-: of Zappy until Dorothy died; Kappy still sees them.
I saw Al for the first time in 40 years; he came
by; the same good guy, though he's had a rough time.
He went through open heart surgery, too. It took
quite a toll on him. I guess it does on everybody.
We reminisced a good deal, particularly about the
days when we were at Gal together.
Ward: You made a lot of good friends - friendships that
have more or less persisted throughout all these
years - at Gal, didn't you?
LG: Yes, including friends among some of the profes
sors. Bob Brady continued as a friend. Unfor
tunately, he died in the 30' s.
Ward: He had a wonderful v/ife, too.
LG: Yes. I remember his wife working with me on a
political campaign later on when I was secretary
of the (California) CIO. We had some big campaign
going on - I believe it was Proposition 1. She
worked with us on the publicity; she was quite good
in that field.
Yes, I did make some good friends. Gulick, who's
very, very old now - about a year or so ago I met
him. He came over for dinner at the home of some
people in Sausalito. I hadn't seen him all these
years.
Ward: Nineties, I suppose? Eighties?
LG: Late eighties, yes. We had a very active group
at Cal. We put out literature, distributed
leaflets; various group meetings.
Ward: What were the issues this active group espoused?
I suppose Spain?
LG: It was primarily the depression. It was a pro-
Soviet group. One of the local issues was the
University budget, around which we called some mass
meetings at Sather Gate; that was the free speech
corner. The old balustrade is still there; that
was the speaker's platform.
103
Ward: You just hopped up on that curving rail?
LG: In those days it was outside the campus, so there
was no place from which to kick you out, I recall
several efforts to meet on campus - to get Wheeler
Hall - not that we ever could have filled it - or
one of the smaller halls, "but those efforts were
pretty much in vain.
One who really gave us a hand was Harry Kingman,
the head of the "Y" (Young Men's Christian Associa
tion). By the way, he had been a professional
baseball player at one time. I think he was on the
Yankee farm system or he might have pitched for the
Yankees before he took this job at Stiles Hall;
that was the "Y" . He was forthright, very generous,
very friendly and when there was no place else we
could meet, we could always meet there.
Ward: I can't help an editorial comment here. I never
met Harry Kingman but I knew the "establishment"
TDeople in Berkeley; he had that peculiar faculty
of getting along with both the right and the left.
He had the facility to get along with human beings.
He was respected, even by the old curmudgeons.
Right. And among other things, did you know that
when Harry Kingman retired from Stiles Hall some
years ago, he and his wife, Ruth, decided they would
go back to Washington and lobby on their own for
good legislation: a two-person lobby!
Somebody mentioned the fact that he was back,
and when they were putting together that bit of a
dinner for me last year (the farewell banquet for
the retiring secretary- treasurer of the ILWU), I
asked that they run down Harry Kingman and his wife;
I wanted them there - and they were there.
Ward: I think you mentioned their name in your little
talk.
LG: I insisted on introducing him because I consider him
a real old friend. Well, Harry Kingman knew what
we stood for. He sure as heck was no fool. A very
LG:
Ward
LG:
104
LG: bright man. In addition to running Stiles Hall he
coached the University of California baseball team.
He did that among his other jobs. And his attitude
was -
Ward: He'd been in China, too -
LG: He'd been born in China - son of missionaries.
Ward: He was known as an old China hand.
LG: Right. He's still around and I have spoken to him
a couple of times. Some time around 1950 they had
a retirement dinner for him. Terry and I drove
over there to be at this retirement dinner; or
retirement luncheon, whatever it was.
So, we made a lot of good friends. I recall one
of the high points of our Social Problems Club
activities was trying to organize a movement against
a proposed budget cut; one of the economies that
was being proposed at that time by Governor Merriam:
(Frank Merriam)
##
LG: It was part of the so-called economies that were
being gone through by various politicians in view
of the depression. These were all unbelievable
depression years.
Whether the budget cut was warranted or not, I
don't know. We weren't that interested. All we
knew was that a number of us were in school because
at least you learned something, studied something,
rather than standing around in a bread line or
leaning on a shovel. At that point they didn't
even have the shovels to lean on; the government
had not acted as yet.
Ward: Wait a minute. You had been on WPA before.
LG: No - no. I'm doubling back here. I'm talking
about the period 1931-33; I guess it was in 1933
that this budget cut was being proposed.
105
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
We did a great deal of leaf le ting, propagandizing
and talking before different groups to see if we
could put together a march on Sacramento, the
objective being to lobby the legislature, the
governor, against the budget cut.
We never got the march under way. We couldn't
mount enough of a group to make the thing go,
although it drew a good bit of attention, particu
larly in the Daily Gal (the U.C. student newspaper);
they couldn't very well knock it - "Don't pay any
attention to these Reds, who are proposing a march
on Sacramento to stop the budget cut" - when the
first thing that would be cut would be the Daily
Cal. On that score, we had fairly wide support.
I'll admit that there was very little done in
the area of student government; a few of the kids -
the left-wing ones - tried to run for ASUC
(Associated Students of the University of California)
offices. But most of us couldn't vote in the ASUC
because we couldn't pay the dues - there was a $10
fee per semester or per year.
It actually wasn't that bad a buy, but ten bucks
was still ten bucks. And all of us were pretty
fiercely non-org - we'd call ourselves - The big
fraternities and sororities, the big sports
i
They did not interest you?
No - no; we thought they were a snob group.
What about the star football players, you didn't
follow around after them?
Quite the contrary. One of the star football
players - I think he was a fullback and people
pointed him out around campus - must have taken an
awful beating. He walked like a punch drunk
fighter, sort of on his heels half the time. That
didn't impress us a great deal. Oh, I'm sure they
were college heroes to the org groups - to the
fraternities and sororities, but they weren't to
us.
106
Ward: The word "jock" hadn't reached the prominence it
has now. You were anti-jock?
LG: Yes; plus we didn't know a great deal about it.
The question of scholarships for athletes was not
that well known. What was well known was that the
sports were constantly being boosted and promoted
by the alumni.
The v/ord would leak around that some guy was on
a football scholarship, whether or not he actually
got paid money I don't know, but the impression
most of us had was that they were taken care of
one way or another by the wealthy alumni; things
like summer jobs, part-time jobs.
A lot of them worked around frat houses -
belonged to fraternities without having to pay the
regular monthly charges. Many of us didn't see
why somebody who was willing to be a football player
should be getting economic help while the rest of
us were scratching with the chickens.
The Communist Candidacy
LG: During that same period many of us felt that running
for political office was considered worthwhile, if
for no other reason to provide a forum as to some
of the things we believed in, both in terms of the
general economy and socialism.
I ran for office one year - just simply by sub
mitting my name on the ballot. The Berkeley City
Council - or something like that, in 1933.
Ward: Socialist program, I suppose, you ran on that?
LG: Communist or Socialist ticket, one or the other.
Ward: It must have been on the Communist ticket. Wasn't
there a Socialist group on the campus too?*
*(Editor f s note: Goldblatt ran on a full slate of
candidates, sponsored by the Communist party, for
the Berkeley City Council, election of May 2, 1933;
he received 649 votes.)
107
LG :
Ward :
Ward :
LG:
V/ard:
LG:
Yes, as a matter of fact -
You were at odds with them, I suppose?
We weren't particularly friendly. They called
themselves the YPSLs (Young People's Socialist
League). The group that was most outspoken of the
Socialists on the campus was the League for
Industrial Democracy. Oleta O'Connor, who later
became Oleta O'Connor Yates, was the head of the
LID, League for Industrial Democracy.
I thought she was a YPSL.
She might have "been a member of that at the same
time. I remember some strenuous debates we used
to have.
Did you debate Oleta at that time? She was on the
v/omen's team (University women's debating team),
I believe.
That's right. I was not on the debating team. I
remember some debates among us; a lot of them were
on the same theoretical plane that students have a
tendency to get into.
Most of us felt that the record of the Social
ists, and particularly of the Socialist
democracies over in Europe was how these organi
zations had collapsed in World War I. After all,
we were still on the heels of the post World War I
period, where the Socialists became super-patriots
and joined the war movement.
Many of them didn't speak out at all, or
supported their governments, when they decided to
launch the invasion of the newly formed Soviet
Union when it was under attack; so we didn't feel
too kindly towards them.
The other thing was that many of them spoke in
the tradition of Norman Thomas. Their facts were
good on the logic of socialism as against the
anarchy and stupidities of capitalism. They had
all the specific examples such as milk companies
all delivering milk on the same street; namely,
the stupid forms of waste and competition.
108
LG: They had the same figures we had on the degree of
unemployment. They pretty well accepted the same
economic thinking. I guess they considered them
selves Marxists in terms of their economic
evaluation of the system.
Where we parted company was in the general area
of the class struggle, with the Socialists feeling
very strongly that the only method of change was
through the legislative process, whereas many of
us felt that the legislative process became a bog
which you just sunk into.
I recall one debate where Cleta O'Connor and
myself disagreed pretty sharply on that. She was
trying to say that something could be done about
the class struggle. I said I didn't know what
could be done about it except that it was there.
It was something like the common cold. People
would talk about it, but you couldn't get rid of
it; it was just inevitable.
She still thought the legislative process was
it and that emphasis on the class struggle was a
mistake. Well, the world turns. Oleta O'Connor
became one of the leaders of the Communist party
as you know; married Al Yates, a very good guy.
Now the world is turning again and you have the
development of Euro-communism which is in large
part dependent on the legislative process under a
new set of economic and political circumstances.
Ward: That gives a better picture of your extra
curricular activities during those years. Now
here we are in Irving Kaplan's home, trying to find
something to latch on to.
LG: That's right; that was in late 1934.
Ward: You were up here on May 30th in '34 and then you
came back again -
LG: As a matter of fact, I came back again around
August. It was after the general strike, which
impressed and completely overwhelmed all of us.
This gave complete substance to the power of the
109
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
working class to change the system.
After the general strike and after the settlement,
there was quite a period of vigilantism in San
Francisco. You might be familiar with it.
I am very familiar with it.
Oh, there was a breaking up of the various left-
wing bookshops, rocks being heaved through them,
121 Haight being attacked. The red hysteria was
pretty bad.
The longshoremen had gone back to work in July
and the issues had gone to the arbitration board;
Archbishop Hanna (Edward Joseph Hanna, Archbishop
of San Francisco) was on that; 0. K. Gushing (a
prominent San Francisco business man), and Edward
F. McGrady from the United States Labor Department,
The newspapers were just off their rockers and
screaming, saying they were all communist plots.
That's when the Examiner put up iron shutters on
its ground floor windows?
Right. That was the reason why afterwards in all
the Labor Day parades, the one thing you'd hear
down the whole length of Market Street was when
they walked past the Examiner building at Third
and Market streets; that "boo" echoing through
the hills of San Francisco.
This was a period of a good deal of terror.
Some of my friends would be sitting with shotgun
at night in a place like the big bookstore down
at 37 Grove Street. I recall going down there
and spending a few hours, keeping them company.
What would have happened if the vigilantes ....
I was there and fell on my ass in a pool of blood
in that store, right after the attack. I was in
there and quick - rubber heels - and zip. Oh, yes
I saw a lot of that!
When was that attack?
110
Ward: That was during the general strike - I was over
there as head of a seven-man team for the Oakland
Tribune.
LG: Yeah. There's no question that guys like Sam Darcy
and Walter Lambert (Communist party leaders)
played a very influential role during all that
time; gave advice and unstinting support. There's
no question that it was the left-wing that really
stuck with it and took on a lot of the very hard
chores, worked endlessly; marvelously devoted
people.
What was happening was this unbelievable wave of
red-baiting, far worse than what happened with the
Dies Committee (the House Un-American Activities
Committee, headed by Congressman Martin Dies at
that time;or the McCarthy (Senator Joseph McCarthy)
era, because it was connected with personal violence
against individuals, against bookstores, head
quarters and so forth.
People did what you'd expect them to do in that
situation. They'd sit guard in the bookstores or
headquarters all night, hoping that they could
frighten some of these people off.
Ward: You actually did a little duty down at the Grove
Street bookstore?
LG: Yes, I was sent down there one night -
Ward: Did anyone have any weapons there?
LG: Oh, yeah, there were weapons there; luckily, no one
had to use them. I'm not sure that I knew how,
frankly (laughter). My ROTO training didn't go
that far. All the training we got there was to
march into battle in perfect formation and the
enemy would fall over.
Ward: All right, so you were doing what you could and
looking for work, I suppose. What kind of a job
were you gunning for?
LG: I made no distinctions. You were in no position
to be job shopping and choosing; there weren't that
many offers.
Ill
Ward: Well, what did you get in the way of a job?
LG: When I finally got back to San Francisco?
Ward: Yes, when you were at the Kaplan's house.
LG: I had gotten a job for a little while before I left
L.A. I got a job with the National Youth Admini
stration - NYA - and I continued on that in San
Francisco. I was some sort of a two-bit supervisor,
because I had a college degree.
Ward: What kind of a project did you supervise?
LG: I'll be damned if I can remember; a lot of them
were just things you'd put together. I recall
being very active making surveys and studies of
unemployed or job skills. If you advertised a job,
you'd have more damn applicants than you could
shake a stick at. They'd just line up by the
thousands. People would sleep there all night.
So I was with that for a while. I didn't feel
it was something that I wanted to stick around
with. I started getting some other work; finally,
in 1935, I went to work in a machine shop - Federal
Mogul. That was a shop that made bearings for
automobiles and other moving parts in San Francisco.
I got to know some of the guys there who remained
friends for life - guys like Bob Cain and his
brother-in-law who had been a light heavy weight
champion of the navy. I only worked there about a
month.
I got fired, perfectly good reason. My job was
operating a punch press for the purpose of boring
a hole through this babbit - sort of a lead shield.
The hole had to be exact, and the one thing you had
to be careful of was that the bit which you pressed
through this punch press was always sharp so that
the hole would be even; they also put a screw in
there.
I was on the graveyard shift, and obviously I
wasn't doing any sleeping during the day. I was
too busy with other things, including making major
changes in the world. I thought the work was going
pretty easy, all these bearings set out on trays
before an inspector looked at them.
112
LG: Come early morning when the superintendent turned
up, went around and looked at these trays, I was
half asleep; he looked at one of these trays and
said, "Well, I've seen a lot of bearings in my life,
but this is the first time I've seen so many bear
ings with perfectly square holes." I hadn't
sharpened the bit.
Well," he said, "this is not the job for you."
I couldn't argue about that, but I did have the
chance later on, when I belonged to the ILWU, to
get a bunch of our members to give a hand to the
Machinists (members of the Machinists' Union) who
were picketing Federal Mogul to get their first
contract.
This was about 1936 or '37. My old friend, Bob
Cain was still there. One of them had gotten fired;
that was the fighter - some guys wouldn't join the
union so he poured lye in their shoes.
Ward : Lye?
LG: Lye. Guys would put on their work shoes while
working there and they'd leave their good shoes
and he would pour lye in them. That would raise
hell on somebody's feet, so Bob later came to work
on the waterfront.
I got myself a job at Owens-Illinois Glass
Company, which was then located between 15th and
16th on Folsom Street.
Ward: Well, you were getting jobs pretty good then. Was
there any special reason? Did you have friends at
these places? How did you manage?
LG: At Federal Mogul, I got a job just by going down
and applying. The factory there had begun a small
expansion . . .
Ward: Somebody tell you it would be a good idea to go
down there?
LG: That's right. Then I went down to Owens-Illinois.
Some people I knew said, "The turnover there is
enormous because the job conditions stink and
113
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward:
LG:
nobody likes to work there." I think half the
Mission (a local working class district) kids had
gone through Owens-Illinois Glass at one time or
another.
Old Harry Harrington who runs the bar once
worked at Owens-Illinois - he has a place now at
Larkin or Turk. I went to work there some time
around May, 1935; I worked fairly steadily. I was
paid at that time a little over the base rate. The
entry rate there was 40 cents an hour. I think I
was paid 42^ cents.
Why?
After I had been there a month the foreman took me
aside and said, "You know, you're being paid more
than the base rate because we think you ought to
be executive material." Because I had some college
background.
Once a month they would have these dinners - but
you paid your own way - made up of foremen, a couple
of superintendents from out of town, the big cheeses;
and then people like myself would be invited to go.
You were supposed to be part of the whole comrade
ship of the guys who really run the place.
They were trying to take you in?
That's right. You weren't one of these ordinary
peasants, but as far as the work was concerned, you
just worked your ass off.
You were working days this time?
No, I worked days part of the time. Cne of the un
happy things about the job was they rotated shifts.
By that time I knew that night shifts were not for
me because the amount of sleep I'd get during the
day was negligible.
Later on I began to adjust my life. When I
finished up work on the graveyard shift, I'd walk
back; at that time Terry and I were living together -
114
Ward: Now, you were divorced by that time, were you?
LG: Yes. I'd left the Kaplans. I'd known Terry in
L.A. She was married at the time when I first met
her, though not living with her husband. He was
back in Chicago.
Ward: She came from Chicago?
LG: That's right. She went back there and they decided
they would call it a day; they separated and she
came to San Francisco where I was.
Ward: But your first contacts really began in Los Angeles?
LG: Yes.
Ward: She was a social worker, wasn't she?
LG: Yes, she was in San Francisco.
Ward: Where did she get her education? Chicago?
LG: She had gone to the University of Chicago. I think
she had gone to the University of Wisconsin and
spent a year at Columbia.
V/ard: What brought her out here?
LG: I think what brought her out here was that she was
married to a doctor who was doing his internship
at L. A. General.
But by that time, 1935, she had traveled north
to join me. We had this apartment on Telegraph Hill,
290 Green Street; that was it. We must have stayed
at the Green Street place for a couple of years.
They were all Italians living in the house: the
landlord was concerned whether we felt comfortable
because they were all Italians. I said, "Fine, if
they want to get along with us, we're happy to get
along with them." The rent there was not all that
bad; I think it was $22.50 a month, and there was
no heat. You had two kitchens - a regular kitchen
and then the side kitchen for heavy cooking, so
that the house wouldn't be filled with the odors.
115
LG-: It was a modest place, and furnished even more
modestly; we got things from Sears Roebuck and
Company like this garden furniture that you can
assemble yourself. .
Ward: She was working and you were working?
LG: She was working. She got a job with SRA - State
Relief Administration - which was a branch off of
programs launched by the federal government.
I was working at Cwens-Illinois Glass, and that
was a workshop; I can understand why guys went
through it. For example, let's say you were packing
beer bottles or coke bottles, they were long Lehr -
I think it's spelled LEHR- which takes the
molten glass and puts it in a mold; a spurt of air
goes into the thing, gets it into a form.
It comes out in this Lehr and takes a certain
length of time to cool. The Lehr was calculated
to move at a rate of speed so that by the time they
got to you, you could pick them up and inspect them.
Actually, it was a conveyer, but it was always
called a Lehr.
My job as a warehouseman-packer was to inspect
the bottles, because one of the concerns of an
outfit like Owens-Illinois was lawsuits; you don't
hear of them anymore. At one time, people would sue
a company because they found a piece of glass in a
bottle, a cigar butt or something.
You examined the bottle for two things, one to
make sure there were no breaks around the throat of
the bottle, that there were no chips, what they
called "birds' nests" because sometimes small veins
of glass would form a bird's nest within the bottle
itself. They would break the moment you put fluid
in there, and you would have glass in your drink.
And we inspected the bottoms.
You picked up the technique so you could do six
or eight at a time, inspecting one side, turning
them over, catching them and then slipping them into
the container, but that was tough work. Those
116
LG-: bottles just kept coming at you - you felt a little
bit like Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times." The
only way you could get a smoke if you wanted to -
there was practically no relief . . .
Ward: You could not stop the machine?
LG: No - no. There's a reason why you cannot stop a
glass machine. If that glass hardened in the
machine, then they had to bring in jack-hammers to
start it again. If a bottle is defective, you let
it go down a chute, and it went right back into the
crusher and came up again as molten glass.
Ward: But no smoke?
LG: The only way you could do it was to go like hell to
work that Lehr back as far as it could reach; that
would give you a margin of five to eight minutes,
depending on the kind of stuff that was coming
along. That was time enough to have a smoke.
Ward: And you could stand there and smoke?
LG: Yeah, they didn't care about that, as long as you
could handle the work.
The ventilation system wasn't too good either.
Right behind the place where the packers worked,
like myself, were small open chutes right next to
the floor. Sometimes you got goddam irritated with
everything because of the speed of the Lehr; you
felt that no matter how fast you worked, there was
always somebody at the other end giving you an extra
notch.
Although there v/ere some things that were nice,
easy going, like gallon jars; that was pleasant.
You could only take one at a time and look the thing
over, plus they couldn't come that fast.
Ward: And coke bottles?
LG: Coke bottles! My god, they came at you like waves,
just one steady flow. Sometimes you would get so
irritated you would take one of these bottles that
hadn't passed inspection and instead of letting it
117
LG: go down the chute you just heaved it out of that
small ventilator opening and out onto the street,
which was not heavily trafficked.
Anyway, it was there that I joined the Warehouse
Local, Local 38-44 of the ILA.* There was an organi
zer came out there, Jerry Dillon, an Irishman; he'd
been around for some time. A guy, I would say, in
his early fifties.
A number of us signed up in the union at once
and he told us to watch our step around there. The
company had a long record of firing someone just
like that . . .
V/ard: For joining the union?
LG: Or for any other reason. My hunch is that company
policy was deliberately designed not to have anybody
stay too long. It was the kind of a job that didn't
take that long to learn. Yes, you had to have the
dexterity to handle the stuff.
They used these small walk-around dollies, sort
of a dolly- jack; you shove it under the flap and
then if you want to release it, you step on the
catch and it lowers it. That was the main piece
of mechanized equipment they had. All the rest
of the work was done by hand. You just muled it -
worked with your hands.
So, I joined, and another fellow who worked with
me on the packing line and in the warehouse, Freddie
Helmar. Incidentally, he remained a member of the
ILA, and then the ILWU, until he retired. I bumped
into him at a party for the pensioners last Christ
mas. Looks great. He'd been an ex-fighter at one
time. Hell of a nice guy.
V/ard: A lot of those guys have been pugs.
LG: Oh, yeah. A lot of them had been fighters just to
make an extra buck. That was one of the horrible
things about the fight racket. I used to go to
the National Arena (a prize-fight ring). They had
Friday night fights, or Saturday night fights.
* International Longshoremen's Association
118
LG: These kids would just bang the hell out of each
other for three rounds - 25 bucks apiece. A lot
of the kids would do that, partly because they
thought they were tough, and partly because they
could pick up an extra buck.
Helmar joined, and Joe Dillon, not Jerry Dillon;
not related. Joe worked in the warehouse and
packing room with us; he had been there a bit
longer than we had, an extra five or six months.
He knew his way around there, so that many of us
felt that it was a real leg-up to get Joe in the
union.
I was fired out of there before I got sworn into
the local; I went to work at Sunset Warehouse for
a while.
Ward: Why were you fired?
LG: They fired me for union activities; the guy who was
my foreman felt I had betrayed him and the whole
world because here I was, a promising guy, who had
been invited to pay-y our- own-way dinners v/here they
gave you a lecture on the making of glass and the
wonders of Owens-Illinois, and here I had gone ahead
and joined the union.
Ward: And that was a hell of - .just treachery.
LG: Complete treachery - betrayal of all the confidence
they had placed in me, which of course was just
plain bullshit.
Freddie Helmar also got fired. And when I saw
Freddie he said, "By the way, Lou, you know neither
one of us ever got fired. Don't you remember, we
were both laid off; they said they would call us
back when they needed us. They just never got
around to calling us back " (laughter).
So, that was the end of my work experience at
Owens-Illinois. I had been there about seven or
eight months. I decided I wanted to stay with the
local. I had been attending meetings as a permit
man, just listening in. I had a temporary book,
good until I had six months; then I would become
eligible for full membership.
119
##
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward ;
LG:
All right, now you were just becoming - you had
been to meetings of the Warehouse Local -
Local 38-44 of the ILA.
You were just one of the new members?
That's all and -
Were
you able to get other jobs in the industry?
Yes, although there were pleasant things. Cne
was working the graveyard shift; there is always
less supervision at night.
Anybody in the higher echelons is not going to
be there all night, so you have the lower range of
the supervisors, most of whom are pretty well
bored; just waiting until they have been there
long enough to move up and get off the night shift.
There are all kinds of guys who don't like people
looking down their necks, and they prefer working
nights. I never did get quite used to rotating
shifts either every week or every two weeks.
What warehouse would this be?
That was when I was still at Owens-Illinois. The
difficulty of rotating shifts once a week is that
you never get used to sleeping at a certain time;
even once a month is better than once a week.
You finally have to try to get your whole clock
changed where you'd have your breakfast in the
same way as you'd have your dinner after a day
shift. You'd spend a couple of hours reading or
doing something or taking a walk, and then go to
sleep as though it was night-time; wake up in the
afternoon, have a couple of hours and then go to
work again.
120
LG: The other thing about the graveyard shift was, I
used to walk home from work through the flower
district, somewhere around 8th Street, and then
walk over to Telegraph Hill, where we lived at
290 Green -
Ward: Quite a walk.
LG: A fair distance, but not all that bad. I don't
think it took me much more than about three
quarters of an hour; walking through the flower
district was always pleasant. It was just about
the time v/hen they were finishing up, moving the
flowers into the various flower stores around town.
I'd get to know some of the guys who worked
there and I'd stop and pick up some flov/ers and
usually I'd get a whole bunch of gladiolas for a
dime, or something like that. When something was
left over and they knew it wouldn't keep, they
would just throw that in.
Ward: And that didn't hurt any at home, either?
LG: No. Those were the only two advantages I could
think of in regard to the night shift - everything
else was a minus.
Ward: That's a good point - we'll stop right here.
(Interview 5: 14 March, 1978)
The Electrifying Speaker
Ward: Before we get into anything else, Lou, I want to
tell you that the other night I was talking to
Barney Young, whom you may remember -
LG: Sure.
Ward: And I was talking about student days in L.A. ; he
came to UCLA about two years later than you and
people like Aubrey Grossman. Among his remin
iscences was a remark about the first time he met
you. You were making a speech somewhere on the
121
Ward: Eastside in '31 or '32 - he wasn't sure which year.
He said you were the most electrifying speaker he
had ever heard up to that time. Even then, he said,
you were something to listen to. He was greatly
impressed.
The Dangers of Fascism
LG: I think he was talking about the Eastside of L.A.,
right?
Ward: I think so. I don't know if he said it was in a
hall, or a street corner. I asked him what your
subject was and you were talking on the dangers of
fascism.
LG: That could very well be true. Some of us felt that
there were the beginnings of fascism, particularly
in Germany. True, Hitler didn't come to power until
1933, but there were already manifestations of it.
I know that was the beginning of a period of a
great deal of activity, both in terms of partici
pation of the YCL, getting to know a lot of the
youngsters who felt the same way, beginning to form
my own ideas as to where I wanted to go in life,
things that eventually became a good deal more
definitive when I went to Cal.
Working in the field of economics, I had come
to certain conclusions that to this day I have not
changed. One was that there weren't going to be
any fundamental changes in this world witiiout a
powerful working-class base.
Student movements could be good; to put them
down, I think is a mistake. True, they have a very
limited and built-in life span, namely, the length
of time that someone is in school. Also, the issues
that might attract them are npt exactly the same as
those you'd find among the working people.
But the one thing I did know was that a lot of
these things were developing and coming to fruition.
Perhaps that coincides with what Young was talking
122
LG: about. Is he still teaching down on the Peninsula
(an area between San Francisco and San Jose)?
Ward: I think he just retired.
LG: He'd be at about the retirement age. Yes. He's
a bright guy.
I think that all these things spring from the
same base fundamentally; fascism was just the open,
mailed-fist control of the economy by the capitalist
system, using fascist methods to make sure there
could be no form of effective opposition to fascist
control; basically what amounted to the employers'
control.
These things were pretty well confirmed in the
whole lash-up that took place between Hitler and
the large industrial employers throughout Germany.
Ward: Well, it gives an interesting sidelight from a
person entirely removed from what we are doing at
the moment. I could just see you on that curving
balustrade at Sather Gate. I used to see the guys
there when I was a campus reporter, but that was
before your time - back in the middle twenties.
Now to get back, you and Terry were living UT>
at 290 Green -
LG: That's right.
Ward: For the record, Terry - Theresa; what was her
maiden name?
LG: Jaffe. It's an old Israeli name. I think the port
of Jaifa, right alongside Tel Aviv, is fundamentally
the same name.
Ward: I see. You got married some time, I suppose.
LG: Later.
Ward: Want to tell me when?
LG: Got married in 1939.
Ward: I suppose that was a big family affair?
123
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
No, it wasn't really.
Okay. You were working nights and beginning to
attend Warehouse Local meetings. Okay, what would
be the next progression? Did you move from job to
job, or did you work out a steady job or what?
I stayed with the warehouse industry. I worked at
Merchants Ice and Cold Storage. That was at the
foot of Telegraph Hill.
As a matter of fact, the building is still there -
it's one of these old brick buildings. The cold
storage house was closed up about a year ago.
Right now I guess the brick building is being
converted to offices and interior decorating shops,
like a lot of others have.
What did you do in the ice house?
Unloading, primarily, of freight cars. A good part
of it was things like apples and pears; these did
not go to the freezer, they went to the cooler.
There were two different sections to the ice
house: one where you keep things such as meats
at below freezing temperature; and the coolers where
things like apples and pears could be kept for a
great many months; there the temperature was some
where around 40-45 (degrees Fahrenheit). But it
was cold.
Most of the crew there were Italians, very
cooperative and willing to teach somebody the ropes.
I was taller than some of them. Some were short
and stocky, better built and acclimated to that
cold than I was.
Most of the stuff was hand piled; you moved it
with hand trucks and then stacked it up by hand.
You had a palette board and a jack that lifts the
palette board 3 or 4 inches off the ground. Then
you pull that jack with the board on it, or you
used a hand truck. And you'd have to high-pile
these boxes; they weighed around 50 pounds apiece.
Ward
That could get pretty old by the end of 8 hours.
124
LG: Yes. But you pick up the rhythm of the work. I'd
say that the only part that I found particularly
uncomfortable was the cold.
Ward: Did you wear long underwear?
LG-: No. I recall one night I was working on a sort of
overlap shift, starting somewhere around four in
the afternoon or thereabout - used to be called
a swing shift - during the period when you would
have a great influx of pears, apples, from that
Sebastopol (a town in Northern California) country.
I guess it was about 11 o'clock at night; we were
unloading freight cars, and I see two guys walking
down the platform - Gene Pat on and Ralph Daws on.
They had become friends of mine; we were part of
the whole Local 6 mavericks.
Ward: It wasn't Local 6 then?
LG: No - no, it was still Local 38-44 of the ILA - and
here they were coming down the platform, carrying
a blanket for me and a bottle of liquor. They had
apparently been out together after a meeting, done
some drinking, and decided that Lou must be awfully
cold, you know, after working in this icehouse all
evening. So, they were coming down to warm me up.
- We all wound up at some bar having a drink.
Ward: So, you didn't stay at the icehouse forever. Why
did you leave?
LG: Probably the work ran out. I then went to work for
another icehouse, a big place - not too far from
Islais Creek. It was down around that part where
Third Street almost joins the Embarcadero, makes
that twist there, and towards the off-shore end.
It was a warehouse from which they either could
load ships or take the - whatever cargo they had
assembled and move that by elevator right down to
the vessels; -the whole idea at that time being that
they would have a cold storage or semi-cold storage
house directly adjoining the waterfront.
There was a whole series of these warehouses,
all of which were tied to the water side one way
or another. Merchants Ice, where I worked, was on
125
LG: the waterfront at the time; Gibraltar Warehouse
was tied to the waterfront, Seawall Warehouse,
Pioneer Warehouse, Hazlett Warehouse, this State
Ice and Cold Storage plant where I worked. It was
across the road from that huge building that later
housed Phillips and Van Orden, the printing house.
Rathjen Brothers Liquor, Haas Brothers Grocery,
S&W Grocery - those are places I remember; a whole
warehouse complex adjoining the waterfront.
On the other side you had the banana docks where
the banana boats would come in. I went to work in
this cold storage plant, although at that time we
weren't handling much perishable cargo. There was
a tremendous overflow of cotton.
Ward: Why did cotton have to be . . . .?
LG: It didn't. I think they decided that they'd just
simply use it as storage. No, cotton doesn't
require cold storage at all. I was working with
Frenchy Arripe. He was one of the early members
of 38-44, good, solid left-winger - While I was
moving from job to job, big changes in Local 38-44
were taking place. Some of the changes had taken
place before I was sworn in as a full member.
Ward: When did you become a full member?
LG: In December, 1935. The president had been replaced.
He was a weigher on those scales where the trucks
had to come out. I gathered he was a fairly good
union guy, but just didn't see the thing other
than picking up a few of the warehouses, weighers
and strappers and samplers.
The consignee never took the word of the
consigner as to what the weight was. So all this
had to go on the scales. It was a simple process
but hard work, where the coffee sacks were piled
on hand trucks and run across the scale; somebody
was taking the weight. It was the kind of a market
where nobody trusted anybody; they also took samples
of this coffee as it was coming in to make sure it
was the brand they had ordered.
Ward: But you didn't strap a sack, did you?
126
LG-: No, you didn't strap a sack. On the other hand,
a shipment of dried apricots came in wooden boxes;
they didn't weigh an awful lot, perhaps up to 25
pounds. If they were going for shipment, they were
strapped, so that you wouldn't have breaking in or
pilferage. These went through strapping machines
for overseas shipments. They had heavy orders from
Scandanavian countries, Germany, France, the
Netherlands. They were great holiday delicacies,
ordered months in advance. It was the kind of stuff
that kept.
Those were the weighers, and strappers and
samplers; the weigher and strapper groups are still
around the waterfront, though not like the large
group it used to be.
The president was replaced by a man named
Warren Denton, a pretty good egg. He was no
youngster; he generally believed in what some of
us were pushing for, namely, that the time was
ripe to go for an all-out organizing drive through
out the industry, including moving away from the
waterfront. That's where the name "March Inland"
was coined. A number of us felt very keenly that
there was a limit on how far we could go on the
waterfront in terms of wages and conditions -
##
127
III THE MARCH INLAND
The Warehouse Organizing Drive
Ward: Lou, you started to mention the "March Inland".
LG: Right. The other change that had taken place in
Local 38-44 was a major change. Had it not been
successful, I doubt very much that the whole
organizing drive that later took place would have
carried such momentum and resulted in the
organization, not only of the vast majority of
warehouses in this city, but of many, many other
groups.
That change was the recall of Dan Flanagan.
Dan was secretary-treasurer of the local. There
had been some difficulties in Local 38-44,
partially because of the presence of guys like
G-ene Paton, Ralph Dawson, George Valter, who had
joined Local 38-44 from Western Sugar. And there
had been some struggles going on up in Crockett.
The whole thing revolved around the basic issue
that here were a lot of young rebels who wanted
to move. Flanagan saw no reason why the local
should expand. Quite to the contrary, his thinking
was in terms of the entrenched Teamster (Union)
thinking of the time.
If anything, he felt the local belonged in the
Teamsters; or if there's going to be some organizing
in some of these up-town warehouses, like (Ward)
Walkup and places of that sort, those people belong
ed in the Teamsters' Union. He was very close to
them.
128
LG: A very nice guy had been assigned from Local 38-79,
the Longshore local of the ILA, Ernie Woods, to
help our local. One of the turning points was,
there must have been a difference of opinion
between Flanagan and Ernie Woods. Flanagan, who
had been light heavyweight champ of the Olympic
Club or something, a considerably younger guy than
Ernie Woods, worked Ernie over pretty good; he
dumped him.
You had an unwritten code around the warehouse
and the waterfront. There always was a good deal
of fighting; that was not unusual. It was under
stood that a big guy, for example, kicking a little
guy around was an absolute "No". A young guy
kicking the hell out of an older guy was an absolute
"No". If the guys were sort of evenly matched,
whether one guy had fought more than the other guy
was another story.
The violation of this sort of basic code was a
pretty serious thing, and it was one of the things
that finally triggered the removal of Dan Flanagan.
There was a recall and he was ousted.
Ward: This was done by a vote of the membership?
LG: . Right - by a vote of the membership. By the time
I became a full member, things were pretty turbu
lent in Local 38-44 and -
Ward: How many members would you say they had?
LG: Oh, maybe four or five hundred.
Ward: Not very big.
LG: Oh, no. The headquarters were at 85 Clay Street.
That was just up the street from where the long
shoremen had their headquarters. It was on the
second story - a long flight of stairs, straight
up. I guess many an evening you weren't sure who
was going to be in charge of the meeting because it
depended on who remained at the top of the stairs.
There were a lot of guys from the Mission,
particularly, who were very good with their hands.
129
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
V, r ard :
LG:
Ward
LG:
This whole process of turmoil included the deter
mination to organize on the part of the Young
Turks, like Gene Paton, Ralph Dawson, FrenchyArripe*
George Yalter, Bob Robertson. In the East Bay it
was led by members like Paul Heide, his brother
Ray Heide, Chili (Charles) Duarte, Bob Moore.
This was all one local, even then?
Yep, one local -
Even Crockett (a town and sugar processing plant
on the northeast shore of San Francisco Bay
in it?
) was
Crockett was in it, yes. They (the workers in the
sugar warehouse) were first organized in 1935, very
new.
The group that was in favor of moving uptown,
marching inland, finally won out. They were left
inclined, union-oriented in their thinking.
Simultaneously with trying to make a living, I was
part of this group and the general program of
driving inland.
Did you caucus before meetings to decide what
positions you were going to take?
On occasion, although once the main battle was
over - did we or didn't we move uptown - there
wasn't all that much to caucus about. Caucusing
was not half as important as being there.
I guess there were some pretty close votes?
No, not once the basic issue was decided; before
that there were. You had this entirely different
orientation, with many of us feeling very strongly
that the chance of growing as part of the Teamsters'
Union was zero, because the teamsters were
dominated by guys like (John P.) McLaughlin, Mike
Casey, John C'Connell; their thinking was entirely
different.
As a matter of fact, Mike Casey's philosophy was
that he would negotiate the wages for the teamsters,
and after that, by god, it was the teamster's job
130
LG-: to hang on and put out a day's work. The rumbles
around there were that in 1933 the teamsters had
reached an agreement with the drayage companies -
after all, all of our warehousemen were directly
affected by the actions taken by Local 85 of the
Teamsters; they were all dependent on trucks,
although most of the warehouses had railroad sidings
so that there wasn't the complete dependence on
trucks to the degree it is today.
The story was around that in 1933 the teamsters
picked up a 50 cents a day increase in pay. After
all, 1933 was still the depression and pretty rough
times -
Ward: Fifty cents a day was quite a thing?
LG: Right, but simultaneously most of the warehousemen
took a cut. How much truth there was to this I
don't know, but there was no question that as far
as the teamsters were concerned, they were interest
ed in that driver. As to what happened to the
warehouseman, that was just too bad.
Ward: So, anybody who had any brains didn't look to the
teamsters?
LG: You couldn't see that as the way out; the teamsters
themselves had no orientation in that direction.
That didn't happen until later on with Dave Beck,
(one-time president of the International Brother
hood of Teamsters), who began to move. As far as
Mike Casey was concerned, the only thing that was
peculiar was that the teamster was driving a truck
instead of a team of horses.
It was only in later years that these other
things took place, where the teamsters began to
move over into a much more industrially organized
outfit, such as canneries and things of that sort.
Ward: So, you got V/arren Dent on in. What was the next
step upward?
LG: I'm trying to remember who became secretary-treasur
er at the time; (Charles) Quirey -QUIREY-
I think it was spelled. He was an older man; he
went along with the general program of organizing.
131
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
His attitude as secretary-treasurer was that he
was a desk man; and the organizing was primarily
with the young rebels.
Now, these offices in the union, like the secretary
and the president and so forth, were they full
time in a local that size?
I don't think the president was - the secretary-
treasurer was.
They were opening up registration for additional
longshoremen, somewhere around 1936 - and a number
of us kicked the thing around. I had become fairly
good friends with George Valter and we were talking
about whether we would go down and apply; we pretty
well decided that we'd be better off, in terms of
what we wanted to get done, to stay with warehouse.
You were hitting the floor pretty frequently in
meetings then, weren't you?
Mmm - It was the same time in 1936 that I went to
work in a car gang.
Car gang - that's unloading railroad cars on the
waterfront?
Right. You didn't have much loading; it was
primarily unloading awaiting shipment. I worked
in that car gang for the balance of 1936 until the
warehouse strike took place; after the strike, I
also worked in that car gang.
But you were organizing on your own time?
On my own time and helping out as best I could.
This was late '36?
I'd say May, June or thereabouts. I was working in
the car gang because the strike in warehouse in 1936
was the first major strike they had. That took
place simultaneously with the waterfront strike
which started either the first of October or the
end of October , 1936.
132
LG: All during this 1936 period, the local was growing
by leaps and bounds. ?or a while we directed our
attention towards cleaning up the organization of
grocery warehouses. The waterfront warehouses were
fairly well organized, although staggering around
in terms of getting any decent contracts out of the
employers. Our "big ambition was to get 75 cents
an hour which would have been $6 a day. During
the strike that was the major demand.
Ward: What were you getting before the strike?
LG: Oh, around 62^ cents an hour - it varied a good
deal. We decided we wanted to go for a uniform
rate of pay, six bucks a day. We had some workers
who were getting slightly more, like the East Bay
Terminal workers, though most of them were in the
lower range. The longshoremen had won their 1934
strike and in the arbitration award they had picked
up a base rate of 95 cents an hour. When I worked
in the car gang, one of the reasons that the car
work was assigned to the warehousemen, through an
understanding between the warehousemen and the
longshoremen, was because they paid a dime an hour
less than longshore work - it was 85 cents an hour.
Ward: That was a desirable job then, in warehouse.
LG: Yes, except for its sporadic nature. I happened to
get an employer - Marr was his name - who was a
small employer. I think he had around four or five
regular guys in the car gang.
I was a half-assed lead man, because I drove the
little pick-up truck from dock to dock. We had our
hand trucks on this pick-up and you had to find the
plates that would go between the dock and the rail
road cars. Sometimes we carried a few of them
along, sometimes we had to borrow them, but the
total equipment he required to run this operation
was not a great deal. The net result was that a
crew of guys could roll around in a small pick-up
truck of that sort.
Ward: From place to place?
133
LG: From dock to dock. The times you'd get four or
five days work at one dock with a string of freight
cars was not too often. It was quite common to
handle a couple of cars in the morning and then go
to another dock for a couple of cars in the after
noon. Marr's job was to get these bookings of
discharge from the freight cars. Some of the guys
on the gang got to be close friends of mine; a guy
by the name of Tim Dorsey. He was a Harponian from
out in the Mission -
Ward: A what?
LG: An Irishman from out in the Mission: Harps - a
good guy. He was a member of the party. To give
you an idea how crazy things were in those days,
Tim had a tendency to drink once in a while, but
most times he'd make the job in the morning. If
he did, you found out pretty quickly it was better
not to talk to him for at least three or four hours.
He'd work the stuff out of his system - strong man -
he'd just sweat, pure alcohol, and you left him
alone.
He had been picked up one night as a drunk and
taken over to the county jail. Apparently one of
the cops there knew his family and when they went
through his pockets, they found a rosary and a
Communist party book. The reaction of this Irish
cop was, "That's just like these Communists -
they'll plant one of these books on anybody; here's
a good Irish kid and he would never belong to
something like this." Out he went. No bail; they
just held him overnight and he was discharged the
next morning.
And there was a character by the name of Riley
in the gang, a reformed alcoholic. Riley had taken
the pledge. He was an older man, though our idea
of what was an older man was very peculiar. We
figured if someone was 45-50 years old, he was
ancient, or damn near. Riley was constantly
lecturing Tim and I was trying to tell Riley, "Gee,
leave the guy alone when he's hung over; at least
he's here and helps put out."
The gang worked together; none of this stuff was
very complicated; you picked up certain techniques
134
LG: I recall we got a string of cotton bales. These
were all freight cars from the valley, and the
bales were all standing up. Bales are heavy - they
weigh about five hundred pounds.
Ward: What do you mean "standing up"?
LG: They're on end - standing up. On top of the ones
that were standing up were a group of bales that
were on their flat side. Well, wrestling with
those would be quite a job. I figured out a system
where the work was sure as hell easier on us. What
it did to that freight car, I'm not sure.
Breaking out the door is opening the door and
taking out the first bales. After you broke out
the door, I figured the best thing to do was to
roll those bales over to where you'd broken out
the door and let them drop on one end. They'd
bounce and hit that wooden floor of the freight
car a couple of awful whacks, but then they would
be standing up.
Once they were standing up, they were very easy
to handle. All you needed was a hand truck and a
hook to move that bale. It was quite a simple
thing. Three or four guys would unload a freight
car of that sort with ease in about forty minutes,
sometimes less, because you weren't manhandling
those bales and standing each one up. You just
dropped them instead. The net result to Southern
Pacific (railroad company) is something I've never
tried to calculate.
Ward: You mean it tended to punch out the flooring of
the cars?
LG: Oh, sure, the floor took an awful beating with 500
pounds dropping on it. And the drop - you had
only broken out enough so that the bale couldn't
fall down again. It bounced back and forth, maybe,
once or twice. You just stood clear and made sure
it didn't land on your foot.
In the case of these wooden boxes that were
going overseas, dried fruit, there the technique
was to simply break out the door and then by using
135
LG: a cargo hook which could get into the wood quite
easily, you would pull out a whole string - enough
for a handtruck full - and then tip those up. One
man would help load the handtruck, the other guy
would wheel it. So that moved along quite easily.
Again, you weren't handling it box by box. If you
handled it box by box, it would be a long process.
Ward: And now you say when you weren't on the job, you
were frequently out organizing. When did you do
that?
LG: At night.
Ward: Well, what would you do? Go to the night operations
of these warehouses or would you go visit the homes?
LG: No - no, these were mainly meetings that might take
place in a bar or restaurant over coffee, if you
were just getting started in a house. If on the
other hand we felt we had been picking up enough
momentum, there might be a meeting at a union hall.
The idea was that like in any organizing campaign,
people take a lot of courage from groups; it
becomes much more infectious.
It was quite common, let's say, if we could get
two or three guys who felt that the place was
ready, we'd say: "Look, why don't you gather ten
guys and meet at a certain corner and then you walk
down to the hall as a group?" Then we'd take
another ten somewhere else. In that way there would
be a general feeling that the thing was a real mass
movement. A group of guys were hot to trot. Then
meeting with them at, say, 5:30 - 6:00 o'clock
before dinner was not uncommon.
Ward: Would they come to the hall, then?
LG: You'd have both. You'd have guys who were
interested and you'd meet near their place of
work - have a cup of coffee. Other cases, where
you were further advanced, you'd meet them at the
hall.
##
136
Ward: Okay. There were two full time organizers?
LG: The full time organizers were Gene Pat on on the
San Francisco side of the bay and Paul Heide on the
east side of the bay. Ralph Dawson joined Paton
in the whole organizing program, after a while.
The organizers initially were paid so much a
head. The initiation fee was $10. The organizers
were paid five bucks a head. We had already picked
up an additional two or three thousand members be
fore we went out on strike in 1936. Our meetings
were getting bigger and bigger and we couldn't
hold them at 85 Clay Street, which would hold,
maybe, two hundred men. That was still the hiring
hall, though.
We began to meet at the Labor Temple out at
16th and Capp Streets. Well, at that meeting
there was a move on foot to make these organizers
regular, full-time organizers ....
Ward: And take them off piece work?
LG: Here was a whole group of impassioned speakers
on the whole evil of piece work and how the labor
movement had always fought against that; this was
a horrible thing to do. Here we were guilty of
having our organizers work on piece work; it ought
to be abolished and they should be given the
dignity of regular pay. Gene Paton sat the thing
out and Paul Heide and Ralph Dawson were the
others directly involved.
The membership voted overwhelmingly, if not
unanimously, to knock off that piece work at once
and to put them on a regular salary of $30 a week,
which was our demand for the basic wage at that
time. It worked out so that, although they had
several thousand dollars coming, they never saw it.
They took it as real champs; to them getting the
job done was far more important than the money.
Ward: As long as they could eat and get by?
LG: Right; it was a step in the right direction. I
still remember, because of the job that was done
by a number of guys on the issue of piece work.
These were fellows who knew all about the Bedeaux
137
LG: system. As a matter of fact, I met the old fellow
years later. He said it was always misunderstood.
Ward: He invented, promoted this system?
LG: Yes, he promoted the system at a number of places.
As a matter of fact, they had the Bedeaux system -
or the piece-work system - at Cwens-Illinois Glass
when I worked there.
Some sort of complicated system, I'm sure that
nobody could figure out except the guy making out
the paycheck. If you got a certain amount of
"ware" - that's what they called the bottles and
everything else they made; it's a packaging term -
out that was undamaged, then there would be
certain incentive bonuses paid.
These ranged from the guys who were responsible
for the molds where the molten glass was first
dropped in, to the packers; certain incentive
bonuses would be paid. This became an issue later
on when we managed to organize Owens-Illinois Glass,
I guess I was partly responsible for a running
feud that went on with them for years.
When we finally got a majority there in 1937,
we notified Owens-Illinois Glass we had a majority
and if they doubted it, a picket line would be up
the next morning. We weren't going to bother with
any elections or anything of the sort. We secured
recognition.
At the same time the company paid the fare of
two officials from the Glass Bottle Blowers Asso
ciation, an old-time AFL outfit, and flew them up
from L.A. They herded the balance of the plant
into the Glass Bottle Blowers; we had the warehouse
and they were fearful we would pick up the whole
thing. We managed to get a first contract.
Those were the days of annual contracts; one-
year contracts. V/e thought that was enough.
Prom then on, I made it my own business that
when that contract expired, we'd figure out some
thing new and different we were going to ask. One
138
LG-: time we put forward the demand, around 1938 or '39,
that we refused to work on any kind of piece-work.
I knew full well that this meant dislocating the
base structure of the whole plant. How could you
abolish piece-work in one department and not throw
out the entire plant?
Ward: And this was at Owens-Illinois, again?
LG: Yes. The contract was finally resolved with the
most insane kind of formula which in effect said
that regardless how much work the warehousemen
did, they would be guaranteed a certain amount
as piece-work. It was really a base rate, not
piece-work, but it had to be phrased that way
because the company was fearful of a move by the
entire plant to get rid of piece-work. I think by
now it must all be gone. In those days it was an
element in the production system.
Ward: Now, you've been talking about the '36 strike
quite a bit. You worked in a car gang before and
after that strike, didn't you?
LG: Yes -
Ward: And the issue of the strike was $6 a day - that
. was the main issue?
LG: I'm not positive. We struck the general public
warehouses and the cold storage plants, which we
had organized but were having more and more
difficulty in getting contracts renewed. And we
struck the grocery houses which we had fairly well
organized.
During that same period Bob Robertson became
very active. He had been working in and helped
organize a grocery warehouse called Kockos Brothers.
Chili had been working at a grocery warehouse
called Haas Brothers; we struck the grocery houses
at the same time.
Organizing was going on in other industries as
well. I'm talking now about various parts of
warehousing; you have public warehouses, cold
storage warehouses, grocery warehouses, paper
warehouses, which are quite big installations.
139
LG: You had dry goods warehouses, like the big Butler
Brothers plant. They're out of business now, but
they had a big warehouse at First and Mission
(Streets) .
I was head of the publicity committee, and
eventually took over the chairmanship of the
strike committee. But let me just mention one
brief yarn about the nature of these organizing
campaigns. We had organized the guys at Zellerbach,
(Paper Company) including a lot of men who had
worked there most of their lives, wore these 25-
year pins.
Ward: And they were for the union?
LG: They joined the union - right. What happened was
that the warehouses had been given an awful beating,
wage-wise, during that whole depression era. V/e
were coming out of it; we were riding this crest
of organization; and they joined with us.
Anyway, one of the demands was the 40-hour week.
While we had a Pair Labor Standards Act, it did not
provide for the 40-hour week. You could work 44
hours a week without overtime; we were trying to
pick up the 40-hour week with Saturday and Sunday
off. We had a number of sessions with the company.
One of the Zellerbachs, Harold, I believe,
decided he would personally take a hand in these
negotiations; on most things we got along fairly
well. When it got to the question of the 40-hour
week, that was an absolute "No",' with a long line
of chatter about how they had to stay open on
Saturday to serve the trade. We kept pointing
out that we weren't talking about closing one
outfit on Saturday and letting others operate on
Saturday. We had the industry pretty well organ
ized and we intended to make the same demand on
all of them.
Well, we still got nowhere. Finally, I invited
Harold Zellerbach: "Why don't you come down and
talk to your own people?" And he said, "Fine, I'll
do that." I said, "Don't worry, you'll be cour
teously received." We had a meeting at 85 Clay-
Street and we asked the men with the 25-year pins
140
LG: to sit in the front rows; we also urged that they
be very polite, which they were.
Zellerbach made quite an impassioned speech
which, in effect, said that the company realized
that time marches on and the day had come when
they had to recognize the union. Sure we were
deadlocked on the question of the 40-hour week,
but he kept using the expression, "Time marches
on, time marches on", figuring that the people
who worked for him would realize that they were
not dealing with a completely hostile employer.
After he finished his pitch - I happened to be
chairing the meeting - I said, "Are there any
questions?" Although they had given him a polite
hand when he got finished, one guy gets up and
says, "Mr. Zellerbach - and they addressed him as
Mister - in your talk you kept telling us that
time marches on". He said, "Yes." "Well, just
let me ask you one question; does it have to be
straight time?" (laughter) Well, that ended the
meeting.
Ward: No answer?
LG: No answer. I'll go into the details of the 1936
strike.
Ward: Very good. One other question. Sometime along
in here, you must have been having quite a few
dealings with the longshore guys?
LG: Yes.
Ward: And you had run into Harry Bridges by then?
LG: Right. In fact, we belonged to the Maritime Fed
eration as well as to the Labor Council. At the
meetings of the Maritime Federation, naturally,
we saw Bridges. Of course, during that '36 strike
we worked very closely with the longshoremen.
Ward: You had meetings with Bridges, personally, you and
other warehousemen during the strike, I imagine?
LG: During the strike, yes. Prior to that, we had had
encouragement from the longshoremen. They were
anxious to see the warehouses organized, too.
141
LG: For obvious reasons, because in 1934 that had
been one of the focal points by the employers in
their attempts to open up the waterfront. They
could use the warehouses to assemble cargo. They
were right across from the docks; the fact that
they were not organized and not prepared to move
in direct support was one of the weaknesses that
could occur during the strike.
Ward: Did you and your warehouse bunch - the progress
ives - accept leadership from Bridges and his
bunch of longshoremen?
LG: It wasn't a question of accepting leadership, so
much. In the warehouse organizing drive, there
just was general agreement that it was a hell of
a good thing.
Ward: And you exchanged ideas?
LG-: Ch, yes. The place where we exchanged ideas
primarily was in connection with developments in
the Labor Council. Local 38-44 was a member of
the Labor Council just as Local 38-79 of the
longshoremen. Bridges was a delegate to the Labor
Council; I became a delegate to the Labor Council.
Our delegation to the Labor Council was made up
in good part of this younger group I'm talking
about, heading the organizational push. Remind
me to tell you a bit of a story about Tim Dorsey
some time, and this guy, Riley who was in the same
car gang with me.
Ward: Okay, we'll start off with that next time.
(Interview 6: 21 March, 1978)
Ward: All right, what was the story about Riley and Tim?
LG: Tim had a tendency to do a little bit of drinking,
but he'd turn up on the job and for the first
three or four hours he would just sweat it out
and worked like the devil. Riley was just waiting
for the right opportunity to start lecturing Tim
on the evils of drink.
142
LG: Tim gets on the job one morning and the usual
thing and working his tail off, and about 10:30
or 11:00 o'clock, before Riley can say anything,
Tim says, "I'm going to tell you guys something
that happened last night." Tim had some funny
scratches on his face. He said, "You know, I
was having a few drinks south of Market at the
bars where I go and I get to one place where
there's a guy playing the banjo and he's playing
"Way Down South" and "Mississippi" and "Way Down
South in Texas."
"I just asked this guy, 'Why the devil don't
you play r Way Down South in San Francisco' or
something? Why all these other places? I guess
maybe I made a bit of a nuisance of myself because
all of a sudden he takes that banjo and hits me
over the head with it. Here I've got these strings
on my face and these funny scratches; I thought
about it later. Here I was going out for a bit
of a good time, having a little fun and what do I
do? I put some poor bastard out of business."
At that point Riley gave up and decided there was
no point in talking to Tim. He had a different
attitude on life.
The 1936 Strike
Ward: All right, now we're back in the '36 strike?
IG-: The strike lasted something over 60 days. It must
have been settled somewhere around the first of
the year. Incidentally, the strike did not cover
all the houses we had organized, because a number
of them were just in the process of being organized;
places like some of the drug houses; paper. These
were not quite set to make the move.
When we entered the strike we might have had
about two, three thousand members, and we just
about doubled the membership before that strike
was over. It was a combination of an effective
strike, an enormous amount of momentum, the use
of a lot of the membership in helping to spread
the organization; a real organizing crusade all
143
LG: through the city and the bay area. Part of the
inland march had taken in the organization of the
workers up at Crockett.
Ward: Did you have, aside from employer opposition, any
other opposition from within the union or among
the workers of an organized character?
LG: Not at that time. You did in Crockett, from a
company union and a group led by company vigi
lantes. That was a very rough beef up there.
Ward: Was the ACTU active then?
LG: No. The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists,
you're thinking of; that was later on. We had a
certain amount of opposition from the Labor Temple
and from the established machine. John O'Connell
was secretary of the Labor Council in San Francisco,
Well, the council had been trying for years to
set up a sort of self-appointed mediatory body;
a procedure whereby after demands had not been met
in negotiations, the council would then ask the
employers and the union involved to come before a
council board in an attempt to see if the differ
ences could be reconciled.
In some cases I think it was worthwhile. How
ever, we had decided in 38-44 that movements of
this sort were not going to do us a great deal of
good. The council was not trying deliberately to
do any harm, but we felt very strongly that the
momentum was such that if you allowed it to bog
down in hearings and further hearings and postpone
the hearing, particularly with an employer who is
looking for time to see whether he can whittle
away at the organization, we were better off to
just go ahead and move.
It apparently began to nettle people like
O'Connell quite a bit. What we would do was
report at the Labor Council that we had struck
so-and-so and so-and-so; the strikes were on. And
O'Connell invariably would make the point that
once again the procedure of the council was not
being followed; they had not called on us, and so
144
LG: forth and so on. We'd make some excuse for it that
there just was no choice. If we had gotten bogged
down in some sort of dilatory process, a lot of
the steam would have dissipated itself.
Ward: Let me ask this. You were employed full time at
the beginning of the strike and I believe you said
you went back to that full time employment in
private industry after the strike?
LG: Yes, after the strike.
Ward: Were you on the negotiating team that settled the
strike?
LG: Yes, the negotiating team included the chairmen
at that time. I was the chairman of the publicity
committee for a while and then of the strike com
mittee, both; so we were part of the negotiations,
as well as the officers and some of the organizers.
Ward: Kow did you get to be chairman of this and that?
LG: Elected in meetings; part of it was just the
business of "thems that were willing to work,
there's plenty to do." It wasn't a business of
having a lot of competition for the job; those
who were willing and anxious to put in the time,
. to put in the nights and get the job done.
On the publicity committee, I can recall, we
used to do a lot of drumming up for that, because
in most cases it needed volunteers. One chap who
did volunteer turned out to be a very good cartoon
ist. And he began to help in putting together some
of our mimeographed bulletins. Most of the stuff
we put out was mimeographed.
Ward: A mimeograph machine was a great thing in those
days.
LG: Right. Making a mimeograph machine operate and
knowing how to operate it. It was not unusual
where the publicity committee would write its
bulletin, do its own typing - we didn't have
stenos . We'd crank the mimeograph machine and
the same committee would be out there the next
morning distributing the literature.
145
Ward: Prom beginning to end - the whole thing?
LG: Not uncommon.
Ward: You were on the negotiating committee also?
LG: Yes.
Ward: Was this your first experience dealing with
employers?
LG: Just about. I might have had a little bit of
experience prior to that talking to individual
employers; in those days we were taking the
various industries within rounds; several years
later, the framework of what is called the master
contract developed. The most highly organized
group among the employers were the public ware
houses, partially because they already had a
structure in dealing with the PUC*on the setting
of public warehouse rates.
Ward: What does that phrase, "public warehouses" mean?
LG: Public in that sense meant that it was not a
proprietary warehouse. Public warehouses are where
the warehouse facilities are available for rent.
In other words, you had a line of merchandise and
you didn't want to hire your own warehousemen, you
could negotiate with a public warehouse both as to
the storage of this material and filling orders as
they were phoned in.
Ward: Very good. So this was your first strike of any
consequence. Did you feel you had a lot to learn?
LG: I thought it was the job of any young rebel in the
labor movement to learn all I could about the nature
of the industries we were dealing with. We weren't
terribly interested in the personnel on the other
side. Employers are employers. It's not that we
thought every one of them was evil and impossible;
they were just employers.
We had a lot of discussion on the nature and
structure of the industry. This, of course, was
important on several scores. Let me give you one
*Public Utilities Commission
146
LG: example which was quite crucial in the case of the
1936 strike. In the course of the strike, I had
spent a fair amount of time with a man who ran a
produce company. I "believe this outfit was
Paramount Export.
This man's name was AntoneKarguleas and we were
just casual acquaintances and bumped into each
other on the street, talked for a while. He came
to me during the strike and said, "You know, a lot
of us as merchants have an enormous amount of money
tied up in things used for Thanksgiving -
cranberries, turkeys, yams, the whole she-bang.
If we can't get the stuff out, we're going to take
an awful beating."
Well, sitting around with our guys, I threw out
the theory, "Which kind of a strike is most
effective against a public warehouse or a cold
storage house? Is it most effective if you keep
everything locked up and nobody can get anything
out, or would it be more effective to actually
empty out the place so that the house you are en
strike against had no source of revenue - nothing
stored, so nothing to collect on? Which way do
we come out ahead?"
Of course, the initial reaction to that was
anathema, because you don't strike a place and
let the merchandise out. .1 said, "Well, we ought
to give that some more thought. Maybe we can do
something to help turn things around for us. Some
of the merchants - they're not big guys - what if
they paid what we're asking for in the event we
take this stuff and release it; the stuff that's
required for Thanksgiving? We have a chance to
rotate that work through the union, and we insist
that they issue a statement supporting our demands.
After all, they're the ones who have to pay the
freight to the public warehouses."
Well, that cast a slightly different light on
the matter. After a good deal of discussion, we
decided there would be no harm done to set up a
release committee - one that these employers could
visit and tell why they needed certain stuff and
were prepared to meet our demands, and also to
subscribe to the statement.
147
LG: We finally had a meeting with, oh, there must have
been about twenty of these produce dealers and
other employers who used public warehouses and cold
storage space; they agreed to what we were propos
ing. It took a bit of heavy duty discussing with
our own guys - yet it did work effectively. In
the course of doing this, I'd say it was the first
time that an employer group came along and said,
"The union is right."
It was a big challenge to learn something
about an industry. Where is the economic leverage?
Where is the pressure? What is the nature of the
beast? This became apparent in the case of the
grocery houses, even though our demands were for
the same rate of pay in all of them. There was
the grocery warehouse that was a completely captive
warehouse, which handled merchandise, produce and
so on for their own stores; Safeway is as good an
example as any. Mutual Warehouse; United Grocers;
Lucky.
Then there was another number of grocery ware
houses v/hich were on the general market, selling
wherever they could. Some of them carried
specialty items, a variety of what was considered
high grade items. For example, S&W (Sussman and
Wormser) v/as a grocery warehouse, but it was not
a captive warehouse at all. It was on the general
market; S&W carried a very good reputation for
quality brand of merchandise. Haas Brothers was
another grocery warehouse which did not have a
series of stores of its own. There was really a
distinction between the two.
Some warehouses were called institutional ware
houses. Those are the kind of warehouses which
would cater to places like hospitals, hotels,
public institutions, ships. The economics in
these situations were not identical. It's much
easier to break through with a captive warehouse
than with an institutional warehouse.
The reason is quite obvious. The warehousing
operation with an outfit like Safeway is an
infinitesmal amount of their total cost of
operation. It might mean something like a tenth of
148
LG: a cent on an item, whereas in an institutional
house all these things would directly relate to
the single economic unit they were running; they
didn't have anything to merge it with. In other
words, it wasn't part of a whole structure like
the Safeway warehouse.
Ward: It wasn't under the same management, opportunity
to streamline operations?
LG: Right. That was one element in the picture. The
other element - an odd one in some ways; an insti
tutional warehouse could not take a strike in the
same way as an outfit like Safeway "because in no
case were they anything like the financial size
or strength of some of the other warehouses, so
that it was a combination of these things.
In some cases we'd even have some of these
warehouses sign up separately provided they met
the union demands. We managed to get a single
rate from each industrial grouping. That's an
example of what happens in grocery warehouses.
Again, that's completely different from an outfit
like a paper warehouse, where none of them ran
storage. They had no specific outlet; their major
sales in the paper warehouses were the usual,
print shops - so -
Ward: Now, Lou, you were saying something about a dif
ferent can of worms.
LG: I was referring to different types of warehouses.
All this is in answer to your question as to
whether I felt there were a lot of things I had
to learn. The answer to that is "yes." In other
words, it's a bit more complicated than just saying,
"Fellows, let's join a union and we'll bang these
employers on the head and get this and that." Also,
you learned that the employers had a lot of power
and they could be very rough.
Ward: Can you illustrate that?
149
LG: For example, Wesley Howell. He was the head of
Hazlett Warehouse: also the head of the Public
Warehouse Association. Ke was as rough as a cob.
He made that very plain right in negotiations. If
he had had the resources he would have sat the
thing out indefinitely. He just had no use for
people coming around, organizing his loyal em
ployees; it was evident that he could hold that
machine together.
I think he might have been hurt more - though
I never really found out - by the tactics we
adopted in emptying out some of these v/arehouses
and striking an empty place. That probably
disturbed him more than anything else because as
long as the stuff was stored it was collecting
money. He might not be making the kind of income
which goes with a regular turnover, but at least
he wasn't being hurt as badly. So, you have to
respect them for their own stubborness, I guess.
Ward: Did you ever run across an employer whom you found
you liked, personally? He responded, in a way?
LG: There v/ere a few employers, some from the smaller
warehouses, who v/ere not difficult to deal with.
For example, a man I always liked was Adrian Falk.
Later on he became quite prominent in the Chamber
of Commerce. Adrian Falk was in charge of the S&W
warehouse; an interesting duck. I think he came
from an old-time San Francisco family, probably
among the initial groups who came out here. I
never felt that he was fundamentally hostile to the
union.
I don't think he ever took the attitude that
his only purpose in life was to see that we were
gotten rid of. I discovered in talks with him that
if you could put together something logical you had
one listener. The big bulk of employers, it made
no difference what you said, they just weren't
interested. The only time they finally sat down
and dealt was when they had to.
Later on even someone like Wes Howell - this was
after the 1936 strike - mellowed quite a bit and
was much easier to get along with.
150
LG: I recall a man from Zellerbach - I believe (Eugene)
Breyman was his name - in 1937 - he was not the
most difficult person in the world to deal with.
Although he got himself all cranked up with some of
these books on labor relations; all the devices
which people invent in books that get you to be an
expert on labor relations. The most unusual
character I met during those years in some ways
was "Navy" Bill Ingram.
Ward: Oh, yes - the football coach. How in the world
was he in the labor relations picture?
LG: Not too hard. "Navy" Bill became one of the
officers in charge of labor relations for Safeway
stores. About the second or third time I met him,
we happened to be walking down Montgomery Street
together and he started telling me that he wanted
to clear something up - that he was not responsible
for running strike-breakers in 1934.
One of the things that developed in the 1934
longshore strike was where they recruited strike
breakers from the U.C. football team. He kept
insisting to me that he had nothing to do with
that; it was something that happened through various
fraternities. How true I don't know.
We were walking along Montgomery Street, and he
said, "Look, I got to sit down and rest." And we
sat on the curbstone while we were talking. "Navy"
Bill was pretty well known on Montgomery Street and
here were guys coming along and saying "hello"; he
had a heart condition.
Ward: You and he were sitting on the curb - ?
LG: Talking and we got along fairly well; except at a
later stage, he came to me with a proposal that
had to be turned down cold. His proposal was that
they would meet whatever demands we had, plus an
additional 5 cents an hour, if the union would then
undertake to compel all other grocery employers to
pay the same rate. Obviously, a device carefully
thought out by the people who ran Safeway that this
was one way to get rid of their competition. I had
to tell him, absolutely no dice; we just weren't
interested.
151
LG:
Ward ;
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
V/ard :
LG:
In that same period I got to know Bart Crum; he
was an attorney in John Francis Neylan's office.
I recall going by there for a meeting with Crum
and Neylan somehow getting around to telling me
about the time he defended Anita Whitney (a famous
Communist) against criminal syndicalism charges.
I didn't know that.
That's right, he did. Here I am sitting in the
office of this man whose reputation as far as
labor was concerned . . .
He was the principal attorney for (William Rand
olph Hearst, famous newspaper publisher) Hearst.
Oh, his reputation was that of one of the most
reactionary characters in the town, and there he
was telling me this yarn about Anita Whitney and
defending her on criminal syndicalism charges,
sometime in the twenties.
Nineteen - nineteen 1920, about the time of
the Palmer Raids.
And that was when I got to know Bartley Crum. For
a while Safeway dealt separately; they were not
opposed completely to working with the union.
Later on they got to be more and more difficult,
particularly when life got complicated with the
entry of the Teamsters into the field of warehouse
organization.
Smart!
Yep. We won the strike; the guys learned their
own power. Contracts that had been kicking around
for six or eight months were wrapped up.
Any brushes with the cops on picket lines?
We had some over in the East Bay. I forget the
name of the cop over there - Brown or something -
a thoroughly impossible guy.
Was he in Berkeley or Oakland?
Oakland; he made a practice of rousting the pick
ets all the time. Oakland had an anti-picketing
ordinance.
152
Ward: Well, they all did.
LG: Yes; we didn't pay any attention to the one in
San Francisco. The first time they made an attempt
to enforce it in San Francisco was around this
Woolworth beef. They used the ordinance to try to
confine the number of pickets. We had all kinds
of guys up there and most of them were there for
solid trade union reasons, but the fact that there
were also a lot of attractive young girls on the
picket line wasn't a handicap in getting our guys
to go out there. They sort of filled up the San
Francisco jails arresting everybody over a certain
number.
Ward: I'm pretty sure that the repeal of the anti-
picketing ordinance began in Berkeley; there was
quite a beef there with the Berkeley police. Do
you recall anything about that?
LG: It was Woolworth; it might have arisen because we
had spread the strike in Woolworth over to the
branch stores.
Ward: How close did you come to achieving all of your
aims, 15%, 90%?
LG: Oh, we got the wage increases we were after or most
of them. I'd say we won in terms of .getting a
contract, getting union recognition, getting
vacations written into the contract - something
that was new - establishing seniority, particularly
getting hiring through the warehouse hall for extra
labor; not the same as longshore because it was not
a complete rotation of all workers; but it was the
question of any replacements being called out of
the hall, any new employees being called out of the
hall.
You can establish a real grip over the industry
in the sense that the employer can't go out and
hire willy-nilly and choose a lot of people who
would be hostile to the union. Those were the big
demands; including preference of employment.
Preference of employment v/as good for union people;
an employer calling the hall: "I need so many guys
to discharge a freight car."
153
LG: At the same time the union was going through a very
intense campaign against what was called "hiring
off the street". Many of our own guys had become
accustomed, before they became members of the
union, to go shopping around at the various ware
houses to pick up a day's work, a half day's work.
Preference meant doubling back and getting a good
deal more discipline out of our own people so as
to knock off things like hiring off the street or
going job-shopping.
The hiring halls became well established. An
interesting sideline is that we did not place much
emphasis on the union shop; in those days we didn't
even have the union shop in the contract.
Ward: You didn't ask for a check-off of dues or anything
like that?
LG: No - no. It was a wholly different attitude. Sure,
institutions change and times change and require
ments change. But our attitude in those days was
if we could get preference of employment through
the hall that was enough in the way of guarantees
of union security.
Then, the question would come along, "Well, if
someone won't pay his dues?" We wouldn't even
have the business agents collect dues on the job.
People had to come down to the hall and pay their
dues. We wanted that direct contact with the union.
Same reason, we established compulsory attendance
at membership meetings and a fine for non-
attendance. The whole thing was built around the
basic concept that the only way to build a union
was to see to it that the membership took part.
Ward: You got compulsory attendance from the longshore
experience?
LG: Yes, sure, and the preference of employment we also
got from the longshoremen. To this day the long
shoremen don't have a union shop, even though there
is a provision in the contract that permits the
union to get a union shop any time it wants it.
They prefer preference of employment and the hiring
hall, which is a much more effective weapon.
154
LG: When some guy would say, "Well, look, there is so-
and-so and this son-of-a-gun won't join the union
on the jot) or come up with his dues," the attitude
at that time was, "Look, if you guys can't take
care of a character like that when he's walking
alongside of a pile or a stack of canned goods, you
have no business even being in the union." So,
that turned it around where it belonged.
Ward: Well, that's the way you guys built a stronger
union by making the guys take care of the slacker?
LG: Right. In other 'words, it had within it what I
think is still the fundamental strength of the
union; it could only spring from the membership
itself. It's not going to come by how many dollars
they have in the treasury or how many officers you
can hire; the nub of the thing had to be the direct
participation of the members; to my mind that still
remains the nub of any effective organization.
Ward: All right. What v/ere the things you tried to get
by the strike that you ended up not obtaining? If
any?
LG: I'm not sure if we got the uniform 40-hour week.
I'm not quite sure whether we won that one. I do
believe that we got the wages we were demanding or
very close to it. We did get the big thing,
preference of employment and the use of the hiring
hall. I doubt whether we got the full vacation
demands which we had -
Ward: How much did you demand?
LG: I think it was one (week) after one (year) and two
(weeks) after two (years).
Ward: Yes, that was the usual thing at that time.
LG: Bear in mind that most of these companies had no
vacations, or if they did have vacations it was on
a hit-and-miss basis, depending on who the indivi
dual was; more a personal favor. We did not have
a great proliferation of demands. There was no
struggle for health and welfare, no attempt to set
up a pension plan. I doubt whether we introduced
155
sick leave. We got that later. Seniority was a
very big thing and that one we did win.
It would be worth while somebody doing a bit of
work to see what happened with other unions around
here as a result of some of our organizing demands
and the good fortune of winning them. I distinctly
remember that at that time the teamsters did not
have seniority in their contract. The warehousemen
got it first.
That reflected the general attitude in the
teamsters; they negotiated the wage scale; after
that every guy was on his own to hold that job.
That's the reason that outfits like V/alkup got the
reputation of "V/alkup - Rundown". If the men
couldn't meet the work, that was just too bad.
Introducing the concept of seniority was a very
big thing.
Another important thing we got was the recog
nition of stewards. To us the steward system was
extremely important; this was a whole layer of
leadership with daily contact with the membership
on everything from the application of the contract
to grievances, the importance of preference and
everything else.
Some of the old line unions had absolutely no
concept of the steward system, or were hostile- to
it. I recall an instance in the Labor Council
where we reported some newly signed agreements -
some that we might have gotten after a day or two
of strike, because v/e had that kind of speed. We
were reporting, among other things, that the
steward system was recognized and we were setting
it up.
John O'Connell, in an impassioned speech, said,
"They talk about steward systems - that's not true
at all - that's just an attempt to build a Soviet
inside the warehouses." Where the association of
a steward system and Soviets came from, I have no
idea, (laughter) Today, of course, that's
accented, like coffee in the morning.
156
The Move To The CIO
Ward: When the strike was settled, you went back to work
in the car gang?
LG: Yes.
Ward: What was your position in the union, then?
LG: I was vice-president of the union. I had been
elected vice-president in the 1936 elections; that
was not a full-time office.
Ward: Obviously not, if you were working in the car gang.
LG: No. I think we had only two or three full time
officers.
Ward: How long did you continue working in private
industry?
LG: I continued v/ith that, though some of it became
hit-and-miss, when we had a lot of these organizing
pitches going.
Ward: You mean, sometimes you would be too busy with
union work to be working on the regular job?
LG: That's right. Although, one of the things with
the car gangs, it was not entirely steady work.
Ward: I see.
LG: Some days you would be very busy and other days . .
It was quite common, oh, if you picked up four
days in a week, you were doing fairly good. Five
days was a good week.
Ward: When you were out doing union organizing, were you
paid for that time?
LG: As I recall, most of this work was all volunteer
work.
157
Ward ;
LG:
Ward: Even though you had to lay off in order to do it?
LG: Yes. There's another distinction between the union
in those days and what happened later. The whole
idea of someone being paid by the union for work
ing on a committee, attending the Labor Council
meeting, was absolutely unknown; you just did it,
that ' s all .
And those weren't the days when a guy ran for
office so he could get rich.
Oh, one of the things that came out of the '36
strike, was that we settled before the maritime
strike ended. Bear in mind that we went out on
strike at the same time and that the impetus for
the organization of warehousing was the role the
warehouses played during the '34 strike. Cn the
other hand, the '36 strike differed enormously
from the '34 strike as to how the employers
approached it. There was no attempt to run scabs;
in '36 in many ways it was more of a seamen's
strike than a longshore strike.
The major push, as I recall, was an attempt on
the part of the employers to get rid of the
seamen's hiring halls. I don't recall the long
shore demands playing that much of a prominent
role in the '36 strike. The union just stuck
together against a counter-offensive on the part
of the employers.
Ward: Then it wasn't damaging to the maritime strike,
as such, for you to settle first?
It did them no harm. I recall we had some con
versations with them and I guess Karry (Bridges)
must have been there and some of the maritime
guys.
Ward: (Harry) Lundeberg?*
LG: Lundeberg was still with the Maritime Federation;
some of his manoeuvering that later led to the
breaking up of the Federation was already taking
form.
LG:
(Leader of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific.)
158
LG: There was a big hassle around the paper there - it
was called the "Voice of the Federation". Barney
Mayes was editor and he had a peculiar slant on
life all of his own; not very friendly to us,
anyway. There was a lengthy beef where finally he
got heaved out as editor. There was no damage
done by our settling and the general feeling was
that it was for the good.
Ward: And there was no resentment on the part of the
longshore union?
LG: No, none at all, because there was no attempt to
use the warehouses as a diversion point for cargo
and no attempt to bring any cargo down to the ships;
the problem didn't exist. In addition, when the
strike was over, we voted $1,000 a week to help the
longshoremen.
Ward: You had money by that time?
LG: Right. Money that came in because of a lot of
organizing, and we felt quite affluent.
Ward: When did you go full time?
LG: That was later in 1937. We had the Pacific Coast
District convention -
Ward: You were still in the ILA?
LG: Still in the ILA. We had a Pacific Coast District
convention in Seattle in 1937. It was around April
or May, and it was at this convention where the
decision was made to take a referendum on joining
the CIO, (first called the Committee for Industrial
Organization; later becoming the Congress of
Industrial Organizations) because the CIO was de
finitely moving all over the country by that time.
The general feeling was that we belonged with them,
although we weren't leaving the AF of L, (American
Federation of Labor).
We thought that part of our job was to see
whether or not we could get the AF of L to adopt
the principles of industrial organization and to
accept industrial unions in the whole structure.
So it wasn't a complete breach.
159
LG-: There was a beginning of a breach between the
teamsters and ourselves. Dave Beck was in power
by then: Tobin (Dan Tobin, former president of
the Teamsters' International) was gone. I recall
when we were up in Seattle that time, there was
an attempt on the part of the teamsters and Dave
Beck to move against the warehouse local we had in
Seattle. As a matter of fact, they moved fairly
successfully and broke the warehouse organization
there.
A lot of hostilities that carried on for a
number of years began to develop at that point. I
think it was during 1937 when we were up there,
the P-I was on strike -
Ward: The Post Intelligencer (a Seattle newspaper) ?
LG: Right. I remember meeting Anna - the daughter of
Franklin D. Roosevelt - Boettiger?
Ward: Boettiger, yes. Her husband was the publisher.
LG: I remember meeting her during that strike - I don't
know how. Apparently, she was fairly friendly to
the strikers.
Ward: Yes, I think that was true. That was a Hearst
paper?
LG: Right. And she was at some little gathering of
ours; I recall everybody having a pretty good time;
I wound up playing some revolutionary songs on the
piano. That didn't seem to offend her or take her
aback. She seemed like an awfully good sport.
Harry had met with Joe Ryan (president of the
ILA) and other parts of the maritime industry in
an attempt to see whether the whole maritime group
could move over (to the CIO). He met with no
accord of any kind from Lundeberg and Joe Ryan of
the ILA.
At one time, as I recall, Harry made a straight
forward proposition to Joe Ryan to take a national
referendum in the ILA on whether to go into the
CIC. If the majority voted not, we wouldn't go
either. But Ryan would have no part of that.
160
LG-: So we voted as a Pacific Coast District to take a
referendum and we voted to go into the CIO.
Ward: That referendum would have "been held in -
probably May or June of '37?
LG: In mid-1937, right.
Ward: And you were vice-president of Local 38-44 and you
were technically, at least, a working stiff?
LG: Right.
o- 1
Ward: Okay, then the referendum took place; did your
position change?
LG: Yep. What happened after that was Harry (Bridges)
was designated Pacific Coast Director of the CIC.
I guess he designated me, or I was designated by
the national office, I don't recall which, as
Northern California Director. In other words, a
sub-title; at that point I went to work full-
time for the CIO.
Ward: You never did work full-time for Local 38-44?
LG: I don't believe so.
Ward: One day you were in the car gang and the next day
you were something else?
LG: That's right. Anyway, it was at that point that I
went to work full-time for the labor movement. The
job there was working together with any unions
that belonged to the CIO, or giving any other
unions who wanted to come into the CIO a hand. Al
though during that same time we continued our mem
bership in the Labor Council.
Ward: For how long?
LG: Until they heaved us out. The Labor Council had
become during 1937 perhaps the most active labor
forum that the country had ever seen. Debates v/ent
on endlessly on the whole question of industrial
organization, rank-and-file organization, the need
of the labor movement to expand. We maintained
very good friends and close allies.
161
Ward: In many labor organizations at that time the guys
who stayed up the latest carried the vote.
LG: No. Meetings lasted until 11-12 o'clock at night,
but it wasn't the business of the delegates
drifting off. As a matter of fact, it was very
tough for a visitor to get in, even, because it
had a very small gallery section. I recall Terry
coming down there and she got a seat only because
I was a delegate and the guy at the door saw to it
that she got a place to sit. There were times
when there were just as many people outside the
Labor Council on the street picking up news as
to what was going on as there were inside.
We had no intention of leaving. I never thought
that we left the AF of L; they left us. About that
time, another thing was taking place which is rather
important. Before Dave Beck took power Tobin, who
was still head of the Teamsters' Union, and Joe
Ryan reached an agreement on dividing up the
warehouse field; where the warehousemen who v/ere
in the ILA would be confined to the waterfront
warehouses, and the teamsters would have all the
warehouses uptown.
Bear in mind that at the time we got going the
teamsters were ignoring the warehousemen completely.
The fact that we began to organize with a good
deal of success became quite a motive for the
teamsters to begin to change.
Anyway, this agreement between the teamsters
and the ILA then began to be effectuated, or an
attempt was made to implement it by William Green,
(president of the AP of L). For a while almost
every Labor Council we'd attend, there would be
another telegram from William Green parcelling out
the warehousemen like so many bunches of bananas;
this belonged to the Teamsters Union; some hard
ware warehouse belonged to the Carpenters Union, or
a plumbing warehouse belonged to the Plumbers'
Union.
They themselves didn't know what they were
doing, because on the one hand they were completely
craft organizations; on the other hand they were
determined that this stupid fight against the
formation of the CIO would go on.
##
162
(Interview 7: 28 March, 1978 )##
Ward: All right, you were about to tell what went on
inside and outside the Labor Council while the
deliberations were in progress.
LG-: What was going on inside the Council was the
debating of the merits of an idea that had taken
form within the labor movement for years. We were
not arguing with the crafts, but our position was
that unless the mass of workers could be organized,
the people who were not craftsmen - and after all
that included a majority of the workers, whether
it be in the bay area or anywhere else in the
country - even the crafts themselves would find
their situation pretty desperate at times and be
subject to every vagary of the employer's position,
such as the American Plan.
These debates were worthwhile. Even in recent
years you still run into some old timer who had
been a delegate to the Labor Council and the re-
miniscing and remembrance of those debates still
stands out in his mind as perhaps the finest
chapter in the whole history of the Labor Council.
The march inland was rubbing off on all kinds
of unions, so that unions which had been either
dormant or completely out of business suddenly
took life again. It was no accident that San
Francisco saw one of the first organizations of
retail clerks. That Woolworth strike was one of
the examples that took place, although the ware
housemen also had a strike against Woolworth then.
Those things tied in together; the importance of
making San Francisco a real union town. This was
an expression that was easily understood.
There was no reason why the whole town should
not be unionized; no reason why just because some
worker happened to be in a non-craft organization
he would be ignored. It was a period where even
the Dishwashers' Union began to flourish. They
163
LG-: were part of the hotel group; at one time the only
groups that carried any weight among the hotel and
restaurant employees were primarily the cooks and
waiters and bartenders - all of them in three
separate little locals. Y/hen it came to the large
installations such as cafeterias and things of
that sort, they only had a handful, if anybody.
A lot of the organization was literally stimu
lated by the waterfront. I remember, for example,
there was an old Clinton Cafeteria down at lower
Market Street, somewhere around Market and Steuart.
I think it was Clinton or Foster - I'm not sure
which. The culinary workers had made some progress
in organization, but not enough; a number of us
decided to get in the act.
That meant, oh, maybe 50 or 60 of us going in
there one morning, occupying every seat, ordering
a cup of coffee and sitting there; that's all.
Three or four hours of that and the company gets
the idea pretty quick that unless they recognize
the union" their chance of business could be pretty
thin.
Like barber shops on the waterfront; all had to
organize at once. The idea that they could operate
non-union was completely unacceptable. Everybody
got in the act. These things stimulated the or
ganizations throughout the city. It also resulted
in us making some awfully good friends and support
ers.
There were some real characters in the Labor
Council. Some of them, very colorful guys, men
who became good friends of ours, very loyal,
remember Hugo Ernst - he was with the Hotel and
Culinary Workers and he had his chair where he sat
on Labor Council nights. We all knew it because
we were already delegates, but apparently some new
delegate came to the Labor Council and took his
chair. Hugo Ernst carried a cane - whether he
actually needed it or not, I don't know - always
had a carnation in his button hole. I'm not sure
whether he wore spats at the time -
Y/ard: He was supposed to have -
164
LG: I think so; he was a character. He walked into
the Labor Council and here is this man sitting
in his chair. He stood there and tapped the chair
a couple of times with his cane. This guy is
getting a little bit embarrassed - doesn't know
what to do - and somebody leans over and says,
"Get the hell out - that's Hugo Ernst's chair."
There's a guy like George Kidwell, who was a
delegate to the Council from the Bakery Wagon
Drivers. One of his proteges was Wendell Phillips,
who retired at the same time I did. George
Kidwell - that man was oust like a rock - just a
good, strong -
Ward: His other protege was (Jack) Shelley -
LG: Yeah, Shelley was the other one. Shelley became
head of the Labor Council, became a member of the
Sacramento Legislature -
Ward: State senator -
LG: Senator and then went on to become a congressman
and then mayor. People like that were pretty
colorful. John C'Connell in his own peculiar way
was a unionist - no question about that - but in
the oldest possible tradition; one who felt so
keenly about observing every little bit of proto
col within the Labor Council. I guess we were
quite a chore to him because when we'd make reports
of unions to announce how many places had been
organized, how many had been on strike and so on!
Before a union was given strike sanction the
Labor Council would try to arrange sessions between
the union involved and the employer involved to see
what could be done to mediate the differences.
Well, we had made a decision.
We couldn't run the risk of getting bogged down.
We were being bogged down enough, as it was, by
the old Labor Relations Act.
Ward: It took too long?
LG: After all, if there's anything that the employers
and their lawyers know it's how to buy time - stall
indefinitely. So, you'd go in and organize a
165
LG: place, try to meet with the employer and get
recognition of the union, preference of employment,
sit down and bargain. If the employer questioned
you, we'd say, "Okay, tomorrow morning you be here
early and count the number of people outside. If
there are more people outside than inside, you'd
better recognize us. If there are more inside
than outside, you win." It was just that simple.
It's no wonder that the Chamber of Commerce and
the Industrial Association got into quite a frenzy
over these things. They almost identified union
ism, communism and revolution as all one and the
same thing, particularly this kind of unionism.
John O'Connell reflected that.
But there were also men in there like Dan Del
Carlo. He came from the building trades, the
Glaziers Union; always remained a very close
friend of the ILWU; he was a former Wobbly. There
were a number of guys who had been Wobblies and
later settled in San Prancisco and became part of
the trade union movement. There are men like Joe
Murphy, a wonderful character in his own right,
also a former Wobbly. I think he has the best
collection of Wobbly literature and songs of any
body on the Coast.
Ward: The machinists were very friendly too?
LG: Very, very friendly at the time. As a matter of
fact, two of them lost out in the machinists in
a very ill-calculated strike at the end of World
War II - (Harry) Hook and (Sd) Dillon. Hook turned
up as a witness against Harry later on; not Dillon.
The waterfront machinists - the Machinists Union
through their waterfront division - that's more
accurate because they were all members of Lodge
68 - were part of the Maritime Federation.
We also helped out any number of unions, even
the union from which George Johns, who later
became the secretary of the Labor Council, came
from. Those were the Cigar Clerks, v/hose main job
was not really selling cigarettes or cigars but
playing this "36" game - bet a quarter against the
house on rolling of dice, to see if you could win.
Anyway, it was a form of half-baked, legalized
gambling.
166
LG: It was tolerated in the city just like dice for
drinks is still acceptable around San Francisco.
Liars dice. Bull dice, you know. Ship, Captain
and Crew. Razzle-dazzle. You name it. All the
various games; although in other parts of the
country, like Los Angeles, you never see a dice
box. It's a characteristic of the city and its
tolerance of certain things. Kyne's and -
Ward: Corbett's. You used to see the D.A. (District
Attorney) at Kyne's on election night.
LG: And every once in a while some reporter would go
down and talk to (Tom) Kyne and ask him how the
odds were running. We also would venture a couple
of bucks there. The wealthy candidate would throw
money into Kyne's, because this is one way to in
fluence the election. After all, a number of
people are influenced by the newspaper stories
saying that the odds against someone winning are
four to one, five to one, or what have you.
Ward: Well, let's get back - you ran against John
O'Connell for secretary at one time, didn't you?
LG: Hmmm. That must have been late in 1936 or sometime
in 1937. Oh, somebody came up to me and said,
"What do you think about running against him?"
' Heck, we didn't have much use for him - he was
always blasting us. John O'Connell had strong
friends in the Labor Counc.il like John McLaughlin
of the teamsters; he thougnt pretty much the same
way as McLaughlin. And I said, "Fine, I'll run -
I just hope I'm not elected;" of all the jobs I
didn't want would be secretary of the Labor Council.
I did fairly well. The fascinating thing was
people coming out of the woodwork from every
direction. Delegates who had been rounded up to
be sure to vote that night. We never had an at
tendance like it.
Ward: I think you said they brought them in on stretchers.
LG: Damn near. Anyway, the Labor Council was a lively
affair - no question about it.
167
Ward: You were telling about the weekly telegrams
coming from William Green, and. about how Harry
(Bridges) manoeuvered in that -
LG: It was a combination of two things that were com
ing to a head; one was the attempt to effectuate
that agreement between Joe Ryan and Dan Tobin on
jurisdiction. And the other was the attempt on
the part of the central leadership of the AF of L to
decapitate the CIO here, and specifically to get
us expelled from the Labor Council.
Our position was that while we thought the CIO
was a good thing, we felt it would be best to stay
in the AF of L, be affiliated with the CIO and at
the same time campaign for the acceptance of the
CIO principles by the American Federation of Labor.
In retrospect, I still think that position was
very sound. For one thing, I think it had an
enormous impact on those delegates. Secondly, I
think it gave a whole progressive tone to the
San Francisco Labor Council and became a really
genuine educational experience.
But in the meantime, the AF of L had taken the
position that if you belonged to the CIO you were
guilty of dual unionism. You haven't heard that
expression for a long, long time. In those days
"dual unionism" was an expression in constant use.
As a matter of fact, there were organizations
that literally tried to do the very same thing we
did, like the International Typographical Union.
They were in the AF of L; they supported the CIO.
The time they broke with the AF of L was when the
AF of L levied an assessment of so much a member
per month on all the international unions to carry
on the fight against the CIO. The ITU (Internat
ional Typographical Union) refused to pay. They
said, "You're simply asking us for money to break
down industrial organization and we'll be no part
of it.
Ward
##
Lou, you were saying -
168
-.
vw
LG-: These telegrams would threaten to lift the charter
of the San Francisco Labor Council unless the dual
unionists, namely, outfits like the ILWU, were
heaved out. No question in my mind that had there
been any kind of an open, above-board vote without
the threat of yanking the charter, we would have
won hands down.
The delegates there, with the exception of
perhaps a couple of awfully stiff-necked and
hard-bitten guys, definitely would have stuck with
us, because that had been one of the by-products
of the maritime and general strike and the march
inland, and the enormous benefit it had done to
all kinds of other unions. You had a tremendous
influx of young people for the first time, in
stead of a Labor Council that was comprised of
people in their dotage.
So it was under the gun of these threats that
a lot of these debates took place; a lot of
parliamentary manoeuvering. We'd meet before the
Labor Council meeting with our friends - kick the
gong around. The whole excitement of the Labor
Council resulted in an enormous attendance, not
only by the delegates; there would be nights
when there were almost as many people outside the
Labor Council as there were inside. People came
because it was the best show in town and without
charge .
Funny things used to happen in the Labor Council,
Like one night, the argument had gone very, very
late. This delegate, Tony Cancilla - a very tough
guy - of the Cab Drivers Union - got up to make a
point of order. Jack Shelley v/as in the chair.
Shelley asked him, "Y/hat's your point of order?"
"Oh, I just want to say one thing, if this argument
keeps up this way there's going to be a mad dash
for the door and somebody ain't going to make it."
Another night, for example, when we were de
termined to try to prevent a vote on G-reen's
telegram of expulsion, Harry made a suggestion.
Harry is a good parliamentarian, even though he
169
LG: sometimes had what you'd call "Bridges' Rules of
Order". He also knew Roberts' Rules of Order and
C u sh i ng ' s I-lanu al very well.
He suggested, "Why don't we go into a committee
of the whole?" The advantage of a committee of
the whole is that you can argue every single merit
of an issue without necessarily making motions,
amendments, amendments to amendments, voting down
the whole thing. It's a free and open debate
around an issue until the assemblage has decided
okay, we've heard all the arguments and we're now
prepared to take motions.
So when this telegram was read Harry gets up
and says, "Mr. Chairman, I make a motion we go
into a committee of the whole." Jack Shelley
didn't see anything wrong with that and we went
into the committee of the whole. The debate must
have gone on an hour and a half, maybe two hours
when somebody got up and said, "All right Mr..
Chairman, we've heard enough. I make a motion we
accept the telegram from President Green."
Harry jumps up and says, "Sorry, Mr. Chairman,
that motion is out of order." Shelley is sort of
riffling through the Rules of Order and says,
"I guess you're right, Harry, it is out of order."
Somebody else gets up and makes another motion,
"I move we throw out these dual unionists." Harry
is on his feet again and says, "Sorry, Mr. Chairman,
but that's contrary to Roberts' Rules of Order."
Finally, it goes round and round on these
points of order with Jack Shelley having to up
hold Harry on these things. Finally, Shelley in
complete frustration turns to Harry, "Look, Harry,
you got us into this damn thing; how do we get
out?" Apparently, the only motion that is accept
able under those terms is to rise and report,
which simply means that you return to the formal
structure of a meeting, with making motions,
amendments and so on.
Ward: By that time, everybody wanted to go home?
170
The Teamster Blockade
LG: That's right; that took care of that night. As
a backwash of the whole 1937 teamster blockade,
there was a good deal of friction. Beck was on
the move. He had some pretty tough eggs, and
other things v/ere developing that were bound to
lead to trouble.
The teamsters had chartered a warehouse local
in the San Francisco area, Local 860. Later they
acceded to the employers' demands for so-called
industry-wide contracts, but already they were
sort of nibbling at our flanks in some warehouses;
some employers were stampeded into signing with
them before we got around.
There had been incidents outside (the Labor
Council meetings); there would be some flare-ups,
although in the main, considering the number of
people that would turn up and the intensity of the
debates, there was amazingly little in the way of
outbreaks.
Ward: I think you said that sometimes there would be a
couple of hundred guys outside?
LG: Not uncommon at all.
Ward: Waiting to see what happened?
LG: Yes, waiting to see what happened. Part of it
also was a feeling that the delegates inside were
trying to protect their interests; perhaps even a
certain feeling of a show of strength in support
of their delegates; and also to be around if some
thing untoward did happen, which it didn't - never
in the Labor Council. Outside the Labor Council,
yes.
Gene Paton was one of the delegates to the
Labor Council and there was a bar right across
the street from the Labor Temple at 16th and Capp
Streets. Pat was having a drink with (Swan) Swede
Carlson. Swede Carlson was one of our early mem
bers and he had been a pretty good light heavy
weight in his day. He was no longer in that light
Tom Mooney Freedom Parade up Market Street,
San Francisco, January 8, 1939. Tom Mooney, hand
raised; to his left, Louis Goldblatt; behind him,
George Kidwell, State Dir. of Industrial Relations
Teamster Blockade, San Francisco Waterfront, 1937.
Louis Goldblatt, center; Ernie Woods, at right with
button; Clarence Paton, at extreme left without hat.
171
LG: heavy-weight class, since he had picked up a few
pounds, but he was a strong guy, tough.
Pat was always a very outspoken guy. Some
teamsters were in the bar and Pat said something
and one of the teamsters copped a Sunday on him
and down he went. And before Swede could turn
around, somebody whacked him and down he went.
The way Swede picked up the story he says,
"So, I shook my head and here was Pat on the floor
and there's no need for both of us to be down
there, so I got up and went to work."
Apparently Swede just cleaned up the joint -
flattened several guys. One guy finally flying
through the door, draped over a car. While Swede
was not a delegate to the Labor Council, having
him around generated a certain respect.
Ward: Remembering him, I would think so.
LG:
One of the by-products was that people said,
"Ckay, don't screw with these guys, that's all -
argue with them, fine, but if you want to go the
hard way, it's a two-way street." You ask any of
the reporters who covered those debates. One of
them who was most fascinated was Art Eggleston
from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Ward: He used to have a column specifically on labor
and its problems.
LG: That's right. It was the first labor column that
I know of around here.
At any rate, by the end of 1937 we were
expelled. That happened in the Alameda (County)
Labor Council too. One Labor Council where they
were having a hell of a job trying to expel us
was over in Contra Costa (County). This wasn't
just expelling these wild, hairy-assed guys from
Longshore and Warehouse.
There, you had all kinds of people like the
Oil Workers, Rubber; Steel were there; the old
Pioneer Rubber plant. You had the Hine, Mill and
Smelter Workers at Selby. You had the guys who
172
LG-: made different powder and dynamite products at
Hercules (formerly Hercules Powder Company, now
part of Hercules, Incorporated); you had a whole
string of industrial plants. Actually in terms
of proportionate relationships the craft unions
weren't nearly as important, and they were
obviously reluctant to heave out the industrial
unions.
I recall going to a meeting of the Contra Costa
Labor Council with Paul Heide. That long drink
of water is an unusual character. I never thought
the guy was so strong but we'd gone to one of
these little arcades, I think it was in Seattle -
he also got tangled up with some teamsters in a
fight there too - where they had these punching
bags where you could register how hard you could
hit it. Paul says, "I think I could hit that
thing pretty hard." And he whacked it right off
its hanging.
So, Paul was also a very courageous guy. We
walked into the Contra Costa Labor Council and
there was someone from William Green's office
presiding. He turned up later in Crockett in 1938
where an attempt was made to break the ILWU. Paul
and I walked in and somebody else was with us; it
. could have been Ham.
Ward : Ham?
LG: (August) Hemenez - "Ham and Eggs" from Crockett.
And as we walked in, this guy dropped the gavel
and said, "The charter is hereby suspended." That
was the end; never any debate, never any discus
sion.
Ward: Did that happen in San Francisco too? Was there
any vote?
LG: No, in San Francisco the delegates finally voted
to expel us; either that or surrender the charter.
And they weren't ready to surrender the charter.
I don't think anybody thought seriously that that
sort of a fight was in order and that we could
make it. Your proportionate relationship in a
city like San Francisco between craft and
industrial unions is overwhelmingly towards the
crafts.
173
Ward: It's the reverse of the Contra Costa situation?
LG: Exactly the reverse, right. By that time we were
setting up the CIO and keeping busy. This was at
the tail end of 1937 f and I had been appointed
Northern California Director of the CIC.
Ward: And your working relationship with Harry Bridges
had existed some time before that?
LG: Yes, not closely, obviously, because Harry was up
to his ass with the Maritime Federation; some of
the conflicts in the Labor Council were also re
flected in the Federation. The attempt, for
example, on Harry's part and the Longshore
division to see whether or not we could get the
maritime unions, as a group, to move into the
CIO. There were a number of efforts made in that
direction, like that of John L. Lewis*to set up
a whole maritime section of the CIO; but people
like Lundeberg and (Vincent) Mai one of the
Firemen's Union were dead set against it.
There was a continual struggle around the
Federation which went into decline after the '36
strike and began to phase out its effectiveness.
All this was bound to preoccupy Harry; he was also
head of the Pacific Coast District of the ILA,
remember that.
As a matter of fact, (Harvey) Carty, who had
been president of Local 38-44 and had been
removed by petition, sealed his own fate in 1935
when he voted against Harry to be head of the
Pacific Coast Division of the ILA. And there were
the attempts on the part of Pedro Pete (Peterson)
in L. A. and the Dirty Dozen, as they called them
Ward: The Dirty Dozen, would you elaborate on what that
was?
LG: Guys who were tied to the ILA, even after it went
to the CIC. Pedro Pete was the leader of the
group; I think he was on the ILA payroll for some
time afterward, after we went CIO.
Ward: I know he was on somebody's AF of L payroll years
later, in the forties.
*Founder of the CIO
174
LG: That's right. So, that struggle was on. The
National Labor Relations Board had used what they
called the globe election theory in the case of
our affiliation with the CIO. In other words,
where you could carve out parts - even though we
had a Pacific Coast District contract - it was a
west coast agreement, you see.
Locals, according to the NLRB, could leave; so
three ports - Tacoma, Port Angeles and Anacortes -
Port Angeles and Anacortes are tiny locals, re
fused to affiliate to the CIO; remained in the ILA
for some years, and finally came back into the
ILV7U, somewhere in the late forties, I believe.
Anyway, Harry had his hands full with the or
ganizing drive and the almost endless number of
struggles.
I can hardly recall a period where we didn't
have a strike on somewhere. They were just pop
ping all the time. You never fiddled around with
anything more than a one-year contract. And it
meant that you not only had your major contract
negotiations, but with your organizing push, you
also had an almost continuous stream of strikes
as well. So that while we attended the Maritime
Federation meetings we also attended the district
meetings of the ILA; the relationship was not all
that close.
Ward: Well, here you were at the age of 26 or 27 with
one big strike behind you, a rather successful
strike, and you had your first full-time trade
union job. That was the situation?
LG: Right. During the earlier period I had been
elected vice-president of Local 38-44 in the 1936
elections. That was the time when Gene Pat on
became president, and an old-timer named C. T.
Quirey who continued as secretary of 38-44 and then
of Local 6; he was elected.
Robertson was business agent at the time and
(Ray) Tarling was another. I mentioned him in
conversation. Some time in 1937 he mis-directed
a letter and it got into the hands of somebody who
was a friend of the union - complete stranger,
175
LG: though. It got to us and we were about to go
ahead with a trial; simply dropped the information
to Tarling that we had it. He was reporting on
organization that was going on at Western Sugar,
among other places. Anyway he promptly took off
and that was the last we saw of him.
By the way, there was a period when almost all
of these employers that we v/ere bumping into were
hiring Pinkertons (employees of a detective agency)
As a matter of fact, (J. Paul) St. Sure later ad
mitted that almost all of the big employers
employed Pinkertons, and I don't mean a Pinkerton
guard standing outside the door or wearing a
Pinkerton uniform; none of that crap. They were
people employed as warehousemen, they were workers
in the plant, their job being to report every bit
of union activity and particularly to single out
the ring leaders.
How much they helped the employer, I don't know.
They did in a few cases where they would finger
somebody and then the employer would find some
other reason to can him, such as coming in a few
minutes late or having a shot of whiskey at lunch
time. But not in terms of supplying any informa-
., tion to the employer which he couldn't get by just
reading our union paper or leaflets which we were
putting out all the time - or by calling us.
I think the employers finally decided this was
a complete waste of money. Most of these guys
were not effectual in dissuading anybody from
joining a union. There was just too much of a
wave going on. As a matter of fact, if somebody
made a crack, "Oh, the hell with the union,"
people might think he was a Pinkerton when he was
not.
Ward: V/ell, in a sense life became somewhat different
for you when you took on this full-time job. I
imagine that one of the things that you were doing
was preparing for the formation of the (California)
State CIO Council.
LG-: Yes. Cnce the expulsion of the CIO unions from
the A? of L was a fait accompli, obviously, the
fight had to shift. For our own self-protection
176
LG: and our own effectiveness it meant that we had to
set up the CIO Council, help out wherever we could
with organizational drives, help the weaker unions,
also help some of the bigger unions when they
needed a hand.
I recall making an awful lot of mileage. It
was pretty common for me to be driving to L. A.
and San Diego, a few days there, stopping along
the route with various groups; and to cover every
thing from San Diego up to Redding . . .
Ward: Not to mention Sacramento.
LG-: Not to mention Sacramento, because I also became
head of Labor's Non-Partisan League. Labor's
Non-Partisan League was really a (political) alte_r
ego of the CIO. It might have had a few other
organizations in it, but not many.
I remember it was a continuous roundy-go-roundy
of work. I remember meeting with newspaper
people, some of whom later successfully helped to
organize the San Diego Union -
Ward: Brodie?
LG: Yes, Brodie - Bill Brodie was one of them. A
slight, small fellow, very aggressive.
Ward: He became a farmer, I understand.
LG: He was a good man. It also meant trying to help
out in the organizational pitch we had going on
among the Fishermen in San Diego. I got to know
the Slovenians very well. I made my first trip
to Mexico City on their behalf; I think that was
in late 1937. I went down to Mexico City.
I met Lombardo Toledano (head of the Mexican
labor movement); as a matter of fact, when we
had a convention of the CIO in San Diego, we made
an effort to have Lombardo Toledano come in. At
that time he was persona non grata with the U. S.
government. Later on he did speak at one of our
conventions together with the man who translated
for him, Alejandro Carillo, who later became the
177
LG: governor of Mexico City, D.?.
1 v/ent down there on behalf of the Fishermen
because somebody had run through a bill in the
Cortes (legislature) in Mexico which in effect
would "prohibit all seine fishing. V/hat they did,
was shove seine fishing in with drag-nets, gill
nets, and so forth.
The Slovenians were part of the friendly
group in the Fishermen; they were the most ef
fectively organized. The Fishermen ran to three
nationalities in San Diego and one in San Pedro.
You had the Slovenian fishermen who were the
dominant group in San Pedro; they invariably used
purse seine nets for catching tuna. You had your
Italian fishermen - not a very large group - and
some of them used purse seine nets, but most of
them used hook and line.
The balance of the group were Japanese fisher
men - Japanese -American, who used unbarbed hooks.
Some of them were not American born, but there
were both Nisei (second generation) and Issei
(first generation) among them. The Japanese would
fish off these platforms on unbarbed hooks. V/hat
they would do was chum (a type of fish) the waters
V/ard : Chum?
LG: You chum the waters by throwing bait out there.
And then the fish all come in a circle and mill
around them; they keep churning so that the school
would be kept fairly close to the tuna boat and
then they v/ould fish with these unbarbed hooks.
The tuna v/ould snap at the hooks v/hich shone like
chum and the fishermen would flip the tuna over
their shoulders into the hold of the ship.
And if they ran into a particularly big school
of tuna I don't know if you've ever
seen this: there could be two men on one line,
sometimes three men on one line, and all three
would have to work together to hook the tuna and
flip them into the ship.
V, r ard: Because the tuna v/ere so big?
178
LG: Some tuna, yes. When tuna began running, say,
150 pounds, you're not going to yank that out.
If you did it by hook and line, you would be at
it forever. When they'd hit a school of tuna,
it was pretty common for them to work 48 hours in
a row. But that's the way the industry is; San
Diego was getting big; a lot of the fishermen
were Portuguese. They used both bait and seines.
Ward: A lot of this fishing went on in Mexican waters,
apparently.
LG: les, they were doing a lot of fishing in Mexican
waters, plus the fact that they used to get some
of their bait - anchovies - tov/ard the lower part
of Baja California. Anyway, if this bill passed,
it would have effectively knocked out the Sloven
ian fishermen, so I took a bounce down there and
things fell in place for me pretty well. Luckily,
I met almost everybody I wanted to meet very
quickly -
Ward: You had the help of Toledano?
LG: Toledano, yes, he was very friendly. As a matter
of fact, Toledano had been supported by John L.
Lewis; he knew everyone around there and he was
able to steer me. Some attorneys I met down there
. knew the ropes, one of whom was a bull fighter
aficionado. He had all the brands of the famous
bulls around his office and I went out to the
bullfights with him.
We found out that the ones who had gotten that
bill through were the Van Camp* interests, which
really owned most of the Japanese boats or held
mortgages on them.
Ward: And they wanted to get the seine fishermen out of
the competition.
LG: Right; what you do is knock off the purse seiners
and you've got the only tuna in town. At that
time (Lazaro) Cardenas was president of Mexico, a
fine, progressive man, you see, and people like
Toledano were very close to him. Anyway, somehow
*Van Camp Seafood Company
179
LG: the newspapers got in the act; and then I recall
that there was some half-assed California legis
lator who went down there.
Ward: That would be one of several, I can't remember
who . . . .
LG: I can't remember which one it was. He went down
there supporting the Van Camp interests. But
this got into a good, public debate and no harm
done at all.
They had some people who looked me up, includ
ing a young guy who manned a small Coast Guard
vessel in Baja California, in the gulf; what they
call the Sea of Cortez. He was telling how the
Japanese had all kinds of concessions there, such
as in Guaymas - shrimp fishing.
They were supposed to teach the Mexicans the
technique - part of the reciprocity for the
concessions. All they taught the Mexicans was
how to cut off the heads. He was angry as could
be, and very helpful. He also insisted that they
had the best coastwise geodetic survey of Mexican
waters that anybody ever had. Well, it got to be
quite a roundy-go-roundy and we won that one hands
down. Cardenas killed the bill, yes.
Ward: Oh, I see, he had veto power.
LG: Oh, yes. He had veto power, the bill had already
passed, but then he killed it. That was my first
trip to Mexico City.
Ward: So, we formed the State CIO Council?
LG: The CIC convention took place at the Royal Palms
Hotel in August, 1938. That was when the State
Council v/as set up and I was elected full time
secretary- treasurer.
Ward: And (Philip M. Connelly of the newspaper Guild)
Connelly was elected president -
LG: Later on there was some change in that -
180
Ward: Yes, later on, but he was the president for two,
three or four years. Then there was the feeling
that the Newspaper Guild was - people were begin
ning to realize that although there was some
romance around the idea of organizing white collar
workers, after all it was a small union. Jim
Thimmes, his nose v/as out of joint a mile -
LG: The Steelworkers ....
Ward: Yes, he v/as the representative of the Steelworkers
out here and he was feeling pretty sore about the
whole thing; Connelly was persuaded to resign and
put in Jim Thimmes.
LG-: Because I recall ....
Ward: You played some role in that.
LG: Right, because the thing I was so determined to
do - all of us were, really - at the founding
convention was to try to get all the industrial
unions represented on the executive board.
Thimmes was one; then there was (J.R.) Roberts,
"Sen-sen Roberts" we used to call him, of the
Rubber Workers; (James) Coulter of the Oil Workers,
I remember the oil workers used to bend my ear
that he was on the payroll of the companies. True
or not true, I don't know. There were the Coulter
brothers, key people in the Oil Workers.
We were determined to try to get them all
represented without having it dominated by the
left-wing unions or the newly formed unions. I
spent a great deal of time on that. I thought
that unless we could maintain that kind of unity,
\ve'd be in trouble.
Some of the initial difficulties of the CIO
began to surface at the Royal Palms convention
For example, there was the International Ladies'
Garment Workers; Jennie Matyas, for example,
played anything but a constructive role. Actually
they were trying to organize a mass walkout.
181
LG-: This we got wind of - I forget in what way, but
word got to us somehow; we had a lot of friends,
naturally. If the Garment Workers could work
things out their way, there would be a mass walk
out and a break-up of the convention even before
it got started, so instead of having a genuine
California State CIC, all we'd have would be just
a fragment. A breakup would have been very
damaging.
Ward: What did you do to prevent the walkout?
LG: We were just meeting every minute of the day and
night with delegates from all the different
unions, like Steel, which we considered important,
Rubber \vas important, I remember spending a lot
of time with Roberts. He was convinced to stay,
finally. Jennie Matyas and the guy from the
Amalgamated (Clothing Workers' Union), Jerry
Posner .... He was a pretty decent guy; he
didn't walk out.
But the Ladies Garment Workers Union just made
a pain in the ass of themselves during the
convention, Jennie Matyas being particularly
difficult. She saw nothing wrong with walking up
and taking the mike, whether it was her turn or
not, and just start rattling off.
I recall one moment there - Harry was in the
chair, presiding as West Coast Director of the
CIO; she got up once too often, interrupting all
proceedings without stating her name for the
record. Harry lapsed into complete Australianese
because he rapped the gavel and said, "Stayt your
name and affiliyiation."
Ward: I also remember a crack of his when there was
some question of a nomination of a candidate from
the needle trades for the executive board and I
think it was she who said, "Well, who could
represent the needle trades better than the needle
trades?" And Harry, from the chair: "I'll tell
you who - anybody - can represent the needle
trades better than the needle trades renresentative. "
182
LG: Cn that score, they did not walk out. Apparently
they didn't have time to organize a walkout;
their support had been thoroughly dissipated.
It was a good convention, lot of spirit to it,
lot of young delegates. We didn't realize that
things were brewing back east. We weren't aware
of it until it surfaced at the '38 CIO convention.
I thought that Jenny Matyas and the Ladies'
Garment Workers had their nose out of joint.
Ward: You mean on the west coast?
LG: Yes, but later on it was pretty obvious that
Dubinsky (David Dubinsky, president of the ILGWU)
was determined to walk out. As a matter of fact,
by 1939 they were out.
Ward: I see. Then, you feel that Dubinsky had something
to do with it?
LG: Oh, I'm sure of it, in retrospect; but at that
moment I didn't know it. We were pretty naive,
I suppose.
183
IV TROUBLES AND TURBULENCE
(Interview 8: 4 April, 1979 )##
Strikes, Fights and Progress
Ward: All right, Lou, now we go into other things that
happened in 1938. How about the "hot box car"?
LG: Things were jumping even before 1938. Tensions
between the ILWU and the Teamsters were pretty
sharp. Dave Beck had achieved hegemony on the
west coast. He had started his move to set up
the Western Conference that later developed into
a series of conferences established by the Brother
hood of Teamsters, such as the Western Conference,
Central States Conference, Southern Conference and
Eastern Conference.
That included the establishment of a Teamster
local in warehouses for the first time, headed by
a man named Ted White. There was also the
continued march inland. That continued full scale.
There were some pretty sharp confrontations
that occurred, like the strike against Cal Pack
(California Packing Corporation) in Alameda. The
warehousemen were locked out. The company made a
move to run strikebreakers and break the union,
which they pretty well managed to do. There was a
large scale confrontation, pretty ugly and violent.
A large number of the Alameda police force, as I
recall, were not civil servants really - they were
on a sort of special hire basis. They quit after
the whole thing. I remember that the neighbors,
184
LG: people living in the area around Gal-Pack, were
sympathetic with the union. Ralph Daws on was in
charge of that picket line and Ralph enjoyed
drafting military plans of how we would handle
these things.
Cne of our warehouse employers got his nose very
badly out of joint because we borrowed some of his
trucks without telling him what the purpose was,
then used them to bring large groups of men over to
Alameda. There you saw the courage and determina
tion of guys like Bob Moore from the East Bay, Paul
Heide, Chili.
I recall there was a temporary standoff and a
few of us decided we'd walk up there and talk to
these cops to see if we could re-establish a picket
line, get the confrontation behind us; we were
convinced there would be no problem. We left the
pickets standing there - a large group - and walked
up there, three or four of us.
When we got to them we realized how stupid we
were, because here were a couple of these cops with
shotguns and they were shaking; these are the kind
of guys who pull the trigger under almost any
circumstance. As we were talking to them, one of
the cops kept swinging a billy at Bob Moore, who
-was a big man; it's a scene you would never forget.
He'd catch the thing in the palm of his hand, put
it back to the cop, keep on talking and catching it
again. Nothing much happened; finally that picket
line lost.
We never did manage to get Gal-Pack, although
later on they shifted that operation, or part of
the operation, to San Francisco. It was around
that Del Monte (Corporation) or Cal-Pack warehouse
where the blockade of the San Francisco waterfront
started.
By 1938 the San Francisco Employers' Association
had set up an affiliated group of warehouse employ
ers and it got to be a pretty comprehensive
organization. Their basic thrust was that a kind
of unionism was moving in - uptown and away from
the waterfront - that would result in endless
disruption.
185
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Incidentally, some of the ads and editorials in the
papers in those days are really worth reading to
give you an idea of how people felt at that time.
These employers were literally out of their minds.
They saw the revolution right around the corner?
It was right there! Right! The whole program of
trying to organize warehouse and other people was
to get a death grip on the whole distribution
structure; they had visions of the city being
brought to its knees by the organization of ware
housemen, together with the maritime workers.
Obviously, that was the key industry for the city
because the whole nature of San Francisco was one
where it didn't have any real heavy industry to
speak of.
Anyway, they formed themselves into an organi
zation - I don't recall the exact title - but it
included wholesalers, warehouse, distributors and
so forth.
The union had been directing its organizational
efforts so as to pick up various branches of
warehouse such as public and cold storage - grocery,
hardware warehouses, paper warehouses, drug, and
dry goods; obviously, the attempt was always being
made to try to bring all the warehousemen up to the
level we had won in 1936.
In many cases this took an enormous jump because
we organized people where the wage scale was less
than 40 cents an hour. Moves of that sort were
enormous; actually we negotiated contracts where
the wage increase must have been almost as much
again as the individual had been getting -
You mean double?
Yes, double it. I recall particularly a place like
Butler Brothers where we found people who were
making $16 or $18 a week. We just about doubled
that.
So the employers became convinced that what we
were doing was whip-sawing the industry. A lot of
that was actually true - no question about that.
186
LG: It was easy for the union to pick out one group and
have it tied in with the general wage scales and
conditions like public warehouse' and cold storage,
and then move on to the next group.
The employers came along with the idea that they
wanted a single contract. On that score, people
like Harry felt very strongly that a single master
contract made a great deal of sense. Most of us
in Warehouse pretty well agreed with it, although
somewhat reluctantly, because the organizational
bargaining technique of working one group off
against the other was attractive.
We finally decided that we'd go along with the
idea of a master contract, but not under circum
stances where the differentials between the
different parts of warehouse were frozen. In other
words, nobody was going to give up anything in
exchange for a master contract.
The Hot Boxcar
LG: We did recognize the fact that some groups would
have to stand still for a little while until others
'caught up. Well, the employers brought their
program to 'a head with the "hot boxcar". I think
the hot boxcar originated with Woolworth' s.
Ward: I was reading that this car was loaded with school
supplies.
LG: Yes.
Ward: But it was sent to places - to warehouses - that
had not the faintest connection with school sup
plies.
LG: It was sent to any kind of a warehouse v/hich had a
siding - a railroad siding. It moved around town -
the hot boxcar. The railroad guys who were moving
the car were very friendly, but after a demonstra
tion they would have to take the locomotive and
the car through, because of the laws governing their
employment with the railroad company.
187
LG-: As the "boxcar reached the warehouse, our men would
be given instructions to discharge the boxcar,
which they alv/ays refused. Down would come the
warehouse - locked out - and pretty soon a very
substantial portion of the warehouses in town had
been closed down.
Ward: No attempt was made to operate?
LG-: No; it was a straight lockout. Your biggest
difficulty with a lockout is that fundamentally it
is an employer strike and about the best you can
do is to get back to where you were. With a lockout
there aren't specific gains in sight for the union;
it is not built around union demands.
However, the thing began to jell, because of
the amount of time that this '38 lockout was con
tinuing, and also the amount of publicity it was
getting. I recall Kike Quin* doing a piece for us;
we printed it in the San Francisco Chronicle. That
was about the hot box car ....
Ward: There was a song. It was a parody on a song called
"A Tiskit, A Taskit" -
LG: Yes -"A Boxcar, A Boxcar"; right.
Ward: The girls used to put on shows at money raising
affairs.
LG: Actually, we had good support on the thing. By that
time - and Harry played an important role in this -
policy finally got jelled. Well the hot boxcar
dispute finally wound up with the basic agreement
that there would be a master contract, although
some of the elements of the master contract would
be finally determined by arbitration. The
arbitrator at the time was a man named Harry J.
Rathbun.
The resolution of the hot boxcar came about by
a combination of things; one was an editorial by
Paul Smith, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle,
saying that the kind of conflict that was going on
around the hot boxcar was turning San Francisco
into a ghost town; there had to be an end to this
* A GIG radio writer
188
LG: thing. Gene Paton had become president of ILWU
Local 6 by then. He wrote a letter to the editor
in which he took on Paul Smith, saying, "Look, if
you know so much about this, we hereby notify you
that we will be happy to accept your services as
mediator." Well, Paul Smith didn't know what to do
with this; obviously someone had called his hand.
However, Paul Smith had a lot of gumption, and he
did take on the job as mediator until the sessions
got started. Sam Kagel (a prominent mediator-
arbitrator) was in the picture; Gene Paton, of
course.
The Master Contract
LG: By that time, I was with the State CIO; but we
spent a lot of time on it. We didn't win every
thing we wanted, but fundamentally we did achieve
the one thing that we were determined to get, a
master contract which would preserve whatever gains
we had made and perhaps provide for a period of
catch-up time.
At least it would be the kind of contract that
when you sat down to negotiate, you weren't
'negotiating industry by industry and maintaining
differentials. The only differentials which might
exist within the contract deal with job classifi
cations or addenda - in terms of base rate, which
was called the freight handler's rate, that we
wanted to make sure was uniform; eventually that
did come out of the master contract.
It was during the same period of time that Jim
Blaisdell, who had been with one of the big law
firms in town, became a wheel in this association.
We began to deal with him; as an individual a very
personable guy. I never had the feeling that he
was anti-labor. No question that he organized his
own people very effectively. V/e found out later,
for example, that the employers during the hot
boxcar dispute had set up something they called
the "heat" committee.
Ward: Sounds like a goon squad to me.
189
LG: It was more effective. The "heat" committee's job
was - I know this is true, because I got it direct
ly from Jim later on - that in the cases of ware
houses which were reluctant to go along with the
hot boxcar lockout, they would get in touch with
all the financial ties of those warehouses. Here
was Company "G", that didn't want to go along with
the lockout. They would find out very quickly that
Company "G" had an outstanding loan from Bank of
America for so much money.
Pretty soon Company "G" got a call from Bank of
America, "Look, we're under the impression that
your credit rating is extremely bad. This loan
will have to be called and I doubt very much if you
can get any future ones in view of your attitude."
So, that was a "heat" committee. Talk about having
leverage on an employer! That's power with a
vengeance. So the employers learned the technique,
in effect organizing their own union.
Ward: Did you get preference of hiring for all the
houses?
LG: I don't think so, although there was some sort of
a referral system set up for some houses that
didn't have preference of employment as yet. But
where we might not have had preference, we had this
referral. By that time the momentum of the union
was great enough that there was no problem in see
ing to it that the referral system was tantamount
to preference.
Ward: Would you explain the difference between referral
and preference?
LG: Referral would simply mean that the union might
send out a man who had experience in some particul
ar industry and the employer would interview him
to see whether or not he wanted him; still leaving
the employer with the right to reject the man.
But if you have enough steam on in a situation
like this, nobody else can take the job except
somebody out of the union hall; pretty soon that
employer can get worn down just by referring the
same man back, and back and back.
190
LG: I remember at the time we had a couple of "black
men in the union - as a matter of fact, some of us
used to pitch in a couple of bucks to keep them
going - because we were determined that there would
be a breakthrough on this question in terms of
blacks in the industry. And the technique we would
use if there was a freight handler's job - which
is still a large part of the industry - and no
question that the man could handle it, was that
we'd send the same man back to the same company day
after day. Pretty soon the employer would get the
point - that if he didn't hire this man, he wasn't
going to get anybody.
Ward: But wait a minute - under the reference system
couldn't he hire off the street?
LG: On that score, the employer realized pretty quick
ly he better not take the chance, because the guys
in the house were backing the union. After the
hot boxcar beef, even though the employers felt
they had achieved something - and I guess they had
they did not come out unscathed.
They realized they were dealing with an outfit
that wasn't about to dry up and blow away. The
big bulk of the employers were not anxious to get
into another confrontation, so that even loose
language could be administered in such a way as to
be a pretty effective practical thing.
It was during that time that Local 860 of the
Teamsters announced that they had agreed basically
to the employers' demand for a single contract.
All they had was a handful of warehouses, primarily
plumbing, and maybe one or two others. They
carried a full page ad on responsibility on their
part, warning us to get along with the employers,
etc. etc.; a purely propaganda ad.
Years later when I went down to the Western
Conference of Teamsters - many, many years later,
when wounds had healed, in one of their conference
rooms was a big, framed copy of this ad by the
Teamsters Union. I'm sure the thing wasn't hung
there deliberately so as to needle us, but the
Teamsters were determined to prove themselves as
being the goody-goody boys in relations with the
employers.
191
Ward: Would you call it a "sweetheart" move?
LG-: Not entirely; it couldn't be too much of a "sweet
heart" move because if it was, then at that
particular time the men would have deserted in
droves. The Teamsters had to go along with some
of the basic things that we picked up.
The main thing they gave the employers was, in
effect, a free hand in the operation. I don't
think they even fiddled around with things like
steward systems; no attempt to get the membership
to really enforce a contract, or to even stretch
that contract a bit where necessary. One outfit
was just a contract holder; the other outfit,
namely, Local 6, was a genuine mass movement of the
membership. That showed up time and time again.
When the Teamsters realized that continued
attempts to try to put us out of business would not
work, one of them used the expression, "Look, you
guys are different; you can blow a whistle and the
whole damn membership is right there." Of course,
to them that's a highly admirable thing to have
that kind of discipline.
What they did not think through was that even
though his description might be accurate, it wasn't
because anybody was carrying a club. If you blew
that whistle they knew you meant it, and they
happened to be in support of what you were talking
about.
The theory behind the master contract is sound.
However, there's no question in my mind that even
to this day, if you were to single-shot warehouses
some of them could be knocked over for more money
than others.
7 or example, one of the groups that has sort
of drifted off, was not part of the master contract,
is in grocery; the reason is quite obvious. There
the warehousing is only a very small part of an
enormous chain such as Safeway or Lucky Stores.
Those rates can be boosted quite a bit; in terms
of the percentage of the total marketing cost, it
is not that much. It's like paying one machinist
in a warehouse of 200 people a higher wage; if you
192
LG: put it in relationship to all the workers, it
doesn't amount to a hell of a lot.
So, grocery is an example of where, for one
reason or another, they were determined to get
out from under Local 6. Like at one time, for
example, Safeway had a big installation in San
Francisco ....
Ward: Bill Ingram 's plan working out?
LG: It worked out in the sense that all of the small
grocery warehouses, unless they had a specialized
commodity like Italian olive oil, were put out
of business. All you have left now are the bigger
ones. Even an outfit like Purity Warehouse -
Purity Stores, that was a big grocery outfit -
that's folded by now; you have United Grocers which
still goes on. Associated Grocers, I think, has
folded too.
Those characters, in order to get out of the
agreement they had with us had a little operation
in San Jose called United Grocers Cash and Carry;
that's a place where a guy in a truck picks up
some things wholesale and takes them away himself.
When they opened up in Richmond, where they are
located now, they used that contract to sign an
agreement with the Teamsters in their Richmond
Barehouse as United Grocers. Then 'they doubled
back and folded up the Mutual plant in San Francisco,
They used the device there of having had an
agreement with the Teamsters. When Safeway folded
their San Francisco warehouse, they had already
set up a warehouse in Richmond; there again they
worked up an understanding with the Teamsters'
Union.
There is a humorous sidelight when the present
Association was still the Distributors' Association
the employer group negotiated the master contract
and administered it; the man who became head of the
Association, J. Hart Clinton, was anxious to have
the master contract rates apply to grocery. He was
practically tearing his hair on what was happening
to United Grocers, which he still represented even
193
LG-: though they were not part of our master contract;
they were in the Teamsters. Apparently the
Teamsters were really giving them the business.
He wanted to ioiow whether we could do anything,
"because our relations - this was later on - with
the Teamsters had improved somewhat. I said,
"Well, if we were to get mixed up at all in this
thing, to tell you the truth, I'd be sitting down
with some of those Teamsters figuring out what
additional demands could they make on that house,
other than what they have done so far."
I said, "The United Grocers are the guys who
jumped the fence. They decided to get out from
under the tent, used their own devices; they
thought they were cutting a fat hog in the ass by
getting rid of Local 6; I gather they are paying
a bit of a price now." He said, "That's right,
that's right." I said, "If I could think of any
thing that would help the Teamsters give that
company a bad time, I'd be right over there at
once." There's no use trying to salvage somebody
like that. When they have done it, they've done it.
By that time the Teamsters were trying to
organize all the warehousemen they could; not just
Local 860. On the Oakland side of the bay, they
set up Local 853. In Richmond, their Teamster
local became a general local, including warehouse
men in Local 315. On the Peninsula there was a
local headed by a man named Joe Dillon.
Ward: Oh, yes - he used to be with Local 6?
LG: Right, although one thing about Joe, at least he
was frank and open when he left Local 6 to go to
work for the Teamsters. He sat down with Harry
and myself and said, "Look, I'm leaving Local 6
and it's not because I don't agree with the union
or what it's done." As a matter of fact I had
known Joe Dillon when we worked at Owens-Illinois
Glass together, back in 1935.
He said, "I just can't raise my family on the
kind of money this union is paying, so I'm going
to work for the Teamsters; I don't intend to
fight the ILWU. I'hey've given n;e a charter down
the Peninsula, Local 655.
194
LG: He was in charge of that until the day he died,
although there were some odd periods many, many
years later where I found myself going down to
his local at a membership meeting to help explain
a new master contract which we had negotiated
jointly and where some good rank and filers got
hold of me after the meeting and said, "What the
hell are you doing down here? We figured we'd
get him on this one." (laughter)
Ward: You were protecting Joe?
LG: Oh, this was quite a few years later. All I'm
trying to say is that the Teamsters were actually
moving in many ways.
As some of them would tell us later, "You know
that we used to call your office every once in a
while and pretend that we worked at a certain
place and have you guys go down there and put out
a leaflet, because as soon as you put out a
leaflet we could go in to the employer and say,
"You don't want them." They were using us as a
cat's paw to organize; more than a cat's paw, as
a bogey-man.
It cost the employers something; at least the
- guys got organized. They might have done better,
of course, in Local 6, but one thing that did
happen during that period was that in a couple of
places, like the case of 860 in San Francisco,
they paid their warehousemen or freight handlers
the base rate, plus one penny more than the Local
6 agreement.
In the case of Oakland, they paid them 3 pennies
more than the base rate. Incidentally, everybody
called that "the red penny"; that was the penny
that was being paid; these guys under no circum
stances had any red thinking or red underwear.
So, years later when we had gone into joint
negotiations, Teamster warehousemen and the ILWU,
which still continue to this day, there was an
attempt at one time by the employers to equalize
rates. When they finally granted our demands, they
were substantial demands; we came out very well;
and they said the least that ought to be done would
be to get rid of this differential the Teamsters had,
195
Ward: Was that your position, too?
LG-: Hell, no - because we said, "Look, you guys paid
for that and you're going to pay for it from now
on. We're going to keep the red penny in the
contract. "
Ward: Yeah, but your workers were paying for it too?
LG: Ho - they were paying for it during the time
the employers were able to use the Teamster
contracts to ride our back and drag their feet.
The Teamsters went from those days of organization
at least 20 years or thereabouts without ever
having a strike. Local 6 was doing the fighting;
they would either drag their feet or sign "me too"
contracts. That in effect was what the enrol oyers
were paying the one penny for.
The warehouses organized by the Teamsters would
operate under any circumstances, and just a sort
of general understanding that they would wait and
see; once Local 6 finished its contracts, they'd
go back and pick up the same gains. That didn't
do us a hell of a lot of good, of course, and was
one of the reasons why years later we felt it was
so important to try to put together joint nego
tiations; then instead of the ILWU warehousemen
carrying the load for everybody, they'd all be in
there pulling on the oars in the same direction . .
Ward: But you still wanted to preserve the differential?
LG: We did, but the employers wanted to get rid of it
because they figured okay we're not getting any
thing more for it. You finally get to the point
where in negotiating jointly you coordinate your
demands, they get to be joint demands and finally,
if you take a strike vote, you take a joint strike
vote.
We even had an understanding whereby the joint
strike vote is pooled as to whether or not it
authorizes taking strike action, and actually the
ratification is pooled. When you have done that,
what the employers have paid for with the red
penny is obviously of no value.
196
##
Ward: All right, where were we in the discussion?
LG: The red penny -
Ward: Oh, yes, the red penny.
LG: Our position was: "Look, you paid for it. Now,
at this particular moment, you figure you are not
getting value received. You made a deal and we
are going to hold you to it." Bear in mind that
by that time the penny did not make that much
difference. When you were talking about 62^- cents
an hour or 75 cents an hour, a penny looked like
something, but by the time you're talking about
$5.50 or $6.00 an hour, a penny doesn't look like
anything.
So we deliberately kept it in the contract; of
course the Teamsters wanted to keep it in the
contract because their members would say, "Look,
we're not getting the full wage increase you're
talking about."
Ward: In other words, the employers wanted to reduce the
Teamsters down to Local 6 -
LG: Yes, because they were no longer getting something
they paid for.
Ward: But couldn't you have fought back and said, "Well,
let's raise the ILWU rate to the Teamster rate"?
LG: Oh, yeah, that would have been one of our argu
ments but we're not going to make that a strike
issue because ho\v in the devil can you get a joint
strike where all we're striking for, and all we're
asking the Teamsters to strike for, is for us to
get a little bit more which they are already
getting?
Ward: I see.
LG: In other words, when you have joint demands and
joint strike action, there must be all the things
that have common denominators; otherwise you'll be
in trouble. Plus the fact that I saw nothing
wrong with it.
197
Ward :
LG:
Did you have any argument in your negotiating
committee on that score?
Ch, we'd get arguments once in a while among our
own people; but obviously with the Teamsters, they
weren't going to raise an argument because they
were getting a penny more.
Problems About War-like Japan
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Now, we've been going along here in an almost
exclusively masculine paradise. Did you ever hear
the phrase, "The stigma of silk?"
Oh, only during the boycott of Japanese goods -
Didn't that start in 1938?
How, you're talking about another field - it was
in 1938 and I believe went into 1939.
Yes, it was in 1939 definitely but I think it
started in 1938 -
That was when there were a whole series of tie-ups
up and down the west coast against the shipment of
scrap iron to Japan. A lot of it originated in
San Francisco when they tore up some of the Market
Street railway lines. Part of the whole movement
of scrap iron to Japan came with the tearing up
of these rails. That was very good scrap for the
making of steel; it's probably the finest scrap
that anybody could find because it is already
finely tempered.
It was during that same period when the Japanese
were invading China. I think that must have been
shortly after the incident of the Marco Polo Bridge
where the Japanese moved in claiming that something
or other had happened. It was after the Japanese
had taken Manchuria and set up their puppet dicta
tor, (Henry) Pu Yi. Then they extended their
control in '37, '38, '39 when the Japanese
launched their program, the Greater Asia Co-
Prosperity Sphere.
198
LG: Anyway, these "beefs against the Japanese invasion
of China were going on full blast, and there was
one tie-up after another on the loading of scrap
iron to Japan. As a matter of fact our relations
with the Chinese community in San Francisco got to
be very close and warm. We'd have little informal
discussions with some of the Chinese in one of the
restaurants; and they were very fine hosts.
I'll never forget one incident that occurred
where we walked into one of the restaurants that
was up a flight of stairs; they had taken over the
banquet room, a small one, and they asked if some
of the guys would like to have a drink - Pat on,
myself. At that time the Chinese had not really
gotten into the bar business like they are today.
Pat and I asked for Scotch and soda, which we were
drinking at the time. I guess they thought that
soda was cider; we were served a pair of Scotch
and ciders; it was just horrible, just horrible.
Ward: And you had to drink it?
LG: We drank most of it and then figured out an excuse
to wander back there where they were mixing the
drinks and finally got the guys straightened out.
Next time it was Scotch and plain water, if you
don't have soda. But as far as they were con
cerned, Scotch and soda and Scotch and cider, the
same thing. They were very pleasant hosts.
There was one get-together where Pat had quite
a few and they had one of the Chinese take him to
a cab, take him home and come back again. They
were very solicitous. At the same time we
discussed with them loading plans that were going
on about scrap iron; we had an idea what ships were
taking it.
They would make arrangements for people from
Chinatown to come down and picket that ship, and
our guys would then observe the picket line. None
of these picket lines could last very long because
sooner or later the arbitrator came along and said
that this was not an economic picket line, that it
did not involve workers on the job; that this was
a demonstration picket line and was therefore
illegal under the contract.
199
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
I don't know how many of those arbitration decisions
came down, but they must be longer than your arm.
I recall in one place the arbitrator was a rabbi
by the name of Jake Weinstein. Jake Weinstein
was a very progressive rabbi, a very good man. I
got the impression that he was considered a little
too far out for the congregation that he had in
Portland and as a result he left there and came
down to San Francisco. Ke was making a herculean
effort to try to establish that the picket line
was legitimate. (laughter)
Even you couldn't do that.
No, we couldn't do it. Finally somebody got the
word and said, "Look, it won't do any harm - the
demonstration is over with." These things got
enormous attention. They used to have a sort of
annual festival in Chinatown built around support
ing China. The feeling in a place like San
Francisco was very warm toward the Chinese - very
hostile to Japanese aggression.
During that time Harry got some wire from the
State Department asking why we couldn't just stick
to our business of being a union and to keep our
nose out of foreign affairs. That was ignored.
During the same period it got to the point where
the women who supported the boycott of Japanese
goods and were opposed to the invasion of China
took to wearing cotton stockings instead of silk
stockings; they looked terrible.
Lisle stockings.
Just a little higher grade of cotton, as far as
I know, but that was during that silk stocking
period -
Well, what was the alternative if you couldn't
wear silk stockings? There was no nylon then.
Oh, no! We're talking about the thirties -
nylon came along later.
So, you could tell right away whether a girl was
a progressive or union or what; if she had pretty
legs there was something wrong with her.
200
LG: By that time few of them, if any, had gotten
around to going bare-legged or wearing trousers.
There was a period there in Warehouse where we
had a woman business agent. We had a good number
of women in the union - places like Hiram Walker,
Southend Warehouse, Lipton's Tea, Colgate-
Palmolive, Clorox, Best Poods; at least 20-25%
of the total local.
Sure, you had some warehouses with no women,
but a place like Hills Brothers would have some
women in the packing line; Polger Coffee Company
would, Lipton's Tea - they had a large operation,
particularly making these tea bags - employed a
large number of women. We had a lot of women
stewards, still do, in the local.
Right now Local 6 has a very competent woman
business agent over in Oakland - that's Evelyn
Johnson, a black woman who does one hell of a job.
At that time there weren't that many black women
in the local, as there were not many blacks. When
you went out to organize you rarely came across a
plant that had any blacks. The blacks came in by
way of the hiring hall. The whole question of
racial hiring broke down and the employers began
to hire them on their own.
I'm trying to recall what the year was when we
put together the town hall meeting. There was a
"committee of 40" of employers, set up for the
purpose of coordinating employer bargaining and
taking a very tough position on the issues of the
day. It was headed by a man named (W.P.) Puller.
Do you remember Puller Paints?
Ward: It's still Puller Paints.
LG: I don't know if it's still around. Of course,
the old man is not around. I know his son quite
well - Palmer Fuller; he's on the board of the
Exploratorium (a science exhibit in San Francisco),
I know his present wife - Esther Pike; she was
formerly married to Bishop (James) Pike.
The San Francisco News was still publishing in
those days - that was Scripps Howard (a publishing
chain). They insisted they were not anti-union,
201
LG: just wanted certain ground rules of bargaining;
San Francisco was getting to be "a real ghost
town." The whole thing was being built up during
this period and I went up to him one day and said,
"Look, if what you say is correct, you shouldn't
have any objection to a town hall meeting."
Ward: You're talking to Fuller now?
LG-: Yes. "A town hall meeting where you can put your
position out before the people and we'll put ours
out before the people." We arranged a town hall
meeting at the Civic Auditorium and it was packed.
The thing caught on. As a matter of fact, I recall
a headline in the San Francisco News - "Town Hall
Meeting Tonight" - that v/as the banner. It was
an interesting session; I'm not saying a great deal
got accomplished.
Ward: Was Lapham (shipowner Roger Lapham) the guest?
LG:
Lapham against Bridges and I v/as bucking heads
with Puller. Lapham blew the show when he got up.
The hiring hall v/as still a hot issue because it
took away their grip over the men. When Lapham
made the statement saying, "We're not opposed to
the hiring hall - we just want to control hiring,"
that was the end of the line; nobody missed it,
and everybody just roared.
Lapham, until then, was getting quite a good
reception, because he was a very personable guy.
He looked like a shipowner; big, grey-haired,
heavy-set; actually a rather pleasant egg - a lot
of guts. After the 1936 strike, I had gone back
to work in the car gang - the same car gang. We
were at American Hawaiian; that was it - because
Lapham was head of American Hawaiian.
Somebody came along - it was around quarter to
twelve - and said, "Knock off, fellows." And
that's all anybody had to say; we assumed it was
a stoppage over some issue or other. We started
v/alking out and somebody says, "Look, we're all
supposed to gather there at this loading platform";
and so we stopped. After all, it's on the employ
er's time and it v/as a lunch break. And here is
Roger Lapham. He was wearing a battered hat and
202
LG: an old raincoat - it was drizzling that day. He
had asked for the meeting with all the guys on the
dock, simply to tell them, "The strike is behind
us - as to who won or who lost, it's not important.
I'm just happy to see that the strike is over and
as far as we're concerned, we have a job to do and
we want to get along." There was an interesting
reaction on the part of a number of guys; they
turned around and said, "That old son-of-a-bitch
ain't so bad, you know."
Ward: Did you ever hear the story of Roger Lapham's
little evening at the P. U. (Pacific Union) Club?
LG: No.
Ward: Where somebody said the room they were doing their
drinking in wasn't big enough to swing a dead cat
around in; by god he went out, found a dead cat,
came back and tried to prove the room was big
enough.
LG: That sounds like him; in later years our relations
with him were fairly good (after he became mayor
of San Francisco).
Ward: Yes, I remember that he and his wife came and
danced at the Warehouse ball.
LG: He came to the Warehouse dance - I remember that.
Yeah, that dance was at the Civic Auditorium. We
used to have these big shindigs - that and the
Christmas party we used to have there for the kids.
We're wandering a little bit here, but it gives a
sort of the flavor of the '38 period.
The Crockett Struggle
LG: On. the other hand, in certain other areas the
battle was almost unrelenting. It was in 1938,
towards the fall, when we had the major confronta
tion in Crockett; they tried to break the Warehouse
local there.
203
LG: It had been established in 1935 after a rough go
with that company (California and Hawaiian Sugar
Company); the guys struck after losing an NLRB
election in which the employers were practically
looking over their shoulders and telling them how
to vote. Well, in 1938 there was a big head of
steam up in the refinery because they had been
herded into a federal local; you remember federal
locals?
Ward: Yes.
LG: These were sort of direct chartered locals by the
A P of L. I forget the number. There the company
had even herded in the secretarial staff and people
who were in semi-executive positions who were also
leaders of the local.
As far as we were concerned, it was just an
out-and-out company union. And a number of the
guys, good guys, I remember - one was named (Allen)
Engle, another was (Carl) Schneider - I don't
know if they are still around - wanted to take the
lead in the formation of a CIO organization up
there. We got a charter for them; I think it was
called Local 776 of the CIO. They began organizing;
one day the company fired them.
A strike over their discharge wouldn't work out
too well, because again you are running into the
same principles of a lockout. The best you can do
is to get back even. In that case it's the jobs
of two men against pulling out several hundred.
The warehouse contract was open at the same time
around September or thereabouts. I remember missing
the ILWU convention, which took place in Aberdeen
(Washington) that year.
Ward: And you missed it on account of Crockett?
LG-: Right. The Crockett beef turned out to be a major
confrontation between the ILWU and the Teamsters.
They had mustered part of the A P of L to support
their beef.
Ward: This company union?
204
LG: Yes - their objective was to get rid of us entirely;
no question that they were being assisted and help
ed by the company. That got to be a pretty tense
beef because they brought in a number of heavy-
handed guys. I forget the name of the A P of L
representative in charge - it was something like
Watkins -
Ward: It wasn't Pedro Pete?
LG: No - no, I think the only time I saw him (Watkins)
was when he lifted the charter of the Contra Costa
Labor Council when I walked in. Well, he was a
big fellow -
Ward: Watkins?
LG: I think so. They ran off our picket line. I
remember getting a call from Crockett headquarters
of the union; they were upstairs above a bar. The
vigilantes had run them off the picket line en
tirely, screaming that they were going to run them
out of town. Well, we decided we better go up
there and re-establish the picket line. I got a
lot of help from the warehousemen and longshoremen,
guys like Swede Carlson, Pat C'Hanigan, Red C'Leary
(longshoremen) ; these guys were pretty good with
their dukes -
Ward: C'Hanigan beat up Henry Schmidt (former president
of Longshore Local 10) one time -
LG: Right. Red O'Leary is the guy who kicked the hell
out of this Russian, who went home and got a gun
and killed him. The guy's name was Korshin - that
was years later. Red and those guys were pretty
good guys. Well, anyway, we gathered these guys
up in whatever cars we had, all piled in together.
Some of them even walked through that Selby tunnel
(a railroad tunnel) to get to Crockett.
Ward: How many did you have?
LG: Oh, I'd say, around 250. Yeah.
V/ard: All in private cars?
205
LG: Just about - there was no other form of transpor
tation. If you wanted to go to Port Costa, you
went from Crockett over the hump and then to Port
Costa, which had legends all of its own. That's
where guys like (Daniel) Diwil Hahoney hung out.
He had "been a friend of Jack London's. Jack used
to hang out at Port Costa with the dock wallopers.
Diwil Mahoney had a couple of sons, one of
whom is still in the warehouse local or about to
retire. That's Dan Mahoney. Another son was in
the clerks' union. He's been retired now for
some time. Diwil was a character all by himself.
He felt that C & H owed him a living.
Ward: C & H would be the sugar refinery?
LG-: Crockett; he thought nothing of helping himself to
whatever sugar he needed. Somebody gave orders
that Diwil Mahoney was not to be allowed near the
plant. He found himself a way in there and got
himself a 100 pound sack of sugar, walked up to
the office with the 100 pound sack of sugar on his
back, slammed it down on the desk saying, "Never
you tell me that Diwil Mahoney can't have sugar
when he wants it."
Ward: What was that first name?
LG: Diwil - that's just the Irish name for devil.
His best days must have been during prohibition
where he ran a still - he used to poach. When
PG&S (Pacific Gas and Electric Company) came
through there with electricity, he figured out a
v/ay to tap the wire. Ran a bit of a bar in Port
Costa; had a circle of friends there, sort of the
unofficial mayor of the town; he was an amazing
old guy. It's just sad that we never got a
chronicle of this man - there's mostly legends
about him.
During the '38 beef, Dave Beck had some heavy-
handed guys moving up and down the coast. There
was a lot of violence in the air. It wasn't an
easy situation; some of them came out to Port
Costa.
.
Somebody told them to talk to Diwil Mahoney,
206
LG: because he had a lot of influence; so they came
over there and talked to Mahoney about whether he
would lend a hand taking over the Warehouse local
for the A F of L. He says, "Well, I want to think
it over; come back this afternoon." They came
back that afternoon and here was Divvil and about
three or four of his friends with shotguns and he
said, "You got your answer." (laughter)
Ward: Okay, let's go back to the strike.
LG: The sheriff of the town was called "Honest John"
Miller. I think he had shaken down every business
man and bar in all Contra Costa County. That's
"Honest John" Miller. And v/e get to the entrance
of Crockett and he's there with some police cars
and a couple of state cars and he says, "Nope, you
can't go in there. If you go in there, there's
going to be a riot."
Ward: You were with them?
LG: Yes, I was with them; I was in charge. So, I said,
"We're not going in there to start a riot. All we
want to do is to re-establish a peaceful picket
line in front of the plant. We've been run off.
Our men are holed up. There's about 200-250 of
our guys holed up in our office and fearful of
leaving because they'll be beaten up by the vigi
lantes. So we want to set up the picket line."
He says, "Well, I don't think there are any out
siders in town anyway - there are no outsiders in
town. If you can prove that to us . . . ." V/e
knew that there were outsiders in town, so he said,
"Well, I'll go back and find out." "No," I said,
"We'll go back with you." I guess he didn't like
the looks of our guys.
Anyway, I left word that: "If we're not back
in 45 minutes, you guys just come on in; period."
So, v/e go into town. Sure enough here are all
kinds of characters in town that you could tell in
a second were some of the vigilantes; primarily
among the supervisors and foremen and so forth.
They formed a big ring around us and the sheriff
was trying to maintain friendly relations.
207
LG: There was just one group of our guys who went in;
I think Swede Carlson was in there, O'Kanigan, Red
C'Leary, somebody else was along; so I spot this
same A ? of L representative, and say, "I know this
guy is an outsider - he doesn't live here in Crock
ett, he doesn't work at the plant." This guy
starts bellowing, making a lot of noise.
Oh, it was one of our guys, I think it was either
Pat O'Hanigan or Red O'Leary said, "Look, these
guys are carrying clubs, and you're telling us
there's no problem here in town. That's the reason
our guys are holed up." So, as the sheriff walked
over to see whether one guy had a club, apparently
some of the other guys felt they v/ere going to be
shaken down. All of a sudden they dropped them and
stepped back. Here's a whole pile of clubs.
We told the sheriff, "Cur guys are coming into
town - v/e're not going to tolerate this." We got
back just before the 45 minutes had run out and we
said, "Come on, fellows, let's go, it's all right
with the sheriff." Cur guys came into town and the
fellows we had in Crockett who were holed up
decided to come out.
Cur guys in the office had improvised a series
of battering rams; it was a steep flight of stairs
up to the office. They had gotten something like
a saw horse and they had mounted two-by-sixes or
two-by-eights on top that the vigilantes would have
had to break through to get into the office. These
things would have come flying downstairs.
So we said, "V/e're going to put back the picket
line." That was our objective. There was a tense
moment when the guys all gathered outside and I
announced, "We are going to march four abreast in
front of the company and we are going to lock arms
just to make sure that under no circumstances could
anybody say that one of our guys threw the first
blow."
I asked Dan Mahoney and Austy Reagan to go back
up into the office and bring down the union banner
and the American flag. Mahoney tells the story
later - "We get up there and I told Austy, 'You
take the American flag - I know you're more patri
otic!'"
208
LG-: So, we formed our line and started marching. It
was a very tense moment as we got to the main
entrance. A lot of these vigilantes had gathered
and as we got there you weren't sure what was going
to happen. We moved and they decided they better
not start anything. We kept marching around for a
while and before long some of our guys started
wandering around town.
Some of the families had been frightened sick -
were afraid to leave their homes. But we re
established the picket line. What happened after
that was quite humorous. This character from the
A P of L was giving everybody an awful lot of lip;
he was saying, "What are you going to do about all
the guys we have here?" I said, "We're going to
re-establish a picket line, that's all." He said,
"Well, I'm not sure we will stand for that."
I said, "If you want to settle something that
way, though it doesn't make any sense, you got
around 250 guys at least, and we've got around 250.
There's a ball park over there; we'll send them
all in there and see who comes out. All right?"
He decided he didn't want that either; our guys
had fire in their eyes. They were pretty angry.
Anyway, after we re-established the picket line
somebody made a big decision to see this fight
through; they announced a general strike of the
building trades. They were going to shut down
everything and gather in Crockett. Two or three
days later this announcement came out in the press.
I was up in Crockett.
We were sitting around discussing this and what
the devil we'd do; once again the guys were fear
ful, and legitimately so, that an attempt would be
made to run us off the picket line and break the
union. After figuring out the whole thing as best
we could - Larry Resner (reporter) was up there;
he worked for the San Francisco Chronicle and the
San Francisco Chronicle at that period has some
interesting stories on the while thing - we finally
decided v/e'd issue a public statement, saying that
inasmuch as the A P of L had announced they were
taking a public holiday to gather in Crockett, we
thought we ought to take a holiday, too; we've
209
LG: asked our men to go fishing; we would just have a
token picket line up there.
We took four old-timers; they manned the picket
line. The fascinating thing that happened - I
don't know how many men they actually got into
Crockett that day; maybe a thousand men, maybe a
few more - they marched through these absolutely
empty streets. We just had four pickets standing
there. It became a laughing matter. There were
no incidents.
Oh, there was one incident at the end of the
parade v/here there was a guy in the warehouse who
had been an ex-fighter and he had a tendency to
get a bit punchy. He had a few drinks and their
parade wound up with some of the heavy guys and he
went down to the bar to have a couple of drinks.
Ke walked out and saw them and said, "Why don't
you get your ass out of town?" And pretty soon
he and this guy tangled. Ke did all right -
(laughter)
There were some other incidents during this
strike that I recall; we had a small soup kitchen
set up for the pickets where they could get coffee
and doughnuts and things of that sort. It was up
a block from the plant itself and then down a bit
of a slope. I went down there one night - 1:30 or
2:00 o'clock in the morning and the only person
there was Mama Zuber.
Mama Zuber was one of the most amazingly loyal
people - she had the greatest love for our union.
Joe Zuber worked in Crockett; later on he stayed
with the union and worked somewhere in Oakland.
Joe Zuber v/as a Montenegran - they both were - and
he stood as straight as an arrow, about six foot
tall, strong man; very quiet, though. I'm sitting
around there talking to Mama Zuber and said, "We
still have a lot of these vigilantes running around
town; why are you here by yourself? You might be
having nothing but trouble." She said, "No, after
all Joe and I fought together against the Turks."
(laughter) This must have been around 1914.
Ward: Oh, in Montenegro -
210
LG: Sure, in Montenegro. She walks over to the kitchen
drawer, pulls it open and there's a Luger. She
says, "You know, Montenegrans are afraid of Sod,
not of men." (laughter)
We finally wound up the strike all right - we
got a contract. We took Schneider and Engle, and
there might have been some others, into Warehouse
Local 6. We couldn't get them back into the plant.
Local 776, this CIO Union we tried to form, never
did get much further.
##
Ward: Now, you have the two guys - got jobs for them -
LG: In the warehouse, in the city of Crockett; they
worked out their days there.
Hot only did the ILWU union survive in Crockett;
over the years it literally set the pace for all
negotiations, everything in the contract, with the
big majority of the workers in the plant belonging
to the Federal local and just tailing along. It
even got to the point a year or so ago where the
wages for warehousemen were higher than the journey-
. man's rate in the plant, because of the persistence
of the ILWU.
Ward: You mean you actually still have two outfits up
there?
LG: Yes, although relations now are much better. The
man who is the secretary-treasurer of the refinery
local has turned out to be a good union man, very
friendly to the ILWU. As a matter of fact, years
later we even had joint negotiations.
Ward: Well, what does the refinery local's membership
consist of?
LG: Oh, I'd say about a thousand.
Ward: How many workers in the warehouse?
LG: At that time there were about 400.
211
T .vard :
I see, the tail wagging the dog.
LG: Yes, and now the warehouse, which is highly
mechanized - you don't have any more bagged raw
sugar or things of that sort - is much smaller;
must be about 175 - 180 men. The union has done
a pretty good job in terms of protecting our men.
The pension plan there is fairly good. We've made
general progress; the big beef has been that they
wanted the bay area scale; the result of getting
that kept moving us constantly ahead of the A ? of L
local.
As a matter of fact the A ? of L local went on
strike two or three times in the last seven or
eight years in an attempt to catch up; most of
them finally concluding they never could.
At the time of the last contract, after they
negotiated their contract and the ILWU finished
its contract, the employers granted an additional
50 cents an hour to the journeymen, partially
because they were afraid of losing them. Some of
these journeymen, even though they had years of
service at C & H, were shopping around for jobs at
this new brewery that's opened in Benecia.
Ward: 1 should think they would have been shopping around
for a job in the warehouse.
LG-: Not quite; no, because a journeyman thinks dif
ferently.
One of the other incidents that occurred during
this Crockett thing; tensions were very high all
during this period. Damn near took on the frame
work of a civil war. If somebody was a vigilante
our guys would never forget it to their dying day.
A guy like "Ham and Eggs" - Hemenez - his memory
on these things is like an elephant's. He forgets
nothing.
I was up there just about every day and usually
quite late into the night. Cne evening I was
leaving the Warehouse hall and a v/hole gang of
women had gathered; these were the wives of some
of the foremen and vigilantes. They were screaming
at me about "outsiders," and I ought to get the hell
212
LG: out of town; get this whole, goddam warehouse
local out of town.
Here they were, embarked on purely fraticidal
strife; no way out except the other guy has to get
killed. The sheriff was around. Apparently some
of these gals had decided on their own crazy plan
that they were going to grab hold of me; they had
a blanket that they were going to cover my head
with, and then they were going to tar and feather
me. Some of them began to get pretty violent; one
of them got hold of the lapel of my jacket and tore
it.
Let me tell you, being attacked by a group of
women is not easy to handle - it's almost impos
sible. I spotted the sheriff standing there right
on the outskirts of the scrap and not doing a damn
thing. I finally said, "Look, Sheriff, I've got
to talk to you," and I pushed my way through.
Years later, when I retired, the guys in Crock
ett put on a dinner for me; many of the old-timers
were still there, and it was an interesting affair
because the men had decided they would do all the
cooking - not the women. One of them who had been
an ex-baker put together a marvelous cake.
They charged something like 015 bucks apiece,
including all you could drink. Some guys must have
had their 15 dollars worth in the first hour. Any
way, it was a real pleasant affair, very friendly,
very warm. Their cooking was good, although I
understand that the beef inside the kitchen as to
who was the best cook went on through all the prep
arations. They spent most of the day at this.
They had a present for me, a barometer, and they
presented me with a check. Dick Boyer, who is an
old-timer, had been around there in '38 during this
beef and he said, "You know, it's been a lot of
years since we've owed you a new suit. Maybe this
will cover it." I stayed very close to the union
up there over the years and continued to help
negotiate contracts or handle the strikes.
o"
It was in 1938 that I went back to the first CIO
convention in Pittsburgh. That v/as the first and
only time that I met Heywood Broun (famous news
paper columnist and first president of the
American Newspaper Guild). Broun greatly enjoyed
213
LG: his drinking and the company of everybody around
him and was a marvelous racounteur.
They had a men's bar in the William 2enn Hotel.
A number of us gathered there and I was lucky
enough to be along. Everybody was exchanging
stories; these were halcyon years for the GIG.
The description of Heywood Broun as "an unmade
bed" is very accurate. He had this huge hat and
when he sat down to drink he took his hat off and
put it on his lap. Pretty soon you began to real
ize that everything at this table was ending up
in Heywood Broun T s hat including his money; if
somebody would tell a story, he might make a note;
this might supply him with something for a column.
He had this faculty - an amazing one; if he could
not write a column in 20 minutes it was no good
and he'd tear it up and start all over again. So,
here were the notes going in his hat; everything
going in his hat.
Every once in a while his wife, Connie, would
stick her head in. He'd told one of the v/aiters
there that under no circumstances did he want any
women in the bar. The waiter would rush over and
say, "Sorry, this is a men's bar." She was getting
pretty irritated with him. But it was a good con
vention.
Ward: The founding convention of the CIC. Before that
it was the Committee for Industrial Organization?
LG: Before then it was called the Committee for Indus
trial Organization. It was as a Committee for
Industrial Organization that many of us put up this
fight that v/ent on in the labor councils because
we said, "This is not a dual union - it's a com
mittee for the purpose of organizing industrially
the major industries like steel, auto, glass,
textile, rubber. "
It became obvious that the Committee really had
no choice at that stage but to form itself into an
industrial organization. That was the founding
convention; it became, instead of the Committee for
Industrial Organization, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations - the CIO.
214
(Interview 9: 11 April, 1978)
LG-: There are a couple of small items on Crockett which
might be of interest. We decided that the only
way to avoid a straight lockout on the terms of the
A F of L, namely, that the warehouse be surrendered
to the A ? of L, v/ould be to go on strike on our
own demands, which were open at the time.
The background of Crockett is one all of its
own and would take a lot of study. Over the years
company policy had been that there were different
national groups that were hired in; in most cases
they came from backgrounds where they didn't read
ily communicate with each other. There were just
plain garden variety Americans; then they hired a
substantial number of Italians - some 40 percent
must have been Italians. Then there were some
Spaniards who were hired, like Hemenez - his father
was a Spaniard, I think an Asturian. Then the
company brought in a number of Portuguese.
During that 1938 beef up there I was inducted
into the Portuguese Club. One of the very active
members we had up there, Clarence Rose, a man v/e
. used to call "Horse-power" - strong man and a very
powerful union guy - came to me one day and said,
"Lou, we've been keeping an eye on you; we decided
you are eligible for membership in the Portuguese
Club; that's a great honor, because we know you're
not Portuguese." I said, "Many thanks."
He said, "We're having the swearing-in ceremony
tonight and we'd like to have you make it." I said,
"Well, okay, we have no meeting that night." I had
been up there most of the day, so I went over to
the Portuguese Club; not many there, perhaps 20 -
25. Clarence Rose was chairman, and a small
wooden box was set up before him. The so-called
swearing-in ceremonies, I think, were a complete
fabrication in Portuguese with an adequate amount
of Portuguese wine being circulated.
Finally, Clarence announced: "Okay, now you
are about to take the oath. You've got to place
your hand on this box and repeat after me . . . . "
215
LG-: I put my hand on the box - there was a spring
there - and out jumped a monumental horse cock
that somebody had picked up in Butchertown years
before and shellacked. That was their swearing
in ceremony. It was a nice evening.
But in view of this whole background of hiring
and all these different national frictions, it was
understandable when some of the old-timers said,
"You know, we never went down to San Francisco to
see the fights; you just hang around on Saturday
nights right here in Crockett." A lot of it was
guys letting off steam and the national frictions
some companies will try to develop.
The evening we took that strike vote to go out
one of the Portuguese got up and said, "I want to
say something in Portuguese, by gosh." And that
was to support the strike vote and to vote "yes";
so he says it; and then somebody else jumps up and
says, "Look, I've got the right to say it in
Italian." Same thing in Italian.
Pretty soon, they're going through all the
nationalities - a Spaniard gets up, says his piece
in Spanish. Cne guy gets up and says, "Who's
going to talk Russian?" And the chairman says, "I
guess you better do that - nobody else can talk
Russian." So, he spoke in Russian, urging that
they vote "yes". It was an odd and interesting
sidelight; it represented that nationalities were
being forgotten, and that the members were sticking
together as a single group.
V/ard: The nationalities were being put to a better use
than the company imagined.
LG-: I told you how we marched those longshoremen and
warehousemen into town when "Honest John" Killer,
the sheriff, finally had to concede that there
were all kinds of outsiders in town. Most of them
were armed with billy clubs that had been made in
the company's carpenter shop . . .
V/ard: That's a new one, you didn't tell that before.
216
LG: And when we finally got into town the first thing
we did was go over to the Warehouse hall and make
it possible for the guys to leave who had been
holed up there overnight. We gathered there de
termined to re-establish a picket line.
I got on top of a car to announce how we would
form our picket line, namely, four abreast, which
was exactly the width of the sidewalk there, and
that we would lock arms and under no circumstances
would any of us strike the first blow. There was
this brief confrontation, but our men took over
the picket line, circled around the entrance
several times and sort of got things back in order
where they belonged. "Honest John" Miller was
standing on the fringes all the time and he turned
to me and said, "You know, you must be crazy."
And I said, "Why?" "You damn fool, standing there
on top of that car talking to the guys!" he said.
"Some guys have rifles and they're sitting around
here in the hills."
The only moment in which he was of any value
was when he was standing on the fringes of this
crowd of women; there was no choice but to rush
over to him. Cnly at that point did he do any
thing, and that was to simply stand there and
make it plain that any ideas they had about throw
ing a blanket over me and tarring and feathering
me was no dice.
That's about all on the Crockett thing, except
that you still have a very fine, wonderful, loyal
bunch of men up there. The old timers are moving
along, one after the other. I guess the last of
those who were around are men like (Joseph) Mc-
Intoffer, who had played football at St. Mary's
College, and people like Dan Mahoney, a son of
Diwil Mahoney. They're just retired or about to
retire. Ham has retired and still lives in Rodeo,
close by Crockett.
But there are some very fine young guys who
have come along. They are an effective bunch -
still very proud of their organization. A couple
of years ago I suggested at a membership meeting
at Crockett that we negotiate jointly with the
sugar workers. I felt we might be better off than
having the company continue playing one off against
the other.
217
LG: Apparently they had heard about it earlier be
cause I had mentioned to Ham and the committee
that we ought to consider it. In the two days
prior to the membership meeting all these
pencilled things appeared around the warehouse
and on the fork-lifts saying, "VOTE NO," "VOTE
NO." At the meeting when I proposed we go into
joint negotiations, it all surfaced and one
after another said, "Look, we want no part of
it."
Here was just a handful of warehousemen
compared to the size of the refinery saying, "Lay
off the joint negotiations. Y/hat we can get,
we'll take," they said. "If they can get more,
fine - let them go their own way." Some guys
getting up and saying, "Now look, Lou, if you
feel that you want to do this on your own - good,
we'll let them hire you." It wasn't a hostile
thing; when the vote was taken, any idea of joint
negotiations was overwhelmingly defeated.
We had gone through joint negotiations at one
time, at my urging, and we came out very well;
but immediately thereafter some of the arch
reactionaries in this sugar workers union - and
in a small town like this single incidents would
hang on for years - adopted a series of motions
instructing the officers to have nothing to do
with the ILV/U, etc. etc.
Well, our guys really had their noses out of
joint because they thought that since 1938, a
long time, the only real power in Crockett came
out of the ILWU because of its ties with long
shore. The plant could not operate without the
ships bringing in raw sugar and we had within
our union all the sugar workers in Hawaii. C & H
is a farmers' cooperative - it pays no taxes
because it operates as a farmers' processing and
distributing cooperative v/ith each of the sugar
plantations having a proportionate share based
on its tonnage.
So our guys felt very keenly that it was only
through our economic power that anything could be
done; if the sugar workers felt that way about
218
LG: having no relations with us, then the hell with
them. This was the only industrial plant I know
of, at the time we negotiated this last contract,
where the rate of pay for warehousemen was above
that of the journeymen in the refinery.
That, of course, is a distortion; the reason
for it is that they kept playing around in the
refinery with percentage increases; there the
journeymen on a percentage increase got more than
somebody who was just a machine tender in a lower
labor grade. It wasn't so much how much they got,
it was just that they got more than somebody else.
It's one of the real evils of percentage in
creases; the guy at the top doesn't measure his
increase in terms of what the hell he ought to
get in the first place, but only in terms of
what he got more. It's a clever use of the
employer's pecking structure. Because of that,
and because of the fact that we fought constantly
for across-the-board increases that the wages in
warehouse moved up to the point where they were
ahead of the mechanics.
The mechanics were also far more concerned
with overtime devices than in actual results in
the contract. The plant operated with the ten
day operating schedule, called back-to-back
schedule, - you work ten days in a row and then
get four days off.
In case of any important repairs or overhauls,
the mechanics then had to be called in at the
end of the ten days, and would pick up a day or
two of overtime; that became more important to
them than the wages. It's another one of the
sicknesses that is reflected in the labor move
ment, where people start living on overtime. It
becomes a way of life.
Ward: You've got a soft spot for Crockett, haven't you?
LG: Yes, I spent a lot of years there. It was under
stood that when the Crockett contract was open,
I'd give them a hand; so that the friendship
there went over many, many years.
219
More CIC Activity
Ward: Very good; now, getting back to the fall of 1938?
LG: Remember when we were talking about the hot box
car, there are a couple of items I think I
missed. One was that during the course of this
lockout, the Teamster warehouse local - which
didn't have a very large membership, maybe around
300 - announced an agreement with the Association
of San Francisco Distributors for a master
contract, exactly on the terms the employers
wanted - a five year contract with no strikes.
I doubt whether it even had an arbitration
provision, because all they planned to do was
to piggy-back on us and, if possible, continue
their raid. Their contract, as I recall, pro
vided for 70 cents an hour, which would have
meant surrendering one of our objectives, part
of which v/e had won in the '36 strike; namely,
a 75 cents an hour rate. No mention there of
the vacation provisions which we were anxious to
extend to all workers, because even the vacation
provision we had at the time did not cover all
employees. Nothing at all about preference of
employment.
No question that White's settlement did some
damage. In addition the Teamsters, in collusion
with an outfit that was called Standard Brands -
it was a paper company - tried to open up a
liquor warehouse ....
Ward: When you say "a paper company" . . .?
LG: I think it was a front. They tried to open up a
warehouse and employed some twenty warehousemen
to handle the liquor distribution for the same
accounts that were locked out. When that took
place we had a mass turn-out at Standard Brands,
which we figured was just an out and out phony.
Luckily, the Teamsters decided after the 1937
220
LG: confrontation that another to-do along that line
was not in their "best interest; the place never
did open; the company itself disappeared after a
while.
##
LG: While we didn't win everything in the master
contract, basically we picked up the wages we
were after, namely 75 cents as a "base rate for
freight handlers, with other rates adjusted ac
cordingly. We managed to win out on the question
of vacation rights, the way they should have
"been written up. I believe when it came to things
like preference of employment, we kept that in
just about every place.
There was a modified "hot cargo" clause;
namely, that if we struck any warehouse that was
not a member of the Distributors' Association,
none of our members in the master contract
houses would have to handle that cargo. If it
was a Distributor house, then of course, under
the master contract you have to strike the whole
thing anyway; if they wanted a lockout, they'd
have to lock out the whole thing.
One area in which I don't believe we won a
really clean-cut victory at that time was on
the work week. Rathbun, there, sort of cut the
baby in half. We had some houses on a forty hour
week, some on forty-four. He announced a 42-and-
a-half hour week - a very odd one. That v/ould
mean that you could have five days of eight hours
apiece and a half day of two and one-half hours.
It wasn't too long after that where we got
the 40-hour week uniform throughout the industry.
I think the biggest thing was that the employers
were in effect saying, "Okay, you're here and
we're going to have to bargain with you." After
the devices and tactics, manoeuvers and everything
else that had been going on for what amounted to
approximately three and a half years, four years,
of continued warfare, the employers had finally
decided that this was not the way to go.
221
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
It also meant something, of course, that in the
long pull it turned out very well; while it is
true that maybe in an isolated place or two
you might find a warehouse which has a slightly
higher rate of pay than the Local 6 agreement;
if you take all these warehouses as a group,
there is literally no place in the country that
even comes close to comparing terms of rates and
conditions.
Another question: in August of 1938 there was
the formation of the State CIC, the convention
in Los Angeles. And then in November of that
year was the formation of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations. Now, at that time you
had become secretary of the State CIO Council,
California.
Yes, I was elected at the first convention.
Right - and you had been Northern California
Director of the CIO. Did you still hold that
title also?
I might have - for a short time, though. There
undoubtedly had to be a transition period because
the per capita to the State CIO was very small . ,
And it didn't come in immediately?
No, it would take some time. Eventually I was
on that payroll and in between I was Northern
California Director. But other things were
happening, too. In 1939 they revised the CIO
structure on the west coast. Where Harry had
been the v/est coast director of the CIO, he was
then limited to California. The north was turned
over to a man named Dalrymple - Sherman Dalrymple
of the Steel Workers, who I think was a former
miner. By the end of 1938 the State CIO was
quite sound enough to take care of the costs.
I know it was solvent enough in early 1939 to
hire a legislative representative in Sacramento.
Yes. As secretary of the State CIO I was also,
just a matter of changing hats, head of Labor's
Non-Partisan League in California. Labor's Non-
Partisan League had been initiated by
222
LG: John L. Lewis. John L. was very distrustful of
putting all his eggs in any party basket. While
I think he was probably Republican most of his
life, as best I could figure out it was not some
thing he espoused.
He had anything but a pleasant relationship
with FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt).
It came to a head around a miners' strike in the
early part of the war; as well as the Wendell
Willkle campaign (against FDR) in 1940. It was
after the defeat of Wendell Willkie that Lewis
made up his mind to leave the presidency of the
CIO. That was when he turned it over to Phil
Murray (president of the Steel Workers). There
was that famous confrontation between Lewis and
FDR where he took off on FDR and used the ex
pression that "it ill-suited someone who had
supped at labor's table to then condemn with
equal impartiality the employers and labor" in
the coal miners' beef. Lewis had that turn of
words; truly remarkable ....
Ward: Biblical -
LG: Some of it biblical - some of it just his own
eloquence. I was enormously impressed at one
CIO convention - I think it was the one in San
Francisco in 1939, when I recall Lewis making
several speeches, some of them very, very brief -
not more than three or four minutes apiece -
on various resolutions; each one was a gem in
terms of its structure and the speed at which
he got right to the heart of an issue, including
one which took a blast at the Red Cross.
Lewis apparently felt very keenly that the
so-called "grey ladies" were in the do-gooder
class, a form of condescension in helping out
people in distress. I guess over the years
something had happened and he wasn't too happy
about it.
By early 1939 I'm spending all my time with
the State CIO, v/ith the exception of breaking
loose every once in awhile around some of the
ILV/U issues. In 1939 there was a Bridges trial;
there had been a hearing before then, around 1935,
223
LG-: primarily as a result of all the employer clamor
to get rid of the alien Australian.
There were all kinds of accusations, rumors,
innuendos that Harry was a British agent; they
had him as an agent for a number of different
groups around the v/orld. He was a British agent
determined to put the American merchant marine
out of business. It had nothing to do with the
workers' demands, of course, nothing to do with
what the employers had done to the workers
obviously; can't attack those upstanding gentle
men. There had to be some other motive.
We began to get the first lessons on how red
baiting is used in many ways by the employers,
and how later they became so much a part of the
thinking of the institutions that are locked in
to the society that they turn up in the most
peculiar ways. Harry was called either an
English agent, or an Australian agent, or a
Russian agent - to show how some of the stuff
is picked up.
When we were expelled from the CIO in 1949 -
I'm jumping ten years now - there had been the
business of the Cold War and Fulton, Missouri,
(an anti-Russian speech made by the British war
time prime minister, Winston Churchill, at the
invitation of the then president of the United
States, Earry S Truman), and a number of things
that occurred.
We sent a delegation back to the so-called
trial the CIC was conducting. It was Arthur
Goldberg (then chief counsel for the CIO) who
was the prosecutor. One of the men we sent back
there was Tony Rania; he was a Filipino, presi
dent of the combined local of the ILWU in Hawaii;
he had been one of those who had been an early
organizer and active rank-and-filer when the
union was formed. Tony Rania testified on how
much the ILWU had done in Hawaii; v/hat it meant
to the plantation workers and so forth.
The reaction of people like Phil Murray and
Arthur G-oldberg was not that his testimony was
false. They put it another way: "V/hat was the
224
LG-: real reason that the ILWU had organized so well
in Hawaii?"
It couldn't have been just "because of the feudal
nature of the plantations and the miserable wage
structures, the busting of heads and the crack
ing of strikes that had gone on for years. It
couldn't be that - it had to be something else.
V/hat was the real reason that we organized in
Hawaii?
I'm giving this as an example of the same sort
of thing where a single individual was concerned,
like Harry; the whole technique of pilloring
people, not because of what they had done,
but .... what was the real motive behind it?
Ward: At that time Arthur Goldberg was chief counsel
for the CIO?
LG: He was chief counsel - right - 1949. I'm jump
ing quite a number of years.
Ward: Chief counsel - Supreme Court justice - ambassa
dor to the United Nations, and what all?
LG: Correct, correct. Just as a humorous sidelight,
I remember going back there when Arthur Goldberg
was Secretary of Labor for awhile. John Henning
(now head of the California State federation of
Labor, A7L-CIO), had just gone back there to work
for the Department of Labor and I happened to be
visiting John.
He said, "By the way, there's a bit of a get-
together for Arthur Goldberg. It could be that
he's about to be appointed to the Supreme Court.
I think you ought to come in," and he walked over
to Goldberg and said, "You must remember Lou
Goldblatt. you helped to expel him from the CIO."
(laughter) Goldberg didn't think it was a bit
funny and turned to talk to somebody else.
Ward: That was ten years ahead. Now, by 1939 there had
been the big victory we thought we had with the
election of the new governor.
225
The Pardoning of Tom Mooney
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward :
LG:
Ward
LG:
Right; that was Culbert Olson. That was one of
the things where the State Council really wet
its feet in that campaign through Labor's Non-
Partisan League - there was a real upheaval.
I'm trying to recall who Olson was running
against: wasn't it (Prank) Merriam?
He was the incumbent.
Right; and it was Marblehead Merriam who was in
power at the time of the '34 strike, I recall,
and he was the one who ordered the National
Guard -
He should be because he served a little over one
term. When (Governor James) Rolph died Merriam
was Lieutenant Governor, if I recall rightly.
He assumed governorship automatically for the
balance of Rolph 's term and then he was elected
in '34 and beat (Socialist) Upton Sinclair. The
Clson election was in November 1938 and he took
office the 1st or 2nd of January, 1939.
That's correct. So, it must have been Merriam.
I recall every body calling him Marblehead -
Marble top.
And the campaign for the governorship was really
an effective one. It crossed all lines, in
terms of people who had been victimized by the
depression, workers who had become part of this
enormous wave of organization.
Things were jumping all over. Woodworkers in
the northwest were moving into the union by
leaps and bounds; shipyard workers were being
organized; the auto plants - there was a sitdown
in Richmond, California where, I think, ?ord had
an assembly plant. They organized the GM plant.
There were the auto plants in L. A. including
the airplane plants. The Oil Workers were mov
ing very rapidly. Traditionally open shop
226
LG: companies like Associated Oil, Union Oil got
organized over in the eastbay. Standard Cil
wasn't cracked until some time later, as I
remember.
This upheaval was going on all over the
state and it was not difficult to take the same
head of steam and put it in the political cam
paign, particularly against a target such as
Merriam, who was as far as possible in terms of
polarity from what we stood for. It was a very
successful campaign.
One of the things that we were concerned with
was the freedom of Tom Mooney (a militant
Socialist and union organizer). After all, he
had been in jail since 1916. That was the
Preparedness Day parade incident that occurred
in San Francisco, so Mooney had been in jail one
hell of a long time ....
Ward: Twenty- two and half years.
LG-: Right. We were campaigning for the freedom of
Mooney and Billings (Warren K. Billings, con
victed of murder with Mooney). Tom Mooney had
taken an unwavering position that he would not
accept a parole; that he had been framed. That's
a chapter all by itself in American history.
I recall going up to San Quentin to visit Tom
Mooney. He had achieved a sort of political
status by implication; people would come by all
the time to visit him. They would just bring
him into the visiting room and you'd talk to him.
He was a man of great courage.
Another of the things we were greatly con
cerned about was the kind of legislature we had
in Sacramento. It was almost completely domi
nated up until those years by outfits like PG-&E,
Southern Pacific lobby, Kern County Land Company.
V/ard: Associated Farmers?
LG: Associated Farmers - they ran that thing as
their own club. When I first went up to
Sacramento - because I got stuck with some of
227
LG: this legislative work later on - they paid the
legislature for a certain number of weeks. At
the end of that period of time the legislators
were cut off the payroll, unless they were on
some interim committee "between sessions of the
legislature.
The first thing I discovered on going to
Sacramento was that the big lobbies would never
push their bills until the very last days of
the session; by that time the legislators were
broke. It was literally impossible for anybody,
including myself, - and Christ knows I wasn't
paid much - to walk into the lobby of the
Senator Hotel around 5:00 or 5:30 without being
stuck with some legislator, his drinks and his
dinner bill.
They were sitting around with their tongues
hanging out, waiting for a live one. Cf course,
by that time they were a lead-pipe cinch for the
lobbies; the lobbyists knew just what they were
doing. The early part of the legislature they
would just spin their wheels, keeping things in
committee, referring them back, and so forth;
they'd v/ait for the last days and then they
would move in.
One cf the prime commitments we asked of
Clson was support on things like getting rid of
the state anti-picketing laws; these laws had
become a plague through the entire state. Host
of them were county laws, and we were determined
that they all had to be defeated. We went
through a lot of battles on them. The San
Francisco one finally got to the point where
nobody was trying toohard to enforce it ....
VfarcL: But we had repealed it in San Francisco before .
LG: Right. But you went into some of the cow
counties - like I remember going up to Shasta
County when we had that strike in Redding; the
Shasta Dam - and there was still an anti-
picketing ordinance. It was during one of the
disputes where I was trying to give the Mine,
Mill and Smelter Workers (Union; a hand as
secretary of the State GIG.
228
LG: I had known some of the Mine-Mill guys when they
were building Boca Dam (near Truckee, California).
A number of them were floaters; they moved from
one job to another. They weren't bindle stiffs.
A lot of them were Wobblies. The first time I
think I met Red Adams (a Mine -Mill leader) was
up there at Boca Dam, together with some of his
side-kicks like Blackie Dyer, and Arrowsmith -
a marvelous bunch of guys.
After Boca Dam, they moved over to Redding;
that's where the Laborers (an A F of L union)
were brought in to sign back-door contracts with
the contractors after the Mine, Mill workers had
a majority. It was in Redding that I was faced
with a decision; a continued confrontation there
was going to be a loser. I didn't see any way
they could win it.
We had all kinds of violent overtones. Part
of this decision had been based upon some of my
readings about the Wobblies; I figured the thing
that might appeal to them would be a straight
free-speech fight around this anti-picketing
ordinance. This ordinance limited pickets, like
to three; after that it was an unlawful assembly,
or some crap like that. We're talking about 40
years ago.
So we put out a leaflet and the local
distributed it. Everybody understood we were
calling for out-and-out defiance of the anti-
picketing ordinance. Automatically a whole
bunch of us - I forget whether it was 50, 60,
were all arrested for violating the ordinance.
We go down and get booked.
Judge (Jesse) Carter saw it as a free speech
fight, and released all of us on our own recog
nizance. That became Carlson vs. California;
that case went to the Supreme Court and the anti-
picketing ordinances were thrown out. And the
reason it was called Carlson vs. California was
because Carlson was the first name in the
alphabet of those indicted.
Ward: Were you indicted also?
229
LG: Yes. The whole group; as a matter of fact, so
was Richie Gladstein. He was attorney for the
ILWU - he and Aubrey Grossman; they were put on
retainer "by Local 6. We paid them a lot of
money. I think it was 50 a month.
Anyway, back to Olson again and Tom Mooney.
One of the commitments we had from Culbert
Clson was that his first act in office, not
second or third or fourth - would be the pardon
of Tom Mooney. It was clearly understood". At
that time, as I remember, the secretary of the
Mooney-Molders Defense Committee - because the
Holders union carried the thing along as a for
mal group - was attorney Herb Resner.
Anyway, Clson was elected in November, but
they always had this gap between the time you
were elected and the time you were installed . .
Ward: First Monday in January -
LG: January; and Terry and I had gone up to some
place in Truckee, just spending a long weekend
up there, near Truckee. It had been a long
grind, with the election campaign and everything
else. Somebody chased me down there - I had
left my phone number in case of anything impor
tant - and said they were meeting with Culbert
Clson. It was either ITew Year's Eve or New
Year's Day.
Ward: It was New Year's Day, Sunday night - New Year's
Eve was on Saturday night. It was the Sunday
night and he was to be inaugurated on the Monday
morning.
LG: It was just before he was to be inaugurated. He
was not in the governor's mansion. He was in a
fairly large apartment near the Capitol.
Apparently there was considerable urgency in this
call because Culbert Olson had indicated that
perhaps it was unwise to make the pardon of Tom
Kooney his first act in office. He was under
the guidance or advice of some of his political
cohorts.
230
LG-: Cur feelings were that if Mooney was not
pardoned at that time, once again we would be
back at square one and going around and around
forever. Resner had this appointment set up
with Culbert Clson and could I take a run down
and be there? I know that Culbert Olson was
under pressure to renege - that was the thing.
So we gathered at this apartment; Resner,
Jack Shelley, Harry See of the Railroad Brother
hood. I think you were there, right?
Ward: Yes. Kidwell ....
LS:
Yes, Kidwell - he was still active at the time,
though getting along in years. Slim Connelly?
I'm not sure if he was there or not -
Ward: I don't think so - I know there v/ere guys there
from Eureka to San Diego.
LG: Right. It was a fairly large group. There must
have been at least fifteen of us, maybe more,
all crowded into this apartment. Olson was
damn defensive and angry, as though anybody could
ever doubt him; he was in effect being accused
of going back on his commitments and he wasn't
that kind of a man.
As I remember everybody was very, very insis
tent; they just took the same position - no ifs,
ands, buts - no business of a 24-hour delay, no
40-hour delay, no nothing. Everybody just kept
asking the same question. "Is the commitment
still good?"
/
Toward the end of the session - Herb Resner,
by the way, did a very good job - a number of
us were asking, "Look, we would like to be there
at the inauguration - and we particularly want
to be there because Tom Mooney is being released."
There was also insistence that Tom Mooney be
brought to the legislature to receive the pardon.
And finally, Olson said okay, he would go
through with it.
V/e in turn made preparations to be there for
the inauguration, in part to make sure he would
not back away. And sure enough he was sworn in
and Tom Mooney was pardoned.
231
V/ard :
LG:
V/ard :
Clson announced at his inaugural that he would
pardon Hooney the following Saturday.
LG:
Ward :
LG;
Ward :
LG:
Ward ;
LG:
Yes, you're right,
act in office.
Literally it was his first
The pardon was a question of getting a place
and setting it up.
Right, '.veil, our concern was the Senate, which
was a highly reactionary body. As a matter of
fact, they blocked almost everything he wanted
in the following legislature.
He did nothing ....
He wound up empty-handed and he began to back
away mere and more and more. The Yorty
(Assemblyman Sam Yorty, who turned Red-hunter)
Committee got busy under Clson. As a matter of
fact, we had supported both Yorty and (Assembly
man Jack) Tenney - Tenney was in the Musicians'
Union - "I-Iexicali Rose" (a popular song) by
Tenney - in the elections in L. A. Tenney was
a part of the red-baiting group.
It was Yorty who later did all the damage,
particularly in the way of discharges. They
cleaned out, oh, the whole State Relief Admini
stration; people like Bill Plunkert (a promi
nent social worker) got the axe. Terry did -
she was working for him at that time.
Terry did?
Yes.
Rose Segure (social worker)?
Rose Segure, of course. She was a close friend
of the Plunkerts and later became a close friend
of Kike Quill (head of the Transport Workers'
Union). Many years later, Rose Segure tried to
act as a sort of intermediary in patching up
things between ourselves and Mite Quill.
Anyway, the pardon of Tom Mooney did take
place. It was the end of that week, Saturday,
I guess it was; the (legislature's) Assembly
232
LG-: chamber was jammed. Ily dad and my mother had
been part of this campaign for the freedom of
Tom Mooney for years. I got in touch with my
mother - I think it was the first time she ever
set foot in an airplane - and she flew up and
came to this ceremony in the Assembly chamber
in Sacramento to witness the pardon of Tom
Mooney.
Afterwards a group of us went over to have
lunch in a Mexican restaurant in Sacramento, and
I brought my mother along. This was a big thing
for me and for her. She reported back to this
little group she belonged to - these various
progressive groups - mostly Jewish - about the
ceremony. It was a fascinating climax to the
sort of thing which in most cases doesn't end
that well.
Ward: Lou, you were talking about this function after
the Tom Mooney pardon with your mother.
LG-: Oh, it was a big thing. After all, she and her
friends had been campaigning from 1916 or '17
until 1939. I felt elated that I was able to
pay back, sort of ... a general feeling of
obligation for some of the things my folks
believed in which helped to condition me as a
youngster.
Ward: It was a rare occasion?
LG: Yes. We headed back at once to San Francisco
where my mother took a plane back. We had to
get ready for Tom Mooney to come to San Francisco,
Ward: It was Sunday, the 8th -
LG: Sunday, the 8th. We had all kinds of work to
do. We decided there would be a march up Market
Street with Tom Mooney at the head of the parade.
We also arranged that there would be a speakers'
platform at the Civic Center where the parade
would wind up. All of our planning notwith
standing, it turned out to be hopeless.
233
LG: There was really no parade. There was an attempt
to put together a parade, but we quickly dis
covered that any effort to set up a disciplined
parade just wouldn't work. People swarmed around
Mooney. We got around oh, two or three hundred
of our biggest guys, and sort of formed a circle
around Tom Mooney and some of the leaders of
the labor movement who were walking with him
and at least protected him from the crush of
the crov/d.
V, r ard: Well, it v/as more than that too; there were
death threats ....
LG: There might have been, but nobody was paying
any attention to them. Some of the nuts, some
of the vigilantes, I suppose, who might have
been around in 1934, '35, part of the backwash
of the general strike.
Market Street was just black v/ith people for
its whole length; photographs show that when the
parade got to the turning point on Grove Street,
all of Market Street right down to the ?erry
Building was just one mass of humanity.
It was the biggest turnout I have ever seen
anywhere around a single issue. We've had some
Labor Day parades that took three or four hours,
but this was different. It v/as just a swarm,
none of it in any way difficult or fractious;
a great celebration. Mooney spoke, a bit too
long, but so many things stored up for so many
years, you see. Even Rena Mooney* turned up for
that. Tom didn't live too long after that.
Ward: His guts had been ruined, prison diet . . .
LG: That v/as quite a day. That's all we ever got
out of Clson - the freedom of Tom Mooney -
Ward: I think so.
LG: Clson had some good proposals but they all died
in the legislature. For what reason the Yorty
Committee, the Tenney Committee, got under way,
I don't know myself; except that part of the
clash between Clson and the legislature was a
* Tom Mooney 's estranged wife.
234
LG-: situation where the legislature could pick up
certain things on their own and run away with
them. And where you found an ambitious
character like Yorty and a man who turned
renegade like Tenney; unfortunately, people v/e
had supported.
Ward: Well, then we come on through '39 and the next
interesting point would be the Bridges trial
with (James M.) Landis, wasn't it?
LG: Those hearings were on Angel Island at the old
Immigration station. We used to commute every
day by boat from San Francisco. The story was
told that on one of these trips Landis took the
wheel for a while and said, "Well, this is my
chance now - I'm heading right for Australia."
Well, while that trial was going on all kinds
of things were going on at the same time. All
my attention at that time was devoted to the
CIO. That meant helping to set up local labor
councils. It was just getting too crowded around
the Balboa Building where we'd been. Anyway v/e
got ourselves bigger headquarters.
Disturbing War Rumbles
The organizational drives were going full blast.
The invasion of Poland did not make that much
of a dent in the organizational drive, though
politically things began to get reflected all
over the place. There were a number of issues
which many of us were concerned about.
All of us were aware of the attempts on the
part of the Soviet Union to build some sort of
a collective security pact; the efforts of
(Maxim) Litvinov (U.S.S.R. foreign secretary
under Stalin); the invasion of Finland, "poor
little Finland." The Finns, the political group
in power at that time, were fairly close to
Germany. There was the Mannerheim Line (a fort
ification of the Finnish-Russian border). I
guess the Russians had pretty well decided that
the way things were going, their inability to
235
LG: get a coalition together to stop Hitler,
whether or not they liked it, they were going
to be on their own pretty soon. After all,
(Neville) Chamberlain (British prime minister
prior to World War II) had come back from
Germany with "peace in our time," after the
surrender of the Sudetenland. Hitler had picked
up Austria, part of Czechoslovakia.
There were all kinds of political debates
going on. Beginning with the civil war in
Spain, it was hard to reach any conclusion other
than the fact that the clash between Hitler and
the Soviet Union was inevitable.
Cn the other hand, there were all kinds of
debates going on about the Russians moving into
Poland about the same time that the Germans did.
It was the period of the Nolotov-Ribbentrop
pact. (An agreement between Vyacheslav 14. Molo-
tov for the U.S.S.R. and Joachim von Ribbentrop
for Germany which temporarily postponed open
hostilities betv/een the two nations). ?or those
of us on the left, the flack was flying from all
directions.
Ward: Japanese too?
LG: The Japanese question was separate. V/'e didn't
tie into any German- Japanese axis at the time.
The action at the Marco Polo Bridge signaled the
invasion of China by Japan; I think it took
place in 1937. The union itself (I'm talking
now specifically of the longshoremen) had gone
through a whole period of stoppages of work on
the use of ships for scrap iron to Japan; these
had been going on since 1933.
I remember a demonstration against the ar
rival of the Karlsruhe. That v/as a German
training ship after Hitler had come to power.
All these things were closing in on everybody.
We knew a lot of what Hitler stood for; his
announcements for getting rid of everything that
tainted the Aryan race, but I don't think we v/ere
aware of the whole "final solution" program
(the extermination of Jews).
236
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward;
LG:
While you had all these debates on the question
of industrial unionism, other debates took
place on a quite higher level; Hitler, Spanish
civil war, and so forth. This went on both as
individuals and as a union; we felt very keen
ly that what was going on in Spain, particular
ly with the help that was being given Franco
by (Benito) Mussolini and Hitler, these were
forerunners of wholesale repression.
While no one had taken Mussolini all that
seriously, even as a fascist regime, all of a
sudden some of its further implications began
to come through to us. You might recall some
of the airplane attacks by Mussolini's airmen,
including either a son-in-law or someone . . .
A son.
Son - including the descriptions of the bombing
of ...
Ethiopia -
And Spain. He had invaded Ethopia, yes, earlier.
Things were going on in our own ranks; the
question of who went to Spain was constantly on
the agenda. Some close friends of mine on the
waterfront decided to go to Spain.
One awfully good guy I had been close to,
Jack Egan, he went to Spain; the last they saw
of him was when he decided to go after a tank
with a hand grenade in each hand; that was the
last of him and the tank. He had a younger
brother who never got over it.
You had a combination of large scale union
movements, strikes breaking out in every
direction, and the political fight going on at
the same time. Deportation attempt against
Harry; struggle over questions such as "poor
little Finland;" the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Trying to keep your bearings in all of this
was not the easiest thing in the world; your
leftwingers were doing valiant service as or
ganizers and leaders, trying to get certain
237
LG-: things done when you knew that the parameters
were specifically limited. It was a rough
period, and a very exciting one. No question
about that.
Labor Spies
Ward: Would you like to talk about the spies for a
minute? Arthur Scott Kent? Jim O'Neill, who
was one in a way
LG-: Jim O'Neill was just a weak guy, more than any
thing else, plus Jim had lost his battle with
John Barleycorn. Jim O'Neill was our PR man,
did our radio program. I recall Jim going to
the clink for 30 days around a dispute we had
at the Teagarden warehouse in North Beach.
The employers decided to run scabs in these
covered vans and one day a big beef blew up and
some of the trucks got overturned and what-have-
you. Dominic Gallo, a very tough little short
guy, managed to get his hands on a couple of
these strike-breakers and they surely weren't
the same very quickly. He was one of those who
did time and Jim O'Neill did time.
We never had any feeling that Jim O'Neill was
a labor spy. I think what happened was that
they got to him a bit later. No question, later
on he went through that crazy business, first
testifying against Harry and then repudiating
it - obviously a very weak guy. There were guys
who were active in the labor councils or in the
Guild or other unions who later turned up on the
witness stand. Not during the Landis (James M.
Landis, who presided at the first trial of Harry
Bridges) thing -
Ward: There was one -
LG: Yes -
Ward: (Miles) Humphrey.
238
LG: Yes, Humphrey. I think Lundeberg turned up in
the next trial. George Wilson was active in
the Newspaper Guild at the time.
Ward: Yes, he was the second secretary of the Bridges
Defense Committee - the second trial.
LG: Merv (Meryyn) Rathborne, who was active in the
ACA (American Communications Association), the
radio operators. He later "became secretary of
the State CIO. Henry Schrimpf was a witness.
John Shoemaker; these and others turned up at a
later trial.
Ward: Shoemaker was a longshoreman -
LG: Longshoreman, right, very active in the 1934
strike. Mike Quin in his "book, The Big Strike,
specifically mentions John Shoemaker - he made
a big impression - a big man - his stature, short
cropped hair, looked like a typical longshoreman;
and a very dedicated one. I did mention one man
from Local 6 who disappeared - a man by the name
of Tarling; the fact that some report he wrote
fell into our hands.
Ward: Oh, yeah.
LG: He suddenly disappeared. Some of them, I'm sure,
were industrial spies who were bought for certain
jobs. Some of them were turned up by the
LaPollette Committee (a Congressional investi
gating group headed by U. S. Senator Robert
LaPollette) later on.
I don't recall the guy's name, but he was one
of those who was active in Crockett - he worked
in the refinery. He had become part of this group
which was trying to take the refinery into the
CIO. I remember a meeting with the leadership
of this group that was trying to move into the
refinery; by that time a couple of the guys had
gotten fired.
I said, "Look, this whole thing looks too
much like a put-up job by the company. One thing
you ought to be careful of is, under no circum
stances do you put up a picket line because the
239
LG-: Local 6 contract is open. If we have to we'll
shut it down, around the contract demands, but
to get sidetracked on this first and then try
to add the Local 6 strike to it, you'll be biting
off more than you can handle. It would be better
to keep plugging away with the National Labor
Relations Board and then bring the thing to a
head when the warehouse negotiations come to a
head; do it at the same time."
This guy was at the meeting and it must have
lasted until about 12:30 or 1:00 o'clock because
I drove back and I got a phone call at 6:30 in
the morning from Crockett. This guy said, "Look,
I know we talked about it last night, but that's
a lot of bunk. Let's throw up a picket line."
He was without any question a provocateur.
He disappears the next day - within 48 hours.
The next I hear about him, he suddenly bought a
service station somewhere in the eastbay. I'm
sure that outfits like the Pinkertons and what-
have-you were making nothing but hay. They must
have honey-combed all the unions.
V.'ard: Did you ever run into Captain Bakcsy? Used to
hold all these parties down at Carmel and invite
all these suspected Communists and leftwingers?
LG-: No, I used to go down to Carmel but I don't
remember him. I remember going to Carmel and
meeting Lincoln Steffens (a famous writer)
married to Ella Winter at the time, and they had
this little young one, Peter Steffens. I remem
ber going to Lincoln Steffens' house any number
of times; he v/as a delight to talk to.
He had a faculty of sort of picking you up
in the middle of an idea and saying, "Now, wait
a minute - I know what you're saying, but let's
go back to the beginning of this thing to find
out how you ever reached this conclusion?" He
had this technique of forcing you to think
things through. I got to know him and Ella
Winter and some of the other people around
Carmel through Dan James.
240
LG: "//hen I was at Gal I had known Dan James; his
wife later wrote this musical comedy "Bloomer
Girl." At that time, Dan would go down to
Carmel and stay at his folks' place. His father
was very wealthy - he was the James Pottery
Company of St. Louis, 1 think. He built this
fabulous place - it v/as just below Carmel
Highlands and built right on the cliffs. I'd
go down there and spend weekends sometimes with
Dan. We were quite good friends; we used to
walk a lot, throw cans out in the ocean and try
to pick them off with a. 22, things of that sort.
Ward: Did you ever have anything to do with Arthur
Scott Kent? He was a sidekick of Mooney - they
met in San Quentin.
LG: Yes. I remember him. But not much.
(Interview 10: 18 April, 1978)
Ward: Lou, you had another Crockett story that hap
pened later.
LG: Yes. It was a friendship I had up there that
carried on throughout the years I was with the
union, a very close friendship. There was a
running confrontation in Crockett between the
management and our union. They figured we were
irascible and impossible; paid no attention to
what they happened to do with this company union
they had in the refinery.
The company was constantly doing surveys of
big factories where they could show that the
warehousemen were paid nothing like our guys
were. That didn't carry any water with us, but
some very peculiar negotiations were bound to
result. They always felt that there was some
kind of a diabolical plot somewhere in the
wind.
We had a great deal of leverage, after all.
It wasn't only that we had the warehousemen in
Crockett; we also had standing with us the long
shoremen; Crockett could not operate unless the
LG:
241
longshoremen were working, for obvious reasons;
all the raw sugar canie there from Hawaii.
Around 1940 or 1950, after the war, the man
in charge of the Crockett operation was William
Tyler; everybody called him "Call Me Bill" Tyler -
his way of establishing informality. He was
also a very high-strung man, particularly when
it came to dealing with the ILWU.
Tyler, about that time, divorced his wife and
married his secretary. '-.Tien I heard of this I
made the crack to somebody, around the office,
"Well, that will set back office worker organi
zation at least 20 years." Because that was the
thinking of a lot of secretaries, that eventually
they would marry the boss.
But that wasn't the story I was going to tell
you about. We were in a set of negotiations,
and in those days we were talking pennies most
of the time. Sometimes the settlement might be
in the range of six, six and a half, seven cents
maybe a dime.
Ward: This was after the war.
LG-: After the war, oh sure; it was before the rapid
inflation period. We had a big move going on
after the war in Warehouse; CPA had been repeal
ed and with the leadership of Gene Paton the
local managed to compel increases, even though
the contract was not open, by a series of slow
downs, job action.
We had gotten a call from Tyler who said he
wanted to talk to Chili and myself. Well, we
had talked at great length in the committee and
knew where the differences were. Most of the
issues were resolved except wages. There the
company offered somewhere around 4 or 5 cents.
Chili and I huddled about the thing and we said,
"All right, if we can get this guy to go to 6--J-
cents, the committee figures it's okay. It
doesn't pay to take a strike over what remains."
After Chili and I and the committee had pretty
much made up our minds, v/e went into Tyler's
office; he was awfully fidgety, walking back and
242
LG: forth behind his desk. Then he let go with
quite a tirade - how as far back as he could
think, the Warehouse local there had constantly
been determined to upset Crockett. Why is it
that we are always determined to get a strike?
He couldn't understand. But, damn it, he was
going to make every effort to avoid a strike.
We don't say anything; we're just sitting
there listening to him, and he finally concluded,
"Look, like it or not, I'm going to offer you
7 cents. I know your attitude; you guys are
just determined to fight; I'll offer you a 7-cent
an hour increase." I don't say a word and I
look at Chili and start shaking my head in dis
belief. Chili and I had just agreed that six,
six and a half cents would do it.
Tyler interprets my shaking my head at Chili
as a "no". And he says, "All right, it's seven
and a half and I'm telling you right now, that's
final." And I'm still shaking my head and still
haven't said a word. Finally, he says, "I'm
going to bring this damn thing to a head and
that's it. It's 8 cents, take it or leave it."
So, we finally leaned back and said, "Well,
if you feel about it that way, I guess we'll
take the 8 cents." That's the only set of nego
tiations I can recall where 'we reached an
agreement on more than what we ever anticipated,
by never saying a word.
Union Leadership vs. Leftwing Politics
Ward: Ckay. Now let's go back a few years ... as
you became active in the trade union movement
more and more, accepting greater and greater
responsibilities, were there any changes in your
personal relationship with the Communist party,
in your thinking and your action?
LG: Not fundamentally. I'd say that there were
changes in one area.
##
243
Ward: You were saying, Lou, that as you became more
active in trade union affairs, there were one
or two things -
LG: What happened, I think, was something over which
you would have no direct control. Unless you
were awfully thick, what got to you was the whole
business of timing, what issues could be
effectively presented, a real consciousness of
how the rank and file would react.
It was not just a business of adopting a
resolution; in many cases, this was the easiest
thing in the world, particularly if you put it
vaguely enough. The one thing that became most
important was the measurement of any political
action or position.
How the thing could be bounced off the mem
bership and to what degree they would support
it? It was not a question of tailism, waiting
for the workers to move before you start running
to catch up.
Leadership had with it certain obligations.
The job of leadership meant that you would
reflect as best you could the reservations, some
times the reluctances, priorities, of the people
you represented. This became a measure of
leadership.
It did not mean in any way compromising what
I thought. An individual in my position, or any
trade unionist, cannot over any long period of
time make the price of his leadership the auto
matic support of the rank and file. You could
not demand that price, but you could demand that
you handle yourself with confidence and knowledge
of the issue.
What you could insist upon was that just
because you had been elected a leader did not
mean you had to give up any of your ideas. It
was around this, for example, that we would
fight things like redbaiting; and actually not
so much the fight against redbaiting; the more
correct way of appraising that would be, the
right of a Red to retain his opinion when he was
244
LS: a union man. You "began to put these things in
a different equation; as a union we were not
trying to change somebody's religious opinion;
we were not trying to change their political
registration. Neither was it anybody else's
damn business how you as a leader felt about
issues or political opinions or political regis
tration.
This sort of balance had to be achieved,
which meant also that any relations with some
thing like the CP (Communist party) you would
weigh constantly. You would speak up on them,
pretty pointedly, because on many scores it was
not that the CP was wrong - it was right.
They were right on every issue from Loyalist
Spain to the battle for the Scottsboro Boys (a
political struggle on behalf of nine black
youths) to the freedom of Tom Hooney, their
thinking about a socialist society, their sup
port of the Soviet Union against Hitler.
The issue was, how could a person in leader
ship exercise judgment in these questions so as
to move the membership along with him; not to
sit there blandly and flow with the tide, not to
duck all issues.
In some cases there were some pretty sharp
confrontations. For example, there was a period
there when the Catholic church had a pretty
violent reaction against Loyalist Spain. There
was a long period of that; but those of us who
had any kind of a leadership influence or
position never backed away on the question of
Loyalist Spain. The same way when it came to
the whole question of the fight on racial dis
crimination, which we started very early.
In the case of Longshore, they had quite a
struggle on the question of racial discrimination
because apparently some blacks had been brought
on the v/aterfront; I think they were American-
Hawaiian gangs and they had been brought on the
waterfront during the 1920 strike.
Ward: When you say American-Hawaiian, you mean the
steamship company?
245
LG: Yes, American-Hawaiian Steamship Company. That
was the one Roger Lapham was the head of. It's
a shipping company that somehow managed to lose
all its ships during the war, World War II.
I'm not saying they were in collusion with any
body, but somehow all of their ships went down.
They wound up as the wealthiest shipping company,
without a single ship, when the war was over.
There was a problem of taking on the issue
in Longshore. The blacks were accepted as part
of the union and a number of them became very
active. Some of them were just splendid
examples of good, solid trade unionists with a
lot of leadership ability.
One of the old-time longshoremen who came to
the surface was a man named Joe White. When he
retired he moved down to some small town near
Fresno and was elected mayor there. One of the
stories I remember about him: he was up in Coos
Bay when Harry was in jail after the outbreak of
the Korean War - Harry had taken a position that
there ought to be a cease-fire and the killing
ought to stop; that was when Judge Harris made
the statement that in this time of peril there
was no room for minority opinion, and he put
Harry in the clink and he was in for several
weeks.
We had a very sharp caucus up in Coos Bay -
one that was really quite crucial; a couple of
odd things happened. Some of the reactionary
characters from Portland made a proposal that we
take the honorary membership away from Paul
Robe son (famous black singer and actor) which
we had granted to him and give it to Jackie
Robinson (a black baseball star). This was
really interesting, coming from Portland. It was
finally voted down.
But the story about Joe White is different.
Apparently, one night some of the guys decided
to call on one of the cat houses in North Bend
or Coos Bay. Joe White is sort of leading the
group and they call at this cat house and the
madam takes one look at Joe White, very black
colored guy, and she tells Joe, "Look, we don't
mix them here." And Joe, without blinking an eye,
turned to her and said, "If my friends can't come
in, neither am I."
246
Ward: Getting back to the relationship
LG: The relationship with the party was such that
you "began to measure things in a different way.
Certain party leaders were far more flexible
and understood these things better than others.
Sam Darcy - and this was true of the '34 strike,
as well as in later years - was head of the
Communist party in California. He had a pretty
good feel of the problem that any trade union
leader would have, or any leader of a mass
organization; recognized the importance of not
spinning yo.ur wheels on every issue.
There was a question of looking for the key
link in the chain of events that you could grasp,
that you could carry. Walter Lambert had very
much the same feeling and would never argue with
you as to your appraisal of what the membership
would or would not do in a particular situation
or in a particular issue. He felt that was your
problem and that was your judgment.
That was what you were down there for; not
just to draw a salary or to conduct a set of
negotiations once in a while, or just say "yes."
On that score, he was a very independent guy.
His brother, Rudy, (Rudy Lambert, another
Communist official) I don't recall having too
much contact with. For one thing, he was hand
ling some other work in the party machinery and
I don't think he was that close to the trade
unionists.
You can't call it drifting away; I guess what
would be more accurate would be to say you got
a different sense of priorities and a different
set of values and a better understanding of what
the hell your job was. I've always felt that
with trade union leadership or leadership of any
mass organization there comes a certain number
of obligations that you cannot avoid; and if you
try to duck them you are either going to capitu
late or you are going to turn phony.
One, of course, you damn well had better know
your job. It's a rare thing to find a good
union official who is not at the same time, or
247
LG-: who has not been a good worker on the job. The
worker's reaction would be if he is an incompe
tent in one place, he will be incompetent in
another place.
If someone is a goof-off on the job; if he
doesn't do his share of the work or gives the
other guy a "Portugee lift," as they call it -
that means the guy picks up his end of the sack
first and the other guy has all the weight to
pick up - if he has no respect for that man as
a worker, then the reaction will be pretty much
the same as to any aspirations he has as a union
leader.
Ch, that was a form of drifting away, but it
wasn't in any sense a break. I'd say that that
took place later on -
Ward: I'm talking about the beginnings of substituting
your own judgment for that of someone who sat
up at 121.
LG: I think this became symptomatic of a lot of the
leftwingers in the trade union movement, parti
cularly those who survived. After all, it has
to be borne in mind that the CIC on the west
coast in some areas had the same impact that it
might have in Pittsburgh, Chicago; such as Los
Angeles, where you had large rubber plants - the
Firestone plant and a couple of others - some
large auto plants. You had the airplane
manufacturers like North American which were
organized early by the Auto Workers. So, it had
some of the same impact there.
But in a place like northern California it
was almost as much a question of principle and
a belief in industrial unionism; that was the
highly motivating thing. The northwest, it was
the IWA (International Woodworkers of America;
(Harold) Pritchett was the president initially.
Later he was forced out of the country by the
Immigration Department because he was Canadian
and had never become an American citizen. Eal,
by the way, is still alive. His son, Craig, is
our regional director in Canada.
248
LG: In the Northwest it became a real running feud
between the IA and the Carpenters, who suddenly
decided to organize industrially rather than have
the woods and the sawmills organized by the IWA.
The net result was that your leftwing leadership
in all parts of the coast either survived by
some pretty good solid, independent judgment or
they'd fall victim to the whole attack because
they couldn't hold the membership; that became
the key.
A Lively Social Life
Ward: I see. Well, I think that solves that for the
moment. How, on your personal situation, you
and Terry, for whatever reason, decided to get
married.
LG: That's right - we'd been living together since
around late in 1935, and in 1939 we pretty well
decided that we ought to have a family. That
was the main reason we got married. We got
married by Reverend Herrick Lane and the man who
stood up for us was Aubrey Grossman. My friend
ship with Aubrey, by the way, goes back about
50 years. Herrick Lane was a fine man; matter
of fact, I called him at the time my daughter,
Anriv was getting married to David King, some
ten years ago. Apparently, he was busy or
something and we had some judge do the ceremony.
But Herrick Lane must have thought about that
because about a couple of months later he came
to the office at 150 Golden Gate to re-introduce
himself and sort of apologize for not having met
our request.
Ward: Any comments on the cause parties and the social
life of which you were a part?
t
LG: Oh, yes. The cause dinners and cause dances made
up a very large part of our social life. I think
this was true of everybody on the left. There
was always something doing on support for Loyal
ist Spain during that period; the constant meet
ings in support of Tom Moonev. PW (The Peoples'
World, a Communist newspaper) parties were frequent,
249
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
LG:
Ward:
The union itself would have all kinds of social
functions. A good many of our social engage
ments revolved around a lot of these cause
parties. As I recall, they were pretty
exuberant affairs - you felt good about them.
It was a good family.
They were working parties in a sense, too,
because you made contact there.
You made contact with people. If there were
trade unionists who you felt wanted to go just
beyond the nickel and dime demands in the
contract, you'd make it your business to invite
them there. It was never this business, you
know, that they try to paint that it was sub
versive and all this crap. That had nothing to
do with it at all. Quite to the contrary, it
was built around friendship and social engage
ments. This became a big part of the social
life of almost all the people I could think of
in the left.
Yes, it was a good time.
Those were good times and they were exuberant
times. We were riding a pretty good wave. We
felt that history and developments were very
much on our side. The country was finally
climbing out of the depression; organization
was going full blast. We won some very
important victories.
A lot of the unions were establishing them
selves as the conscience of the trade union
movement. That's why I always felt that our
expulsion from the A F of L, and later our
expulsion from the CIO, was really a form of
hari-kiri by the A F of L and the CIO. I think
that if there's any one single thing that's
responsible for the trade union problems in this
country it was that whole series of expulsions
and the redbaiting that went with "it.
Well, you'd run into some of these A F of L
guys whom you knew at these parties - it was a
mixed bag?
250
LG: Oh, sure. There were all kinds of good, solid
trade unionists; some of them not all that
politically inclined; some of them left-inclined;
some of them just genuine people, for example,
who carried over some of the Wobbly tradition.
I'm talking about people like Joe Murphy, who
was head of the Laborers' Union - -
Ward: Jack Wagner?
LG: Jack Wagner was a good example. He was with the
Pile Drivers Union. There were people like Dan
Del Carlo, (secretary of the San Francisco
Building Trades Council), who was very friendly
to our union. There were any number of them
who were simply carrying on as best they could
what they had picked up in the Wobblies.
Many of the individuals who came out of that
Wobbly movement were fundamentally very sound
on a couple of things; they had absolutely no
fear of socialism; if anything, they leaned
toward it. Of course they thought of socialism
in more of a syndicalist fashion - one big union
and were quite distrustful of some of the
political sides of socialism, but they were not
allergic.
They definitely were not redbaiters; if any
thing, they understood the danger of red
baiting, particularly after what had happened
in the Palmer raids right after World War I.
Ward: Central ia.
LG: Right - Centralia, Washington; Wesley Everest;
they felt very keenly about the right of people
to believe as they pleased. There was also a
wonderful, sort of a goyishe chutzpah -
Ward : Chutzpah?
LG: Chutzpah, you know - I guess the closest defini
tion you can get to it is that it's a form of
arrogance and defiance. You've heard the story
of this young man who is brought to trial for
having killed his mother and father and pleads
251
LG: for clemency on the grounds that he's an orphan.
That takes chutzpah, you see. But a goyishe
chutzpah is a sort of gentile chutzpah.
With my own background and my own beliefs,
I always had a certain admiration for a group
of people in this country that ranged from some
of the Wobblies I knew to some rather prominent
people like Bob Kenney (one-time State Senator,
California Attorney-General and judge). They
just seem to take their democratic rights of
personal belief, refusal to redbait - seem to
have taken it with their mother's milk. It
never frightened them.
There was a certain great feeling, "Look,
this is our country; just because you happen to
wrap yourself up in the American flag doesn't
make it your country." I'll never forget an
old-time Wobbly, now retired, a member of our
union named Paul Keady from Newport, Oregon.
It was during one of the debates on the Vietnam
war or the Korean war when there was a lot of
this rabid redbaiting, flag-waving.
In his own way and strictly as a kind of
grass roots simple American, he would sort of
fit the definition that if you dropped him out
of an airplane anywhere on the west coast, he'd
somehow make a living. He got up and made a
a speech that literally shook up everybody in
the place and cooled off this hysteria.
The point he made was very simple: he wasn't
going to argue his patriotism with anybody; it
wasn't any of their damn business; his life and
his record spoke for themselves. When certain
things were important, he'd support them; when
it came to fighting in World War II, he had done
his share .
And he said, "As to these flag wavers, I have
no objection to that either. I don't have an
objection to them even when they take the Ameri
can flag and cut themselves a coat out of it.
But, damn it, when they cut themselves a vest
and a pair of pants out of the American flag
they have gone just a bit too damn far."
(laughter)
252
LG-: This stripe of person was attracted to the CIO,
to support of Loyalist Spain, to the whole
fight for freedom of expression by the left-wing,
They might not agree at all times, but their
minds were open.
These were the sort of people you knew you
had to have with you; either that or you were
fighting a lost cause. Some people thought
that triumph was going down with your flags
flying. So what? It was far more important
to try to measure things against people of this
stripe.
Ward: Incidentally, you mentioned a while back that
the Catholic church took violent opposition to
Loyalist Spain. Is that where the ACTU played
a role in local trade unionism?
LG: I think the ACTU had started by then, although -
Ward: Before the war, it was a problem?
LG: It was before the war and during the war - both.
It disappeared later on, the Association of
Catholic Trade Unionists, the group you're
talking about. The man v/ho was very prominent
in that was a Father Rice. I think he was in
New Orleans - he was based there, in the South
somewhere.
He actually put out pamphlets on how to
stack a union meeting; instructions on how the
Catholics should handle themselves; all, of
course, directed against the left. Whether he
was a direct disciple of Father Coughlin (a
famous radio priest), I don't know. You
remember him, of course, a dangerous man.
As far as we were concerned, they became
much more prominent in the years after the war.
That's when they became quite a pain in the ass
to us; set up basic ACTU chapters in Longshore
and Warehouse. They got mixed up in attempts
to raid the ILWU after we were expelled from the
CIO. I'll never forget one of our longshoremen,
Johnny O'Connor. He was a very tough little
guy -
253
Ward: Ex- pug -
LG: Ex-pug, wonderful guy, a lovely family, a very
ardent Catholic. I don't think he ever missed
mass. He came to Harry and myself as we were
sitting around and he said, "Look, they're try
ing to get me into the AGTU; v/hat do you think
I ought to do?" And Harry said, "Why don't you
ioin? Find out for yourself." Well, he did.
The very first meeting he goes to, the local
leader in San Francisco of the ACTU was a
teamster, who was also mixed up in some very
aggressive raiding activity against the ILWU.
As soon as the meeting starts, he starts taking
off against the ILWU and why the AGTU had to
take it apart. And Johnny O'Connor got up and
said, "Look, nobody can blast my union that way."
That just about ended the meeting. There were
very few meetings called after that.
Ward: And Johnny would have done that.
LG-: Yes, Johnny would have done that. Sure.
You were asking about Terry and I getting
married and somehow we got off on these other
things.
Ward: And then the social life ....
LG: While all this was going on, the social life
was sort of squeezed in between v/ork schedules
that ran, oh, 14 and 16 hours a day. They
seemed to be endless. A lot of the ground that
I covered had to be by car because there were
all sorts of out of the way places. I remember
that the State Council began to become the
depository of some of the more difficult beefs.
They (some unions) v/ere reaching into areas
where it was inevitable for them to run into a
bunch of scissor-bills and people who were very
hostile to the v/hole union movement. There were
Woodworkers' strikes, and I remember going to
Westwood. George Andersen (an ILWU attorney)
went along with me. This was after we got word
254
LG: that they had run the strikers out of town -
the vigilantes had. As George and I got towards
Westwood - maybe within 15 or 20 miles - here
were some of the families of the guys who had
been run out of town.
When we went in there, it was an armed camp.
The man v/ho was the head of the company - I
think it was a family concern - was named
Walker. I said, "Look, we want the families
reunited and coming back into town." He was
sort of half listening.
Obviously the strike was lost, although
eventually I think they came back and did re
organize it. A lot of the strikers were from
the area they called "old town" - made up of
Italians. During the midst of this a fire wagon
began to sound and this guy Walker jumps over
and grabs one of these fire hats and a jacket
and says, "I'll see you later," goes out and
jumps in the wagon; they were waiting for him.
I couldn't help but feel, "There's a pyro-
maniac, if I ever saw one in my life." (laughter)
Westwood is not operating anymore. They finally
timbered out there, and more recently the whole
town was sold.
I remember getting a call from a Mine-Mill
guy who said that the guys at the New Idria
mine had walked out. New Idria mine was one of
the places where (former President) Herbert
Hoover built up his fortune; it's way back in
the hills from Hollister, and I went down there.
These people had been driven out of town; it
was so common in these small company towns.
They were mostly Spaniards. They were camped
alongside the road and it was raining miserably.
We went in there to hammer things out with the
company. People went back to town; in that case
the union managed to hang on all right; but
talk about a desolate, god-forsaken area, that
was it. There were all kinds of other things
going on - the organization of the fishermen.
I learned much in that period about the basic
need for what was then being called "united front"
255
LG: The need was for maintaining some sort of
collective understanding and leadership in the
CIO; you were dealing with such divergent
characters; everybody from a Sherman Dalrymple
to the Coulter brothers and some just plain
old-line trade unionists, some stick-in-the-
muds. There was a crazy melange and the only
thing you had in common was that we were part
of the CIO.
Ward: And accepted John L. as the leader?
LG: No question about that.
Ward: So now we come on to . . . .
LG: The '39 CIO Convention which took place in San
Francisco and the State CIO coordinated with it,
It was at that convention that I really had a
chance to not only meet John L. Lewis but to
talk to him a bit.
Ward: You went to Treasure Island v/ith him ....
LG: Yes, I went to Treasure Island with him, and I
got to know (his daughter) Lathy Lewis very-
well . She became a good friend of mine; she
liked us out here.
Ward: Some people found her a bit of a problem.
LG: She was; I think that later on she got mixed
up with this America First (an extreme right-
wing political group) , though there was an
attempt to disclaim it. John L. was pretty
much of an isolationist, really. He distrusted
American foreign policy, and particularly dis
trusted any connections with the British -
Ward: Well, he was of Welsh background.
LG: He was a Welshman, yes, and Welshmen don't have
much use for the British. They've always felt
that if you have any alliance with Great
Britain, it would only be because the British
wanted to use you in some way. Kathryn Lev/is
spent a lot of time with us.. She was a heavy
woman .
256
Ward: Very stout . . .
LG-: Very stout; she wasn't too attractive, but she
was pleasant enough. I recall a party we had
at the place Terry and I were living at that
time. We had moved to a penthouse . . .
Ward: On the curve going up to Telegraph Hill?
LG: Right, it was just before the last turn. Oh,
we paid a big rent there. Both of us were
working then, so we were making a lot of money.
We paid $65 a month.
Ward: Terrific!
LG-: That was a good deal of rent. We moved out of
there when Annie (Goldblatt's oldest daughter)
came along in 1941 and took a place on Green
Street, which was a little more reasonable -
$42. 50. By that time, Terry had quit work.
It was a nice interlude up there (on Tele
graph Hill); it had become a gathering place
for a lot of people. And it was a hell of a
good party pad - no two ways about that. To
wards the end of the convention, I had managed
to hustle a batch of wine from the Wine Insti
tute. In those days they were trying to
advertise California wines, and I told them one
of the chances to advertise was for the conven
tion dinner.
They sent down a few cases of wine and a case
of champagne which they thought would be for
the head table. We never got around to using
the champagne for the head table ; and we kept
that and I said, "Well, okay, the least we
could do is take some of the staff v/ho worked
their tails off, and we'd have a bit of a party.
I recall Lee Pressman (CIO attorney) was there
and I think, Len DeCaux (editor of the CIO News)
was ....
Ward: Yes, I know Lee v/as there -
LG: Yes, definitely. As a matter of fact, Lee was
responsible for drafting most of the resolutions
during the convention. Kathryn Lewis was there;
257
LG:
Ward ;
L&:
Ward :
LG:
you might recall that the apartment had those
bookcases that were right under the windows,
and Kathryn -
We were talking about the party and Kathryn
Lewis; she had some champagne.
Yes, and she was sitting on these bookshelves.
Luckily, nothing happened.
No books were lost?
No. But the 59 convention was a good conven
tion; it had a lot of spark to it. Ey 1939
people like Dubinsky had begun to move out of
the CIC. The 1940 convention I recall distinct
ly; that was back in Atlantic City. I think it
was in 1940 or '41, Lewis resigned as president
of the CIC and Phil (Philip) Murray took over.
That was the turning point in the CIC when he
(Lewis) stepped down. I recall a large scale
campaign by many of us to persuade him to stay.
He supported Wiltkie in the 1940 campaign. When
the CIC did not go all out in supporting Willkie ,
he decided he'd been repudiated. A number of
us were up night after night to find ways and
means to try to persuade him. But nothing
worked.
He was very cordial about the whole thing;
I remember one night a number of us were sitting
around in one corner of the lobby and Lewis
came over to say "Hello" to all of us; sat down
and regaled us with all kinds of stories from
the coal mines, and some of his jokes. He was
a great raconteur as well as a great speaker.
But he wouldn't even broach the subject of
staying and there was no use broaching it with
him. He had made up his mind. It was a sad
day. A number of us began to feel that things
were going to change. I left the State Council
by the end of 1941 . . .
Ward :
How did that transfer take place?
ed it?
What initiat-
258
LG: Well, I initiated it myself. I felt that the
council was set up; no question about that;
also that councils have a certain inborn limi
tation. The way your councils are set up in
the labor movement, the amount of authority
they have is almost zero.
People keep talking about someone like Heany,
(George Meany, former president of the A F of L);
on a national scale it is true that the A ? of L
heads pre-empted some areas such as foreign
policy. Cn the other hand, the individual
unions within that council have an enormous
amount of autonomy when it comes to their bar
gaining. You can't tamper with their contracts.
You can't walk in -there and tell them what to
do. Cnce in a while it overlaps - when you get
into periods of the War Labor Board or the Pay
Board.
The principal role you play is that of a
fireman; somebody doesn't call in, there's no
fire to answer. The one thing that became
apparent to me is that the scope of this job
was going to be very "limited. I thought I had
had enough of that, and I preferred to go back
and work for the ILWU.
In 1941 I went to Chicago representing the
ILWU, primarily in an attempt to do some or
ganizing there; that was moderately successful.
What we didn't realize was that the v/ar brought
about many other things so that organizing had
a different coloration.
A lot of employers, in order to get workers
during the war, were granting voluntary
increases. Even where they didn't do that the
War Labor Board regulations prevailed and the
increases went through the Board; so World War
II became a time when most of the newly formed
CIO unions got to be entrenched, or grew by
accretion.
Ward: Weren't the employers also aware of the fact
that the CIO had adopted a no-strike policy
during the war?
259
LG: Sure, so there were certain limitations. While
still in the CIO Council we could play a moder
ate role in the pursuit of the war effort. I
recall going back to Washington, D. C. for a
luncheon called by Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of
President Roosevelt). It was around the
business of supporting the war effort. Other
than the time I went down to see Pierre
Salinger (press secretary to President John F.
Kennedy), this was the only time I was in the
White House. But I much preferred to go back
to the ILTJ, which I had really never left.
Ward: I see. And did you approach Harry about it?
LG: Yes, I talked to Harry about the thing and to
Bob Robertson.
Ward: And they were agreeable?
LG: Oh, sure. That was the time Merv Rathborne
became the secretary of the State CIC.
Ward: Yes. Well, now, there was a convention at which
you got elected? When and where?
LG: Ch, that didn't happen until 1943. I was back
in Chicago about six or seven months, maybe a
little more. Terry and I were living with her
sister on the Southside, down near Gary, Indiana.
I recall they were spending the summer out there
while I was staying in town and plugging away
on some of these organizational things. We had
organized a large group of paper, scrap metal
houses, primarily black, and we weren't doing
so badly.
Ward: Well, then at that time you were working as an
organizer for the ILWU?
LG: Right. Then I moved on to New York City. Again,
with the same objective in mind; we still had
hopes that we could put together a national
organization. We had locals all around - New
Orleans, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland. In
New York the warehousemen were in a group called
District 65.
260
LG: We worked out of their "building for a while
and we were hoping that that might "be a natural
alliance. They were part of the Retail. Whole
sale and Distribution Workers. (Samuel) Wolchok
was the man who was the head of that ... He
was really quite hopeless, particularly when it
came to the ILWU. I think he felt that in any
lash-up with the ILWU, he'd never survive, and
he was right. Ee was pretty much a business-
type trade unionist.
Eventually, District 65 split with him, too.
We were also having some jurisdictional hearings
in Washington, D. C. with Wolchok claiming all
the warehouses. I remember going before the
CIO Executive Council and arguing on the ques
tion of warehouse jurisdiction and getting some
pretty good support. Not only the leftwing
unions but Allan Heywood (CIO official)
supported us; John Brophy (also in CIO leader
ship) did; Brophy was very fond of our outfit,
and Kathryn Lewis was very friendly to us. I
used to stop by and talk to her all the time,
so we got certain help from that direction.
It was during the period when I was in New
York that it was obvious that the war effort
had to take precedence. I met a number of
people who were with - what do you call it?
The O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services)?
These were civilians. It was one of the war
organizations, and they were telling me of the
back-up of supplies in Espiritu Santos - places
like the north coast of Africa.
I began to work with Elinor Kahn (a prominent
labor researcher) back there on a war shipping
report; a series of recommendations on how the
whole flow of supplies could be expedited. The
basic idea was that we could take ILWU men, key
guys - naturally we would expect them to be
paid whatever they were paid at present - ship
them to such places and have them supervise the
discharge of the ships.
The idea v/as really implemented by the navy
through the Sea Bees (construction workers);
they became basically the same thing.
261
LG-: In working on this report I also got the
cooperation of Joe Curran (president of the
National Maritime Union). Cf course, I knew
Blackie (Frederick IT,) Myers and some of the
other men of the NMU.
Later on, I took this report down to Wash
ington where we had an office. I believe that
Bjorne Hailing (a prominent longshoreman) or
Harriet Bouslog was in charge. She was an
attorney licensed to practice in Hawaii.
Harriet went back to Hawaii in 1946, several
years later.
In Washington we had a whole series of
meetings on our report. I remember meeting
with Lev/ (Lev/is Douglas of the War Shipping
Administration) Douglas, (James V.) Forrestal,
(Secretary of Defense); (Assistant Secretary
of War John J.) McCloy, I think, of the Army.
Finally we set up a meeting with (Rear)
Admiral (Emory) Land and got copies of the
report to him. He had read them apparently.
Joe Curran was there at that meeting.
Admiral Land's reaction was very quick. He
said, "Maybe you can or can't help on getting
these supplies moving, but basically what you're
trying to do is change all the work standards
in every one of these countries v/here the
shipping is going." He was convinced that was
our only purpose.
Later on, people who wanted to get the ;job
done did begin to recruit a number of our long
shoremen to help out. I remember members like
Sailor HcCloskey from Los Angeles, Phil Sandeen,
then president of Local 10; guys like L. B.
Thomas, Charlie Ross - they were all part of
the navy, or going as civilians to various
places.
Ward: Well, that brings us around to your situation -
you weren't drafted? Cr were you?
LG: No, I wasn't drafted.
Ward: How come?
262
LG: I filed with the draft board just like every
body else did; it was on Polk Street, the North
Beach draft board. I never applied for a
deferment. I got the funny feeling that they
didn't want me any more than I wanted them,
because there was a sort of an ugly confronta
tion. I was called down to the draft board;
they were classifying people and they wanted
to know what I did. I told them I was a trade
unionist and what we were doing.
They said, "That's not essential for the
war effort." "Well, you feel as you please,"
I said, "We feel pretty keenly about the war,
and by the way I don't remember ever seeing
you on any of those picket lines when we refused
to ship scrap iron to Japan." Well, he just
blew. After the hearing, one of the draft
board members walked out with me and said,
"Don't let this guy disturb you; he's got a
kid overseas and got a report he's hurt." So,
nothing came of this.
Ward: You never got a call?
LG: No. Never got a call.
Ward: . Because you were within the age limit?
LG: Oh, yeah. I was within the age limit. This
was in 1941 and I was 31 years old. I wasn't
about to volunteer. True, we had one child by
then. That might have made a difference.
Ward: Okay, that answers that question. Now, after
this organizing and this work on the logistics
problem, there was a convention in '43 in which
you became the secretary of the ILWU, the
secretary-treasurer?
LG: Yes, I came back to the west coast. Gene Paton
was then secretary of the ILWU, but he decided
in 1943 that he was going to enlist in the army.
Gene had a number of problems of his own -
rough problems. Later when we tried to find out
as much as v/e could what had happened to Gene
during the war, some of the guys in his company
that we ran down said that he was almost like a
263
LS: man with a death wish. Paton was one of those
rare characters; he must have been promoted to
sergeant three or four times, or some ether
rank, and then always got busted. I got a call
from Paton when he was stationed out at the
(San Francisco) Presidio for a v/hile. He said,
"I'd like to see you this evening; let's have a
bite to eat and a few drinks." So, we go out,
we're having dinner together, and a few drinks.
So I said, "What time are you due back?
It's after midnight now." He says, "Yeah, I
know that, but I know v/hat I'm doing." I said,
"Y/hat do you mean?" He says, "V, r ell, we have a
guy in charge here; his idea of getting even
with somebody is to send him overseas, and I'm
sick and tired of sitting around here. And if
I can bust the rules one more time, I think
I'll go."
Sure enough, within a week or so he was on
his way. By that time, I think he had been
busted down to private; he v/on a battle-field
commission to captain. Most of the officers in
his company had been killed. Pat was quite a
guy, really a son of the people. Had a wonder
ful flair to him. Understood the rank and file.
A very courageous guy; also had his problems.
He was married to Virginia Woods, who had
been my secretary when I was up here with the
CIC. I had known her in Los Angeles; she
graduated cum laude at UCLA.
Ward: She's a brilliant mathematician.
LG: Yes. She and Pat got hitched; I guess it was
during the war. But Pat also had some drinking
problems.
Ward: Yes, he was a heavy drinker.
LG-: I remember getting him to go out to see a
Doctor (Norman) Ryder - I guess he's considered
to be the best analyst in San Francisco. Pat
said, "What the hell's the good of me seeing
a head-shr inker?" I said, "Look; the way you've
264
LG: been going, you've got to be doing yourself an
awful lot of damage." Ryder was wise enough
to have him get some tests, and Pat was told
that he had some brain damage.
Ryder decided very quickly that one thing
a psychiatrist can't do successfully is treat
alcoholics. Pat's attitude for example . . .
I guess Norman Ryder thought that maybe it
would frighten him into stopping drinking. V/e
were sitting around talking about it and he
said, "Oh, what the hell, so what? Still, with
half a brain, I'm a lot smarter than most of
these employers."
I came back because he decided to go into
the army, and I became secretary. It might
have been an interim appointment just before
he left, and then I was elected in 1943.
265
EFFECTS OF THE WAR '
First Mention Of Hawaii
V/ard: Ckay. How, how long had the Longshore local
been organized in Hawaii?
LG-: The Longshore local in Hawaii initially had
been organized at the end of the 1934 strike
and the beginning of 1935. The first group
that organized down there v/as in the port of
Hilo. Honolulu came later, and the other
outlying ports like Port Allen, now Y/awiliwili.
These were on the island of Kauai; at Kahalui -
that was on the island of Maui.
I think that in addition to the Hilo long
shoremen, there might have been a small group
up at Kukuihaole - that's where they loaded
ships on a high line - bags of sugar. They
might have been a part of the Hilo local. They
had begun to organize in 1935 but they were
having damn little success getting any kind of
a contract from the employers, or recognition.
They had gone through a nasty strike in 1938.
It was the Inter-island strike; the Inlandboat-
men's Union had struck and the employers ran a
shipment to Hilo. The longshoremen and their
wives were down there. It was more of a picnic
atmosphere than anything else, apparently.
They weren't going to work the ship and were
there to dissuade anybody else from doing it.
The local constabulary opened fire on them and
a lot of them were injured.
266
Ward: ITo deaths?
LG: No - nobody got killed. Cne of the guys who
went to work for us later on, Bert Nakano, had
been in that same beef. He had part of his
heel shot off, so that he always walked with a
limp from then on. The leader of that group
was a fine, competent man - Harry Komoko. He
continued with the union until some years later,
when he married a girl who worked for our union
and then they moved to Monterey. She was
determined that Harry (Komoko) get out of the
union scene, which is a little bit sad.
Most of the leaders of the longshoremen in
the '30 T s there, '34 and the early part of '35
were Hawaiian; guys like Freddy Xamahoahoa, who
was built almost like a kamehameha I mean - one
of the strongest men the world had ever -
Ward: Is he the guy who picked you up (pointing to a
nearby wall) in that picture?
LG: No - in that picture? No, that's a woman . . .
Ward: A woman picked you up?
LG: Yeah, Blossom something or other. She's not a
small woman, but she figured it would be a
great gag. Then Benny Big Nose Kahaawini - he
was one of the leaders there.
Ward: Well, these guys - their main problem was try
ing to get wage parity with the west coast,
wasn't it?
LG: Oh, yes. Their main problem at first was just
to get recognition in the contract, and they
didn't have much luck. In Hilo they finally
were well enough established so that they had
some sort of an informal understanding, or may
be even an agreement, but in Honolulu the
employers just opposed organization constantly.
Finally we did win an NLRB election. That
was around 1940 or '41, but never really got
around to getting a contract; the war came
along and the military promptly took over.
267
LG: Martial law was imposed and the people in
charge of martial lav/ on the docks were the
same shipowners.
It wasn't until the tail end of the war that
we really began to rebuild the longshoremen,
though they stayed pretty v/ell together during
the war. Jack Kawano who was president at the
time, served in some sort of a minor capacity
working for the government. He was also doing
part-time farming, so my hunch is that we did
not have too much going for us.
Later on when we began to study the whole
thing, we found the island economy was such
that longshore played a different role than it
does in most parts of the country; at least
it did in terms of the industrial control there
by the Big Five. Longshore is a specific indus
try in the mainland. In some cases however, you
find longshore shipping tied back into bigger
corporations. Reynolds Tobacco runs some big
ships. Some outfits have been tied in to
trucking.
Kav/aii v/as different. In Hawaii, longshore
was really an economic off -shoot of the prin
cipal industries there, pineapple and sugar.
Pineapple and sugar would determine what, if
anything, v/ould be shipped out of there.
Each of the Big Five controlled certain
shipping operations. At the time we organized
Mat son (Navigation Company) it was owned by the
Big Five, which determined Mats on f s policy.
Alexander and Baldwin, for example, controlled
the shipping and the port in Maui - Kahalui -
because A & B is the biggest agency on that
island. American Factors controlled the long-
shoring in Fort Allen and ITawiliwili on the
island of Kauai; they are also a big sugar
producer there.
C. Brewer, the biggest sugar producer on the
island of Hawaii, the Big Island, controls the
v/aterfront there. Castle and Cooke, which at
one time v/as the biggest sugar producer on the
island of Cahu, still own Wailua Sugar Company;
268
LG: they also had another plantation which has since
merged with Oahu Sugar Company. They are the ones
who are the principal stevedoring company in the
port of Honolulu, servicing Matson ships, as well
as other ships.
There is an independent contractor, McCabe
Hamilton and Renney which was a local operation
hanging on "by its teeth, doing primarily army and
navy work and once in a while catching a ship that
did not belong to Matson.
So, after I became secretary, one of the things
I was really interested in was that we had these
locals to which charters had been issued ....
Ward: What do you mean, there had been charters issued?
LG: The Hilo longshoremen had an ILWU charter. The
Oahu longshoremen had an ILWU charter.
Ward: Oh, I see.
LG: And there had been a union in Port Allen. As a
matter of fact, they once had a six or eight
month strike in 1940, a strike which was broken.
, One of the rank and file leaders is still around;
he came from Port Allen. As a matter of fact, the
leader of the Port Allen strike was Jack Hall (who
was to become ILWU regional director) -
Ward: Oh, then he was a natural in the Islands?
LG: Jack Hall had gone to sea. He took part in the
'34 strike. In the '36 strike, he got off the
ship in Honolulu and that's where he settled. He
constantly tried to form a union down there, had
a small paper called the Voice of Labor. Now they
have an Island paper put out by the ILWU called
the Voice, of the ILWU. They were attempting to
organize in places like Port Allen.
Marcus Hyashida is the other guy who was in
Port Allen. I think Jack Hall actually got a
contract in one of the sugar plantations, McBride,
on the island of Kauai. It didn't last very long
but that was a contract, I think, in the name of
the old UCAPAV7A (United Cannery, Agricultural,
Packing and Allied Workers of America) .
269
V/ard: Really? Agricultural workers?
LO: Jack spent all of his time on just one thing -
trying to organize. Jack would recall how he got
by in those days; he would wait until another
seaman v/ould come in, a live one, and get a couple
of bucks. He'd buy meals, or he'd go down and get
some fish and poi, flop almost any place in down
town Honolulu. What did he do about washing his
clothes? Oh, he'd just dive in the ocean, sv/im
around for a while. (laughter) Apparently he led
a pretty rugged life, but not all that unpleasant;
he liked it.
But when the war came along, all that changed.
Organization stopped dead in its tracks. When I
became secretary, one of the things I did was to
start going over the whole structure of the union;
what we had chartered, where it stood. I spent a
lot of time going up and down the coast, visiting
the various ports; generally took the executive
board member of that area along with me, like
Prank Andrews from Clympia, a guy they used to
call "Sull of the foods' 1 .
U.M.
irW
(Interview 11: 25 April, 1978)
More About the California CIO
V/ard: All right, Lou, you want to go back into your days
as secretary with the State CIC Council; the first
thing would be I guess, the North American strike.
LG: There were three things that I did during the time
spent with the State CIO as secretary in addition
to the items I already mentioned, and in addition
to being the head of Labor's IT on-Partisan League,
which sort of automatically came with the title.
One was the role of the California CIO Council
in the North American (aircraft factory) strike.
Another was the attempt to organize the workers in
Hollywood on an industrial basis, led primarily by
270
LG: Jeff Kibre and supported by the State CIO, in an
organization called the USTG - that was the United
Studio Technicians Guild. The third was my appear
ance at the Tolan Committee in reference to the
evacuation of the Japanese from the west coast.
Ward: That was Congressman John Tolan, wasn't it?
LG: John Tolan, yes, I believe he came from the East
Bay. Those hearings took place just prior to the
evacuation, I believe around March 1942. He
conducted those hearings up and down the Coast.
Well, let me try to cover these things one at
a time. The USTG with Jeff Kibre and the North
American strike were pretty much in the same time
frame. The USTG was initiated by Jeff somewhere
around 1938 or the early part of 1939. It was an
attempt to use the National Labor Relations Board
for an industrial election in the studios.
We helped support it and put some money into
the thing; also Jeff managed to get a considerable
amount of help from rank and filers and people
around Hollywood. There was still a strong
progressive group around Hollywood. Remember, the
studios were broken up into dozens of craft unions.
My father worked in the studios, a member of the
Carpenters. One of my brothers, Sam, worked in
the labs there, particularly the Pox Technicolor
lab; I think he was a member of the IATSE,
(International Association of Theatrical and Stage
Employees). A brother-in-law, John Vigoreaux,
married to my sister, worked in Hollywood, primar
ily as a painter. He belonged to still a separate
local. I had another brother, Saul, who is dead
now; he had also worked around the studios. All
of them, of course, were of a progressive bent.
One of the things that was most obvious was that
some sort of an industrial union in Hollywood would
make a great deal more sense than the crazy craft
structure and pecking order they had there. Jeff
put together a perfectly sound approach to the
issue. He understood the nature of the craft
unions and the importance of getting a broad cross-
section of representation.
271
LG: He had a number of people who ranged all the v/ay
from electricians to grips to carpenters. Cne of
the groups there was under progressive direction
and supported the USTG; that was Herb Sorrell with
the Painters' Union. It was during that campaign
that the IATSE suddenly came to life again; it is
made up of a whole series of craft organizations.
They have the motion picture operators in San
Francisco -
Ward: They were a scandal-ridden union too, weren't they?
LG: The union had been taken over by two men, one of
them named Willie Bioff and the other by the name
of Brown. The man with the muscle who really ran
the thing was Willie Bioff. Later on it was found
he had all kinds of connections with mobsters in
Chicago and that area.
We're skipping a little bit, but what finally
happened was that Bioff made a deal with Joe
Schenck (a motion picture mogul). I forget which
of the large studios he was mixed up with, whether
it was Paramount ....
Ward: MGM (Ketro-Goldwyn-Hayer) , I think.
LG: HGM, yes. Joe Schenck did time on that. It was
a back door deal made by Schenck v/ith Bioff and
Brown to bring the IATS15 back in; Hollywood was
pretty well disorganized from the depression time
on.
The sentiment around Hollywood was for a union,
no question about that; but as to whether the IATSE,
with its craft appeal, would have the strength or
not was another thing. I am still convinced to
this day that had there been a completely fair
shake on the election, I think that the USTG would
have v/on.
Ward: Would that have been industry-wide or studio by
studio?
LG: I think it was industry-v/ide. The election, however,
was held at the old Gilmore Stadium. I did not
know until afterwards that the Stadium was not
within the city of Los Angeles. It was part of the
272
LG: county, with some sort of a different relationship
towards the police force. I am convinced that the
election was held there under pressure from the
employers and from the IATSE.
That's where a lot of heavy-handed guys were
used, within a block, a half a block, of the
election polls. Some of the good guys were
literally dumped. My brother, Sam, got beaten up
during that election.
This was Bioff's technique. Bioff later wound
up in Las Vegas, I believe. Some years later he
stepped on the starter of his car, and they
haven't found him or any part of the car since.
So, USTG was dumped - they got beaten in the
election.
Ward: Did you have anything to do with Walt Disney?
LG: No, that was later on; you're thinking of ...
Ward: The strike in '41.
LG: There was a strike later on by the cartoonists -
they had a Cartoonists' Guild. There was a Screen
Actors' Guild, Screen Writers' Guild, Screen
Directors' - there were a lot of guilds, as
distinguished from unions. Jeff's idea was that
the whole pecking order in Hollywood was such that
people thought of themselves as guildsmen rather
than trade unionists.
I don't believe the Cartoonists were part of
the USTG, but they were a progressive union. They
were led by some awfully good people. Disney had
really put the whole cartoon business on a chain
line; it was no different than a belt line in an
automobile plan.
The way the thing was broken down, photographing
a cartoon was simply going over all these drawings,
done by the cartoonists. It was a belt line busi
ness. Disney broke their back, you remember.
Ward: What did you do to help the USTG?
273
LG: We helped financially, met with some people I
still knew from the old days. I helped with some
of the literature, but primarily feeding a few
bucks in there, not a great deal.
V. r ard: There wasn't that much money?
LG-: Not much money; you rarely saw it. A lot of
things were "do it yourself". Nobody was terribly
upset if you wrote up a leaflet, typed up the
stencil, did the mimeographing, and then took it
out and distributed it the next morning.
Not too different from what had happened in
Warehouse. We thought it was an enormous step
forward when we managed to hire a part-time
stenographer. We'd always find people who could
do things. I recall the IATSS putting out some
literature to the effect that the USTG was being
supported by the CIO and that the Secretary of the
State CIC, myself, was in L.A. living in a second
class hotel, the Royal Palms. To the IATSE, the
important thing there was the second class hotel.
That's the way they thought.
That election failed. The net result, while
some of it was bad in the sense of bringing guys
like Bioff and Brown into the picture, was that
the unions were revived. My family was mixed up
in the USTG. People like my brother supported it
ardently; there was none of the family blacklisted
at that time.
Later on in the 40s you had the big movement
led by Herb Sorrell, an attempt to put together
the motion picture crafts around a progressive
program. When those strikes were broken you began
to see the beginning of a real blacklist around
Hollywood which, by the way, is one of the reasons
why one of my brothers, Sam, takes the name of
Gilbert. He was blacklisted out of Hollywood;
this was around '46 - '47 ....
Ward: Sam? Saul took the name of Gilbert -
LG: Saul and Sam took the name Gilbert - they both
did - because of the blacklisting in the studios.
Sam had to start from scratch. Here he was a hell
of a good technician. He had become head of the
night lab at 7ox Technicolor, pretty responsible job,
274
LG-: He had gone with my dad to the Soviet Union in
1937 or thereabouts. Around 1936, my dad and my
brother were offered jobs in the Soviet Union,
where they were setting up their motion picture
industry. They wanted them there primarily in
conjunction with set construction, something in
which my dad was really good. My brother went
along with him and they spent approximately a year
there under regular contract with the Soviet
government; monthly checks to support the family.
During the period they were there my sister
visited them. She was over in Prance and spent
a short time in the Soviet Union. Incidentally,
to this day Sam speaks good Russian. He got to be
just as good as my father.
As a matter of fact, when there was a delega
tion of Russians that came by the International
(ILWU office) three or four months ago my brother
happened to be up here and he came by; he v/as just
chattering away with them in Russian. He was
interested in getting a UCLA basketball team to
visit the Soviet Union for some exhibition games.
This was just recently. As a matter of fact, he
and my sister-in-law, Rose, chaperoned a U. S.
volleyball team over to Poland a couple of years
ago.
Ward: Rose would be Sam's wife?
LG: Yes. His first wife, Punny, died of cancer some
years ago. Sam and Rose sponsored this girls'
volleyball team and they came back with some rather
amusing stories. Apparently, the girls did fairly
well except that they played some of the teams
there which were actually slightly higher grade;
they were something closer to college.
This v/as a high school team, so that they didn't
fare so well. My brother complained that the
competition at least should have been on approxi
mately the same level. He told a rather humorous
story about an incident in Poland. Apparently,
some guy had too much to drink and was at the same
hotel where these girls were staying. He decided
that he was in love with some girl from the volley
ball team and he followed her and tried to break
into the room where this girl was staying.
275
LG: Finally, the gals got together and they didn't
hurt him physically, but they put him down and
said, "Let's teach him a lesson." They stripped
him of all his clothes, and there he was, bare-
assed naked in the corridor of the hotel.
The security guard came up and wanted to file
charges and haul the guy off to prison. He was
terribly disturbed; you just don't do this to
foreign visitors, you don't act this way. The
girls told the guard, "Look, leave him alone.
He's been punished enough."
Sam was trying to do some of the same thing
in the way of a college basketball team; they
had been having a lot of these preliminaries to
the Olympics. That was the reason he was up here
and was talking to some of the people who were
part of this Russian delegation.
Anyway, the USTG- just didn't make it. I had
met Jeff at UCLA, but he was in a completely
different circle of people than many of us. Ke
v/as very active on the school paper and he did all
the sports - was one of the editors of the paper.
He was considered a bit of a wheel around campus.
I might mention that Jeff and his family had
been attached to the studios for many years, too.
They used to make what are called "miniatures".
Yflien you see one of these big airplane disasters,
like the Hindenburg going up in flames, these are
done in miniature; when they are photographed,
they look big and real.
Ward: They were technicians, then.
LG: Technicians; all these miniatures had to be built
according to scale, painstaking and time-consuming
work, highly skilled. So, this family had a long
history of connections with the motion picture
industry, just the way mine did.
But at UCLA he was not any part of this left-
wing circle of youngsters. But after he got
started with the USTG, with the experience he pick
ed up there, he decided to stay with the trade
union movement.
276
LG-: Ee later became head of the United Fishermen's
Union; the awesome power of the U. S. government
put that union out of business by declaring the
efforts on the part of the fishermen to negotiate
a decent price for their catch, instead of being
taken to the cleaners by people like Paladini
(A. Paladini Seafood Company) and others, was a
conspiracy in restraint of trade; that they were
price-fixing.
Thurgood Marshall (prosecuting for the U. S.
Justice Department) pressed the charges against
them and the great victory he won was to destroy
this little union trying to get a couple of cents
for their days out there on the high seas. The
places where the union held on was in those areas
where you had the larger fishing boats like the
tuna fleet; there the men worked on shares and you
could negotiate the question of shares, rather
than the price of fish.
The North American strike took place around
mid-1941.
Ward: Early June, '41.
LG-: That's about right, I guess. The situation by
that time internationally was beginning to change.
The U.S. was already into making heavy supplies
for the British and I think 'we were supporting
some of the armies in exile, like the French, as
well. The whole posture of the administration -
they didn't call them "war plants", they were
"defense plants". Then, there were groups work
ing out of London, like the Dutch seamen.
Ward: Poles?
LG: Yes, people who had not gone along v/ith the capi
tulation of Leopold (King of Belgium). The
feeling on the part of most progressives, at least
when the war broke, was that in many ways this was
just another imperialist war. Things people like
myself were very conscious of were efforts on the
part of the Soviet Union, and Litvinoff particul-
arily, to set up collective security pacts;
attempts to reach agreement with the French and
the British to try to stop Hitler before the wave
really took over.
277
LG: We all remember Chamberlain and "peace in our
time." There was also the feeling that the
Russians were left with no alternative. I'll
admit that things like the Ribbentrop-Molotov
agreement were awfully hard to handle, although
there again it fell within the same set of con
clusions; all the efforts on the part of the
major powers - particularly the British, who
dominated foreign policy, at least in the European
end of things - were directed towards appeasement;
doing nothing to stop Hitler.
It didn't in any way diminish our feelings
about Hitler; everything from the boycott of Nazi
goods; the picket line around the Karlsruhe when
it visited in San Francisco; the resolutions that
had been adopted against Hitler, the whole feeling
we had about fascism.
In retrospect, I think we over-emphasized some
of these developments and failed to see the broad
er picture, particularly the extent of Hitler's
appetite. Basically I think where we were mis
taken was where we failed to measure certain deep-
seated democratic feelings in countries like
England, which were simply not going to break in
a situation like that.
When the North American strike broke, I remember
being in San Francisco and getting a call on the
thing. It hit the headlines very quickly; Roosevelt
called the army out against the strikers.
I remember heading down there almost at once
and meeting with Dick Frankenstein; he was one of
the officers in the United Automobile Workers. At
that time I think he was in charge of the Aircraft
Division; he was an effective guy. He had been a
side-kick of Walter Reuther (president of the UAW
at that time) for many years; v/as one of the guys
who was beaten up by Henry Ford's (founder of the
Ford Motor Company) goons.
Frankstein was a tough egg though, a strong guy
and had a lot of guts. He was at the Biltmore
Hotel (in Los Angeles), and I went by to see him.
First thing I did v/as to make it plain to him -
on that score I v/as also relaying Harry's message -
278
LG: that we couldn't see the strike as a winner; any
attempt to take on the U. S. Army was just insane,
wouldn't work and ought to be called off. The
main issue there was an attempt to get something
like two-bits an hour increase in pay -
Ward: They v/ere getting 50 cents and were asking for
75 cents.
LG: That was probably the minimum wage.
Ward: Yes, it v/as.
LG: Anyway, the session with Frankenstein was whole
some. Cn the one hand he v/as very much in support
of the workers; on the other hand, as a trade
unionist he knew perfectly well that they v/ere
heading for disaster. It would be the kind of
strike that v/ould completely unravel; and if you
let the thing unravel to that degree, then you
would take another risk, namely, that a group of
guys who were going to hang out to the end v/ould
be the ones to be victimized.
They are the best trade unionists,
