SF Bay Area, 1960–’63

After crashing overnight at a rustic motel in Gilroy on the way north, I pulled into San Francisco’s working class Mission District around noon the next day. I registered into the Vermont Hotel, a clean blue-collar residential hotel with kitchen privileges. It was on Valencia Street just east of 16th Street, across the street from the large Operating Engineers Union Local #3 hiring hall. It would be my home for the next few weeks before I found a more permanent abode. The Vermont Hotel was the favorite jumping off place for these heavy equipment operators waiting for their next hire. One of these Local #3 guys tipped me off to a nearby parking lot that had cheap monthly rates a couple of blocks away. The union let me use its parking lot until I could rent my own space and unload my gear into my room.

Next day I took the Muni bus downtown to the Typographical Union No. 21’s headquarters on Market and Third Streets, with Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner daily newspaper on the opposite corner. “The Monarch of the Dailies,” the Hearst family proudly called this flagship of the fleet of its vast newspaper chain. As I handed my travelling card the Typo Union 21 youthful Secretary-Treasurer Gregor Bachich, he was delighted to see my Finnish last name. Greg, a second generation progeny of Croatian immigrant stock in Northern Minnesota, told me his best high school buddies were Finnish lads growing up on the Mesabi Range. We hit it off splendidly. As he was writing up my Local 21 working card. I asked where was the best newspaper shop to get work as a proofreader. He said that the Wall Street Journal, which then had a newspaper plant further uptown on Market, was looking for a proofreader. While I learned later that I could have gotten on as a substitute immediately at the Examiner next door, I walked slowly uptown to ward the WSJ taking in the colorful sights of Market Street, “that great street,” as recorded in song.

As I passed Fifth Street I looked to my left and a block away I noticed the San Francisco Chronicle building, the Examiner’s rival morning daily in the City. (The afternoon daily was Scripts-Howard’s News-Call-Bulletin, on nearby Howard Street, a block further down 5th, halfway between 4th and 5th Streets.) I wasn’t that anxious to work at the WSJ, anyway, the leading financial organ of USA’s corporate capitalist class. So I thought I’d go down to the Chronicle first for a look-see. Upon arriving in its vast, humming composing room I met with Ed Musso, acting day chairman (shop steward in most unions), and asked him about proofroom work and he responded, “You wanna work tonight?” Hell, yes, I thought! So I handed Ed my working card and he made up a slip writing my name on it which he stuck in the bottom of the proof room priority list on the union slipboard as the bottom “sub” or substitute. “The night chairman will see you at the 8:30 PM show-up time and send you to the proofroom. In a couple of days the bookkeeper will come by, give you a W-2 form and ask for your vital stats for the payroll.” (According to the ITU’s General Laws no physical was required in going to work, and your competency was established on the first shift by the departmental sub-foreman on observing your work at shift’s end. That’s the way it was in the old days of the trade on union newspapers where the chairman exercised considerable power on the shop floor until computerization destroyed our trade as we’d known it for a century in the United States. Incidentally, in the ITU the shop floor of the composing room was called a “chapel,” which dates back hundreds of years to England where unions were outlawed as criminal organizations and printers had to organize as semi-religious associations in order to act in concert for their needs.)

Show-up arrived that night and off into the proofroom I went. We were paired off in twos, especially on ads that needed to be gone over twice on the first reading. Where the word “shirts” appeared in an ad or news story so the word “shit” or “shits” wouldn’t appear in the paper as it hit the streets. I worked with night shift acting head proofreader Bob Danenhower and had no problem in proving my competency. And so it went night after night as I got to know my fellow Chapel members. Gary M. Samson was our chief elected Chapel Chairman, a Russian Jew who was born in Shangahi, and Art Stagliano, a New York City Italian was Chapel Secretary who ranked second in the chapel’s union hierarchy as the only elected officers, as the other assistant chairmen were appointed to serve on the different shifts by either Gary or Stag,

MY FIRST MEETING OF ITU LOCAL 21

The first Sunday after starting work, a special union meeting was held to discuss and vote on a new master contract for the Local’s newspaper branch at the San Francisco Labor Temple on Mission Street. I went as this was a good way to become familiar with my new Local in action. The large auditorium was packed and chaired by President Sterling Rounds of the Union’s Independent Party which then controlled the Local. Main problem was that Rounds was stinking drunk, could barely stand at the mike and was almost totally incoherent. What kind of kettle of soup have I walked into? Almost immediately, Lou Mendieta, a young journeyman from the Examiner Chapel and a law student, took the floor mike and moved that the assembly continue to meet as a “committee of the whole,” a parliamentary maneuver to remove the president as the chair of the contract meeting. It was immediately seconded and overwhelmingly approved by the body. Almost unanimously elected to chair the rest of the meeting was “Tex” Ellis, a prominent Examiner chapel member and an astute parliamentarian. President Rounds slumped down in his chair on the stage and soon fell asleep for almost the remainder of the meeting. The rest of the meeting proceeded smoothly with a high level of intelligent give and take debate ensuing over the contract proposal, copies of which were available to all as we had entered the hall. This kind of discussion was what I had always envisioned as a standard in a democratic union. The contract received majority approval in a secret ballot and my initial view of things was amended for the better at the meeting’s conclusion, except for the incompetence of the local union’s then-top leadership.

BAY AREA SP LOCALS

I was only able to attend one meeting of the newly-constituted San Francisco SP Local at Don and Jean Thomas’s apartment before I moved briefly to Marin. I recall Jim Petras, an expert on Latin American left radicalism was the featured speaker. There was also an SP branch of elderly women in the City that had been around for decades holding the fort. These included Erma Arnstein, Lilian Goodman, and Celia Alperth who had their own afternoon tea functions. I always got along great with them. Living briefly in San Rafael, I got to know Hank Braun, the enthusiast for Pope John XXIII for his pro-socialist thinking, and his spouse and Bruce Sloan, who during the great Flint sit-down strike of 1936 was an 18-year-old SP member who was a hot shot mimeograph operator for the burgeoning auto workers’ local. Bruce was now an independent landscape architect. While I was in Marin that small Local’s main activity was a weekend afternoon public meeting for Norman Thomas at a hall on Mill Valley’s Miller Avenue which I had the chance to attend. Since I mostly worked nights I had practically no night life in Marin so I did a lot of daytime hiking in the county’s beautiful hills and on my occasional night off I’d hang around a great soup joint called The Kettle on downtown Sausalito’s Bridgeway. Next door was the swinging Patterson’s Bar but I had been on the wagon for about eight months and would just stop there to nurse a 7-Up and people-watch. This all got boring after awhile and I jumped across the Bay to Berkeley where the SP Local was its liveliest around the exciting Cal campus. And Berkeley still then had a sizeable Finntown with two halls, the oldest then the pro-CP Tenth Street Hall and Brotherhood Hall on Chestnut owned by the Kaleva mutual benefit society lodge where the Berkeley Finn IWW and Socialist Finn groups also met.

LIFE IN BERKELEY

My first apartment in the East Bay was on Kains Avenue near Gilman in West Berkeley. I was excited with this move and one of my initial actions was to join the Berkeley Coop grocery at 1414 University and its credit union at that address of which I became a regular patron. There was also a Co-op gas station and garage around the corner at Sacramento and University. A Minnesota Finn Eugene Mannila was the general manager of the Co-op market chain, and Leonard Erkkila managed the meat department at 1414 University. Eddie Hagelberg, formerly of Fitchburg, MA, came West to manage the Co-op hardware and variety store across the parking lot at the original market at 1414. The large Finnish population in Berkeley was among its founding members and loyal patrons. The East Bay SP Local was quite sizeable and many were active members of the Coop which at the height of its 50-year existence was the largest consumer coop in the United States. I immediately pegged into the Labor Committee of the Coop. It was a voluntary committee of members who served as something of a watchdog on boycotted goods that might appear on the shelves of its stores. A Palmolive soap factory functioned on the corner of Ashby and San Pablo in Berkeley was on the boycott list due to a labor dispute. So we urged management to remove it off co-op shelves. One of the Labor Committee volunteers mentioned some earlier unfair goods case when they approached General Manager Gene Mannila about the issue he said: “You want me to yank ‘em?” Which he did. Problem was that the Co-op also had conservative business-oriented members who objected that this violated “consumer freedom of choice.” Let the patron decide whether s/he wants to buy the brands in question. So that’s what happened except management agreed to put a sign by the items saying these were subject to a labor dispute. So let a customer’s conscience be their guide! That’s what happened to Palmolive-Peet products and later a boycott of Washington State apples arose on which our committee raised the issue. Of course, we could leaflet information about such boycotts in the stores’ parking lots. Comrade Anne Draper was a member of our committee, which also included some CP labor activists. She was great to work with!

EAST BAY SP LOCAL ACTIVITY

In 1960, East Bay Local rented a small office on the ground floor of an apartment building on California Street at University. It held its membership meetings there, housing its files, and bundles of the national SP newspaper “New America” for distribution. Michael Harrington was its first editor, soon to be succeeded by Paul Feldman, a Realignment Shachtmanite. All political currents of the Local were still meeting on the same roof when I joined the Local. But soon political divisions began to appear. The Realignment people became a de facto branch of the Local that was centered around Bogdan and Betsy Denitch’s house on Dwight at Telegraph and focussed on operating in the Democratic Party. The Draperite revolutionary Third Camp socialist group met at Hal and Anne’s place. Of course, this tendency had no use for Democratic Party politics but was active in labor and student rights issues on campus. Before the advent of the Cesar Chavez farm worker movement, the AFL had established the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC which caught on with the Filipino farm workers. Anne Draper provided her formidable skills to help out, and Berkeley peace activist and SPer Henry (Hank) Anderson was hired by AWOC as a district organizer. Hal Draper led classes in Marxism and wrote a pamphlet that inspired an incipient Free Speech movement on the campus called; “Berkeley, The New Student Revolt (1965)” and through YPSL the highly influential “Two Souls of Socialism” (1965), which argues for socialism from below instead of from the top down. This branch included Third Camp researchers and scholars like Arthur Lipow and Ernie Haberkern. Another branch included pacifists attracted by the writings of Professor Mulford Sibley and Erich Fromm which included John Ohliger and Hank Anderson.

My own Oakland-Berkeley Branch included a catch-all SP-type more non-hard line ideological sorts like Barbara Lucas, a Norman Thomas admirer; Ted Alpen; Jim Gallagher, a former maverick young ISLer who was working as a city planner in South San Francisco; Teamster reformer Merle Bigenho from Richmond; and former ISLers Stan Weir and Charlie and Helen Shain who were also close to the Draper branch, and were floaters in the Local. So our California Street office soon closed its doors. I had a talk with Barney Cohen, a Realignment advocate, and we agreed it was better for divisions to evolve into branches within the Local rather than leave the SP to form more ineffectual radical sects and splinter groups. While we still had the office, my old SP comrade from LA, Bruce Aubry, now a Cal undergraduate, would get together with me at the office to keep it tidy and organized during our spare time during the day and chat.

Bruce was excited about applying for a Fullbright scholarship to spend his junior year at laborite Ruskin college at Oxford University like National Secretary Irwin Suall had done earlier. (In which pursuit he eventually succeeded.) Bruce also recommended a book by Richard Drinnon, a UC professor who he said was an SP member and had just published a single volume biography of American anarchist icon Emma Goldman: “Rebel in Paradise,” Picking it up, it opened up my interest in the anarchist movement I hadn’t studied that much about earlier. This led me to read her autobiography later “Living My Life” (1931) “My Disillusionment with Russia” (1923) that broadened my own political horizons on libertarian socialism which have been part of my political and social ethos ever since. So today I feel comfortable in being called either a “social anarchist” as well as “libertarian socialist.” I don’t believe in revolutionary violence nor the “propaganda of the deed” by killing off individual tyrants of the old order to bring about social revolution, as did Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and her lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman (1870–1936) as very young anarchists which led to Berkman’s misfired attempt to kill steel magnate Henry Frick during the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 in Pennsylvania, a method they themselves rejected after seeing its folly. Noble ends merit noble means. I reject Hal Draper’s condemnation of anarchism in his “Two Souls of Socialism” based heavily on Michael Bakunin’s conspiratorial top-down vanguardism to attain revolutionary aims which I would also ascribe to Bolshevik vanguardism that helped destroy the liberatory possibilities of the Russian Revolution.

I’ve also enjoyed Berkman’s diary “The Bolshevik Myth (1920–‘22) which I’ve read in his original handwriting at the Social History Archives in Amsterdam based on his and Goldman’s bitter observations of Soviet Communism during their Russian exile. His “ABC’s of Communist Anarchism” (1929) establishes the basic foundation of anarchist collectivism. Another libertarian communist writer I followed up on during the 1960s was Victor Serge (1890–1947) born of Russian revolutionary parents in Belgian exile who started out as a young anarchist who spent jail time for bank robbery in Paris but whose linguistic and writing talents gained him work as an apparatchik in the Bolshevik regime when he moved to Russia in 1919. His libertarian instincts soon made him part of the Left Opposition even during Lenin’s life and particularly during Stalin’s increasingly murderous tyranny. “The Case of Comrade Tulyalev” was an early novel that comes to mind as well as his insurrectionary poetry, Managing to escape the USSR, he lived in France until he ended up leaving with his young son on the last ship to depart Marseilles for Mexico as the Petain fascistic puppet government tightened its grip in Nazi-occupied France. He lived in extreme poverty in Mexico to his death. I’ve been reading his voluminous “Memoirs of a Revolutionary” recently chapter by chapter during my browsing expeditions at Moe’s Bookstore near the UCB Campus. I highly recommend reading Serge’s Memoirs. Brilliant preface by writer Adam Hochschild and translator’s introduction by Peter Sedgwick.

CORE VICTORY AT HINK’S DEPARTMENT STORE

My upstairs neighbors on Kains Avenue were a young interracial couple, a white guy and black wife with a small child. The women whose name I’ve forgotten was the chairperson of the Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. At that time there was a weekly Saturday picket at Hink’s Department store on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley because of the store’s unwillingness to hire black sales personnel. So I gladly joined in the demonstrations. In those days there were still department stores in the downtown districts of medium size California cities. Since it was the raging age of the automobile, due to insufficiency of downtown parking, this accelerated a move of such stores into the growing trend toward outlying shopping malls. In Berkeley’s case they moved to huge parking malls built in El Cerrito, Emeryville and Hilltop Mall in San Pablo. We outside street-pickets carried signs and distributed leaflets outside of Hink’s while trained CORE activists worked the inside to test hiring practices. It took a few weeks but Hink’s finally capitulated and began hiring racial minority salespeople.

I TRANSFER TO AD ALLEY

I continued to proofread at the Chronicle, bouncing back and forth as a substitute and regular situation holder on the priority (seniority) list on the low end of the totem pole as travelling printers came and went from shop to shop around the country as Typo Union men and women. Unless they settled down to work permanently in one shop or local, they were often called “tramp printers,” frequently colorful characters and story tellers about the trade. One day during the Fall of 1960 Chapel Secretary Arthur (Stag) Stagliano, whose many years of priority at The Chronicle were as an ads and floor man, made me a proposition. I had gotten to know him well as we were basically on the same socialist wave length. He had been in the SWP while working in Seattle and had gotten to know fellow ITU printer Charlie Curtiss in LA through the Trotskyist pipeline. Charlie we know had opted about 1951 to the SP and Stag had dropped out of the SWP along the line for its rigid sectarianism. He remained an independent Marxist maintaining a clear class analysis in politics. Stag proposed I pull my slip from the proofroom and slug up on the ad floor as I had told him about my background as a hot metal hand printer. My priority status in the proofroom was negligible and starting at the bottom of the ad room priority list would be no sacrifice at this stage. The work would be more interesting than sitting full time on my duff in the proofroom and I’d be able to develop my handwork skill set further as I went along. But I had to work one adroom shift to establish my basic competency. So he asked fellow Italian Jack Dante, the ad skipper on his shift, whether he’d give me a trial run. Jack agreed and I came through his observations unblemished. So now my priority was as an ad man.

I enjoyed working in the Chronicle composing room. We worked a seven hour shift and a 35-hour week. The second shift paid a dollar more than days. The “lobster” (graveyard) shift paid the same premium as nights and constituted a 6-hour day and 30-hour week. The Chronicle Chapel was considered the most militant unit in Local 21. with a core of high-spirited younger men and women who took no guff from the foreman though doing their job with professional competency. On daily newspapers meeting production deadlines was all-important and as unionists we were all aware of it, although we worked at a reasonable ordinary pace to achieve them. Once the edition went to press we’d take our coffee and smoke break at our own pace without being rushed. In effect, we enjoyed considerable control over our work situation at least at the Chronicle Chapel.

One of the reasons for our conditions was a provision then in ITU General Laws which gave chapel members a measure of control over the foreman’s discharge of a fellow member. If the lead foreman fired one of us, that worker had the right to appeal the discharge at a special chapel meeting on company time. The chapel members had the right to either reject or sustain the discharge following the foreman’s and appellant’s remarks along with those of witnesses or other members who spoke on the case. Unless the foreman made a convincing case, the member was most often reinstated on a secret ballot of chapel members present at the meeting. Either party had the right to appeal the outcome to the Executive Committee of the Union Local. After the EC’s hearing, it would make its recommendation to the next regular local membership meeting for discussion and decision, with further appeals possible to the Executive Committee of the International Union, with a final appeal to the National Convention of the International Typographical Union, which I recall reading about only once. Usually, the issue would be resolved at the chapel or local union level. This job protection law was the closest I ever saw to workers’ control in capitalist industry. As the union’s power continued to decline with the continuing advent of the computerized technology. Local 21 traded off this ITU General Law in contract negotiations for increased financial benefits which enhanced management control over shop conditions at the expense of ours. We had a rank and file committee that fought against this sale of our General Law on discharges and even held up the adoption of a newspaper contract for several months before the International intervened to jam it down our throats about 1968. As the late socialist militant Stan Weir used to say: “If technological change doesn’t benefit the workers, it’s not progress.” In our case it wiped out an entire trade in the newspaper industry finally.

MEXICAN HOLIDAY

By the end of the year 1960 I had saved enough money to take off a month or so from work to travel to the interior of Mexico for a holiday. While living in Southern California I had familiarized myself with the border towns of Tijuana, Mexicali and San Luis Rio Colorado, as well as the fishing and resort town of Ensenada in Baja California, bar-hopping and cavorting with their cute hostesses . But the prospect of metropolitan life in places like Mexico City and Guadalajara stirred my adventurous spirit. So in early January 1961 I turned my slip on the chapel board to show I wouldn’t be available for work until I re-activated my slip and at the same time preserving my priority while away. I rode to San Ysidro at the US-Mexican border by Greyhound bus and crossed on foot into Tijuana. I’d had the foresight to buy Arthur Frommer’s guidebook: “Mexico on Five Dollars a Day,” which was possible in those days. So I purchased a through ticket on the first-class express bus which I remember as being called the Copa de Oro bus line. It was a long tiring ride day and night, with stops in cities along the way, with breaks for lunch. periodically. But it was a spectacular ride for the scenery, and as I was the only American abroad, I had a chance to practice the little Spanish I’d picked up in introductory courses in the spoken language during past couple of years. It was rough going but I got along well with my fellow pasajeros.

We got into Mexico City in the middle of the night and I checked into a modest but neat downtown hotel recommended in Frommer’s book. This was to be my domicile for my stay in the city. Breakfasts I’d eat at Sanborn’s Restaurant by practicing my Spanish: “Jugo de naranja, huevos revueltos, pan tostada, y café Negro, pour favor.” I visited notable sites in the city, the famous anthropological museum. then located near the Zocalo downtown, the Autonomous University of Mexico with its magnificent architecture and I also saw a lively student protest demonstration on its vast campus. Artwork around the city reflected the pervasive influence of the revolutionary painters and muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco. Also the haunting self-portraits of Frida Kahlo, Rivera’s beautiful wife. Another visit was to a wax museum near the Zocalo which had waxen statues of great heroes of the Mexican Revolution and other national luminaries. Sticking out like a sore thumb was a forlorn statue of Joseph Stalin, for which there was an inscription: “Un hombre genial.” Nothing genial about one of history’s greatest mass murderers!

I met a cute young bar hostess at a night club with whom I spent several days and evenings with some love trysts in commercial saunas who I’ll call Ana, as I’ve forgotten her name. I treated her to meals and we travelled around the city as a couple, trying to communicate in Spanish. We went to the bullfights together, where she fell asleep on my shoulder, bored with the whole bloody spectacle. I was appalled with the cruelty of the “sport” and was disgusted at the final kill. Never again in this life! Ana was a kindly, compassionate person as once when we saw a ragged Indian beggar, mother with an infant bundled up in her arms, she asked me for some pesos to give the mendicant for milk for her baby, which I was glad to do.. Ana said she came from Guadalajara, and as I told her I would be travelling there next she said she’d meet me there and gave me a street address where she’d be staying. She also asked me for some money for a valise for the trip to her hometown. I was fond of her and did so.

GUADALAJARA

I could have stayed longer in Mexico City, but it was time to head northward. So I took a bus to Guadalajara and checked into another budget hotel recommended by Frommer. I was disappointed but not surprised when I checked out the address that Ana had given me and found only a rubble-filled vacant lot. Been stood up before and after. Only two things stand out in my memory of Guadalajara. One was the Jalisco goat meat specialties served in restaurants, Jalisco being the Mexican state of which this city was capital. Birria, their goat meat stew, was delicious! The other occasion was my meeting with students from the city’s university one evening in their student union. It was a special social evening set aside for Mexican students to meet with English-speaking visitors to practice our respective languages with each other. They were a bright, friendly lot, both men and women, and I dare say their English was ten times better than my sorry Spanish. They asked about my further travel plans, and suggested I visit the beach city of Puerto Vallarta along the Jalisco Coast. That sounded good to me as I had no other specific plans. So the next day or so I bought a ticket on a second class bus on the overnight trip to “Vallarta,” as the locals call it. There was only one second-class bus a day that traversed that route, with peasants, their families and workers its primary clientele.

ON THE ROAD TO VALLARTA

The rustic second class bus ride to Puerto Vallarta was the most adventurous part of my whole Mexican vacation. The route had once been a mule path to the coast but by 1956 a torturous dirt road had been completed doable for sturdy motorized vehicular traffic. The bus was crowded with me the only gringo aboard. There were peasant women and children with many women carrying open buckets brimming with risen dough going shorter distances. Men probably working in Guadalajara were visiting their families in hamlets in the Jalisco Sierras or seeking employment in Puerto Vallarta or Moscata along the way. A few dozen live chickens were attached by a leg to baggage railings along the roof. Next to me sat the owner of a fighting cock on his lap heading for some village for combat and betting possibilities. He even tried to sell me the rooster. We negotiated treacherous mountain roads with switchbacks so sharp that the teenage boy who helped the driver frequently had to guide the bus from the road, banging on its side to steer it round sharp switchbacks, back and forth, inch by inch, so our vehicle wouldn’t plunge into a gorge several hundred feet deep. Scary to say the least.

The bus carried spare parts as there were no repair garages along the way so the driver and the boy had to double as mechanics. The bus carried an extra axle which had to be attached at one point when the original broke. Occasionally, there was a rest stop at a cluster of huts which included a tortilla, taco, and sandwich stand plus warm soda pop one could buy for lunches, although the resourceful country folk carried their own victuals from the start of the trip. There were no toilets on the bus. so at occasional pit stops passengers would disappear behind a desert hillock to do their biological duty on the bare ground. The only excuse for wipes were napkins or other bits of paper that people had brought with them. There was no water for a handwash unless you had a canteen of your own. At one point where there was a primitive latrine, an elderly man of maybe a hundred tried to sell us small cut scraps from newspapers held in place on the ground by stones, for a few centavos. With only two buses travelling either way during the day, not much of a way to a earn a living.

At one switchback we needed to cross a river with a wooden bridge not strong enough to bear the weight of the bus with its passengers on board. So all of us got off and walked across the bridge with our baggage and waited for the bus to follow. The driver creepy-crawled his way across the bridge with the boy walking alongside to give him guidance in crossing and negotiating the switchback that followed. It was still daylight when we arrived at the old mining and agricultural town of Moscata on a high mountain plain where we were to spend the night before moving on to Vallarta very early in the morning. We were met outside the bus by a retired American mining engineer who lived in the town seeking out any fellow Americans on the bus with whom he could talk English. As the lone gringo I was a ready quarry. After checking into my hotel room I joined the old timer in stretching my legs and strolling about this historic mining town. He had worked in the mines in Mascota and decided to retire there. He hung around the bus stop daily waiting for the lone bus to Vallarta or Guadalajara to spot some English-speaking passenger for conversation. His other interest in the town was to give boxing lessons to the Mexican kids.

TURISTA PANGS IN MASCOTA

That evening the wife of the proprietor family who owned the once majestic hotel dating from Mascota’s mining boom days, served me an excellent dinner of meat and a variety of locally-grown vegetables. Only problem, I drank the cool, sweet, well water poured from the pitcher with the dinner instead of my own bottled water. That night I agonized with a serious bout of turista or “the trots,” both vomiting and dealing with diarrhea for hours. I was much weakened and shaken when my landlady woke me up for breakfast at 4:30 to catch the early bus to Puerto Vallarta. No more well water but the coffee was a great invigorator. She also packed me a hearty lunch of sandwiches and fruit to go as I headed for the bus.

PUERTO VALLARTA

The trip to the Coast was not exactly trouble-free. At one point we had a wide river to cross where the bus had to be towed by a line hitched to a truck which pulled us across. We passengers stayed dry as the water level in the river was quite low. As we started to approach the outskirts of Puerto Vallarta we began to be plagued by engine trouble. It would stall and the only way we could get it started was by all of us male passengers getting behind the bus to push it to enable it to get enough momentum to kick the engine back into action again. This sputtering and stalling pattern kept repeating itself all the rest of the way to our destination.

I checked into a beachfront hotel which was the most beautiful lodging of my entire Mexican adventure. Verdant foliage pervaded the entire area and the hotel building encircled a large courtyard full of bird cages, housing exotic avians of a many origins. They kept us entertained with a concert of continuous song and wake us at daybreak in a renewal of their sweet sounds. Mornings also brought us the clatter of mule hooves on the cobblestone streets guided by their peasant owners as the city’s workday began.

Puerto Vallarta in those days didn’t come close to Acapulco as a major Mexican west coast tourist city, and was much cheaper for ordinary tourists than its much larger rival coastal mecca. A small colony of American writers and artists did make it their home then. It wasn’t until Hollywood filmed Tennessee Williams’ play “Night of the Iguana” in 1963 in the neighborhood, starring Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, that Puerto Vallarta exploded into a major tourist destination. Burton and his on again, off again glamorous wife Elizabeth Taylor bought a home there during their tempestuous, volatile relationships. As did John Huston, the brilliant director of “Iguana.” So the population and commercial boom was on in that Pacific paradise. But I’m glad I visited at a quieter, more pristine time before the developers took over.

I walked all over taking pictures of scenery and inhabitants. I loved seeing the women of Vallarta doing their laundry outdoors on the stones of the creeks flowing out through the dunes to the sea. These were relaxing, pleasant days for me and sober ones, as I hadn’t been drinking alcohol since a traumatic episode earlier in the year while still living in Los Angeles. However, my addiction was lurking underneath, waiting to bounce back, and surfaced with a vengeance a few months later in the Bay Area. “Cold Turkey” only went so far.

After pleasuring in the sun and soft ocean breezes I thought it was time to return to California before the new year of 1961 properly got underway. Instead of the long but scenic bus ride to Guadalajara I flew back from Puerto Vallarta to that teeming Mexican metropolis. Then another bus back to Tijuana, and by Greyhound back to the Bay Area, which got a bit tedious.

BAY AREA, EARLY 1961

I returned home on the first week of 1961, just in time for the inauguration of a new President, John F. Kennedy, who had defeated Richard Nixon in November. (Since I was no longer supporting candidates of the corporate capitalist parties, I had cast perhaps a futile protest vote for the Socialist Labor Party candidate as a write-in as it was impossible for a minuscule party like the SLP to qualify on the California ballot, or for that matter, the Socialist Party.) I returned to work, with my name notched up a bit more in priority on the Chapel slipboard while I was gone. I began attending union as well as SP Local meetings regularly again. Sometime in the early part of the year I began to search for a house to buy in Berkeley. I found an older one-story two-bedroom cottage on Tenth Street in West Berkeley at the corner of Gilman for $11,000 and bought it. I shopped around for second-hand furniture and basic appliances from Goodwill and other thrift outlets. The house had rotted window sashes and Stan Weir taught me how to replace them with aluminum ones. Comrade Stan was now working on the San Francisco docks as an ILWU B-man, a group of 700 casual longshore workers whom Harry Bridges had created in 1959 and had promised would be promoted to A-status after a year. Meantime they got the dirtiest jobs on the docks. They had no right to vote in union elections or even attend union meetings. So Stan and a few other militants organized the B-men into a fighting force of its own. Which brought about a conflagration between the B-men and the pro-CP Bridges about which I’ll write more about later, except that the ILWU president never kept his promise to promote them to full member status.

BAY OF PIGS INVASION

The Bay of Pigs attempted invasion to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba on April 19, 1961 turned out to be new President John F. Kennedy’s biggest early foreign policy blunder. Plans for this projected overthrow had been developed by the Eisenhower Administration much earlier after Cuba had nationalized America’ corporate sugar interests and other business holdings on the island. The CIA had been training an army of anti-Castro Cubans, holdovers from the Batista years, in Central America. US warplanes would conduct the attack from the air while the army of Cuban right-wing exiles would provide the “boots-on-the-ground” invasion force which hoped to rouse an anti-Castro counter-revolution from the island’s dissenting populace to the post-1959 regime. All signals were almost ready to go when Kennedy stepped into office in January, 1961. Eisenhower informed his successor of his pending plans, and as soon as feasible JFK intended to follow through as he was now the leader of the American capitalist empire which had no desire to be neighbors with a Soviet-supported communist regime 90 miles from Key West.

The US military’s plan was to conduct the invasion on Cuba’s sparsely-populated southern coast at the Bay of Pigs to minimize armed resistance. A couple of days before the exile army’s landing, American aircraft destroyed most of Cuba’s fighting aircraft on the ground. But not all. The remaining Cuban planes strafed and bombed the supply ships that were trying to bring arms, ammunition and other supplies ashore for the exile army’s use. Cuban intelligence was no slouch, either. Although the invaders initially drove the modest defenses back temporarily the main elements of the Cuban Army were quickly on the scene and it turned out to be a rout! Fidel Castro himself assumed command. There was no uprising as the large majority of the Cubans still supported the 1959 successful revolution. A number of the invaders were killed or taken prisoner. US ships evacuated others. A major, humiliating defeat for our imperial power!

SHACHTMAN’S RIGHT TURN ON CUBA

About the time of Bay of Pigs Max Shachtman came to the Bay Area on a speaking tour. His first stop was to the Berkeley campus at a meeting organized by the UCB YPSL Chapter. He was scheduled to speak the next night to our East Bay SP Local where a sizeable audience was expected. But horror upon horror, he spoke in support of the US-backed invasion of Cuba! The YPSL immediately jumped him for it. The great self-styled “revolutionary leader” immediately left for New York in a thin-skinned huff, not to return for several years until a neo-con right-wing cadre had succeeded in taking over the national leadership of YPSL. Instead of a Shachtman appearance at our Local function, we scheduled an impromptu Cuban debate between resolute Third Camper Hal Draper and a Realignment regular Bob Martinson who had once been an SYL student organizer on the UCB campus, when he still agitated for a revolutionary line. Our Local was divided on the whole issue of Realignment but this swing by “Slapsie-Maxie,” as a Cleveland comrade Tad Tekla called him, lost a lot of supporters because of this blatant support of US imperialism, even in Realignment ranks. I doubt that Harrington and Denitch supported him on Cuba but were publicly quiet to preserve Realignment Caucus discipline for another decade.

I always remained on friendly personal terms with Bob Martinson, although he also appeared to side with the argument that the US Cold War bloc with its bourgeois democracy was a lesser evil than the totalitarian Soviet Camp and more worthy of critical support. Those in attendance at the debate were overwhelmingly in support of Hal’s Third Camp argument that we support neither Western and Soviet Imperialism in world politics in favor of a democratic socialist liberatory revolution but we condemn the military attack of one of these great powers against a small island country, which was the first to successfully throw off the yoke of Yankee Imperialism in the Americas in the mid-twentieth century. (Of course, many of us were disturbed by the Castro regime’s crushing of civil liberties in Cuba, the lack of which under Batista’s fascism was of no concern as long as US capitalist sugar interests were able to rake in their profits undisturbed.)

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

Shachtman’s trajectory to the right continued until his death in 1972, with his undiminished loyalty to the George Meany Cold War trade union hierarchy. He did attract a small cadre of young right-wing social democrats who shared his pro-US imperialist politics, a number of whom were hired as trade union staff functionaries within the AFL-CIO, while Meany and his ideological successors like Lane Kirkland remained in control at the Federation’s national leadership. Non-interventionist libertarian writer Justin Raimondo who publishes the www.antiwar.com on line news, saw Shachtman as one of the earliest neo-con war party theorists and wrote extensively about him. In his last years Shachtman talked extensively in long distance phone calls to Los Angeles with his co-founder of American Trotskyism and later ideological opponent James P. Cannon. It would have been fun to have been a bug on the wall to listen to their old age conversations. Probably the only recorded account of those informal dialogues came through phone taps planted by the FBI.

1961 LOCAL 21 UNION ELECTIONS

The elections for officers of Local 21 was one of the most exciting happenings for me in the spring of 1961. A more youthful, more future-focussed Progressive Party slate was challenging the somewhat moribund, entrenched, and more conservative Independent Party incumbency for the control of the Local. The “Progs” had made some inroads in the previous election when commercial shop printer Russell A. Wagle had won the office of Second Vice-President. There had been considerable dissatisfaction among rank-and-file printers with the “Indie” Administration of President Sterling Rounds, who had a drinking problem besides not seeming all that bright. This feeling was strongest in the newspaper chapels, particularly at The Chronicle, the most militant shop in Local 21. The nomination of the Progressive slate took place in a rented downtown hall packed with printers eager for change. The three candidates for the presidency were incumbent 2nd Vice Russ Wagle, Tex Ellis, a copy cutter at the Examiner Chapel, a former president of the Columbus (Ohio) Typographical Union and an expert on ITU law; and George Hogan. militant chapel chair at the San Mateo Times. A proofroom colleague from the Chronicle Mary O’Donnell and her husband Adman Eddie O’Donnell, both Boston Irish, urged me to vote for George Hogan as a fearless fighter at San Mateo against a would-be tyrant foreman Owen Mobley. George had also been involved in an unsuccessful union-busting newspaper strike in Quincy, Mass., where the scrappy little Irishman had kicked the tar out of a scab. Sounded good to me. Then my buddy Art Stagliano urged my vote for Russ Wagle. as Hogan might be too hot-headed in situations where cooler heads would be preferable. That Russ was an able, strong negotiator and an ADA-style Democratic Party liberal. Stag made a reasonable argument and I cast my secret ballot for Wagle in what appeared as a close election.

Russ’s victory wasn’t that close a call, but George and Tex made respectable showings, with Hogan in second place. So as a consolation prize George Hogan became the Prog Nominee for First Vice President and Tex Ellis’s considerable legal and administrative skills earned him a recommendation for the Executive Committee. I don’t remember if the Progs ran anyone for the post of Secretary-Treasurer in 1961 as popular incumbent Greg Bachich, unaffiliated with either party, appeared unbeatable in the general election. An older Prog Bob? Patterson became our nominee for Second Vice President.

Another Executive Committee nominee was Leon Olson (1920–2006), a leading Progressive activist who was chair at the Scripps-Howard News-Call-Bulletin newspaper chapel downtown, who was then editor of the monthly Golden Gate Progressive, newsletter of our club. Olson was a former Communist Party member who had resigned from the CP along with other such labor leaders, after the purges of a number of CP union officials during the Red Scare following passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, especially those who had supported the Henry Wallace third party presidential candidacy. In conversation I had with Leon subsequently he appeared to have maintained some of his earlier pro-Soviet convictions, suggesting his resignation might have been made for tactical reasons. As it was, for the rest of his life Olson was an active, loyal advocate for the Democratic Party, a politics to which the CP itself is no stranger to the present day. (A more clear-cut decision to leave the CP was made by colorful SF longshore union retiree Bill Bailey (1911–1995) who broke with it in 1956 when Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian workers’ revolution. In his salty autobiography, “Kid from Hoboken” (1993), Bailey said something like “workers from one socialist country should not be attacking the workers of another.” (A bit confused about what constitutes socialism, but in the right political spirit.)

In other nominations, Don Abrams and Arnold C. Sears were voted as nominees to the Newspaper Scale (Negotiating) Committee. Both were younger members of our Chronicle Chapel. Don was a make-up man as a front page composition regular, a pragmatic centrist Democrat, and of Jewish origin, converted to Catholicism through marriage. Arnold was a Navy vet from New Hampshire, a linotype operator, and a liberal Democrat, earlier active in the SF Young Democrats. I don’t remember who our Commercial (Job Shop) Scale Committee candidates were. The Indies, who were strong in job shops had incumbents who were hard to beat for those posts, particularly Tommy Dillon, popular chapel chair at the financial daily The Recorder on South Van Ness near Market. Being pretty new to No. 21, I was nominated by the Progs to run as Delegates to the SF Labor Council and SF Union Label Section. I wrote my own campaign statement for the Golden Gate Progressive and we were all provided personal cards by the Club for our own personal campaigns as we toured the shops seeking votes for the Party and ourselves.

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

The campaign was fun for me, part of a long ITU democratic tradition which excited the rank and file in the shop more than any state and local election as it directly affected the working members’ bread and butter and conditions of work. Both Prog and Indie candidates campaigned inside the shops during working hours handing out their campaign cards and engaging the printers on the job with a short pitch, whether at a linotype machine, adroom frame. proofroom, or make-up department “turtles” or frames on wheels on which the hot metal pages were assembled and locked in. I covered all the downtown chapels by foot or bus, covering the metro papers and larger commercial shops which were clustered in the downtown Sansome Street business district. Another must campaign stop was at the huge Phillips and Van Orden plant on Berry Street south of Market that printed telephone books. PVO had been an Indie stronghold for years with Party regulars Jack Clancy and Ray Stover frequently alternating in the post of elected Chapel Chair. But the character of PVO union politics was in flux as Progs like Leon Olson’s older brother Jack Olsen, formerly an influential ILWU functionary, and progressive Democratic Party activist Harold Rice had slipped up to work there.

Not too long before the San Mateo County Typo Union had merged into Local 21, covering a number of community newspapers such as the San Mateo Times, Burlingame Advance, and Redwood City Tribune. So to access such chapels I needed to use my car. San Mateo County was strong Progressive country and chapel members used to post all our blue campaign cards on their bulletin boards and in one case strung out like a clothes line from a string. Everyone was friendly and courteous as we approached them. Just as in San Francisco shops whether they were Progs or Indies or nones.

But each party’s newsletter blasted their political opponents as mortal enemies. The Golden Gate Progressive accused the Indies as being too close to management and as reactionaries and opportunists. The Indie paper engaged in gross red-baiting, branding the Progs as pro-Communist. Their editor produced evidence of Leon Olson’s old Communist affiliations even using his original Russian or Polish-Jewish family name as someone quite sinister and evil. The McCarthy Era still dangled its impact on union politics. Stag thought that the Indie ideologues were in cahoots with the FBI. This is quite a reasonable assumption as it had been quite common all over when conservative union bureaucrats were trying to drive the Communists out of the labor movement. After all there is now clear evidence that when Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he was engaged by the FBI to rat on CPers and its fellow travellers in SAG, with his zealous compliance. A couple of years later in barroom post mortems after a union meeting, one of the leading Indie anti-communist ideologues in the Local accused me of Red ties when he was quite drunk, saying: “I know all about you in the steel mills so you don’t fool me. You’re either a commie or some kind of socialist.” He wouldn’t have known about it unless he was in cahoots with the Feds. This of course did not apply to most of the ordinary rank and filers of the Independent Party as most were decent people and good union brothers and sisters though of a more conservative bent. But there was a more hardline inner circle. During the Rounds Administration there was a supply available at Union Headquarters of J. Edgar Hoover’s 1959 anti-Communist book: “Masters of Deceit,” made available to the membership. The local Progressive Party was generally more left-of-center with a wide range of ideological convictions ranging from democratic socialists, social democrats, old Trotskyists, Democratic Party liberals, Wobbly sympathizers, to former and maybe a few current CPers who were by no means in control of the Progs. At the time I think I was the only card-carrying SP member.

Despite the fierce red-baiting by the Indie politicos, the Progressive slate won an important victory as they captured all the major administrative offices except for one executive committee seat, as I remember. Don Abrams and Arnold Sears made the newspaper scale committee. The Indies kept their commercial scale committee slots, although the newly-elected President Russ Wagle would lead the negotiating team in both branches. In subsequent articles in their newspaper, the Indie red-baiting editor sneeringly dismissed the Prog slate as the “young militants.” Although on the whole the Progs had the younger candidates, we did have several experienced middle-age winners but we all enjoyed the unintended compliment the Indie editor paid us. In my first electoral outing, I failed to make the SF Labor Council which I preferred because of the contact with delegates of other unions, but did make the SF Union Label Section, which was a non-starter group, chaired by some elderly bureaucrat past retirement age. This committee never held one meeting during my tenure as Local 21 delegate.

BERKELEY VISITORS

Among visitors to my new Berkeley home were Mamma and Irma along with one of my sister’s medical secretary girl friends at her LA Children’s Hospital job. Bob Camp stayed with me off and on from the old Chicago Whitman House gang in between wives or girl friends which he would dump when their novelty began to bore him. He was an aspiring novelist who never successfully published anything during the time I knew him. Fortunately, he was an electrician by trade, a skill he’d picked up in the Navy so he’d work on and off in that field although never for long on a job, as he quit them as often as the women in his life as he roamed restlessly around the country, dreaming about writing the great American novel.

Another old Whimanite who stayed for a few days was my old YPSL and SP comrade Dick Fredricksen with his wife and his two very young daughters. He had continued his studies at the University of Chicago all the way to an economics PhD, becoming alienated by socialist politics. Milton Friedman, the great monetarist guru of free enterprise was the celebrity economics personality on the Chicago campus whose disciples known as “The Chicago Boys” became notorious as the chief economic advisers of the General Auguste Pinochet’s violent, murderous counter-revolution in Chile that overthrew the democratically-elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s with CIA support, reversing its democratic socialist gains for a virulent fascistic form of unfettered capitalism. Of course, Dick’s visit to me long preceded the criminal behavior of the Chicago Boys. But his total dedication now to free enterprise was extremely disappointing to me. In fact, he was now employed as an economist for a giant multinational corporation headquartered in White Plains, NY. Long an avid science fiction fan, Dick’s only remaining bohemian vestige from his Whitman days was that the purpose of his family vacation visit was as a stopover to a convention of nutty Unidentified Flying Object fans in Arizona. Even that was preferable to his sellout to capitalism. He is now retired and living in Tucson, with an interest in space travel.

ANOTHER MARITAL DISASTER

Sometime during the Fall of 1960, I got involved in a correspondence with a woman named Kathlyn in Oakland I came in contact with through a local mail order dating service. I had met no one in the SP, at work, nor at the Singletarians Club of the Berkeley Co-op where all the available women were middle age, at least ten years my senior. Not being religious, I did seek mid-20s to early 30s eligible females at the Dutton Club singles group at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco and at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship which had no singles group to find someone of liberal or radical politics who might see me as a potential pater familia. Being shy and awkward in these situations, nothing happened. I also patronized a couple of big band ballrooms in San Francisco and Oakland with paltry results. So it was back to the mail order dating scene through which I’d met my first marital failure in Los Angeles. Maybe this time something would pan out. In our correspondence, Kathlyn was an articulate, intelligent letter writer although her crimped but clear handwriting suggested some personality difficulties. She lived as a welfare mother in Oakland and was a couple of years younger than me. She had an eight-year-old daughter by an earlier partner whom she had left and an infant daughter of a father she never identified. Didn’t sound like a promising prospect as she was apolitical, besides, but when she called suggesting a meeting, I thought what could I lose? I picked her up from her small apartment in Oakland and took her and her infant daughter Danette for a drive into the Oakland hills. Since it was a weekday, her older girl Christine was in school. Our conversation was awkward and stilted and little Danette wailed and cried non-stop the whole trip. So after a half hour or so, I drove her home. Surprisingly, she invited me in for a cup of coffee. Soon after Christine came home from school. She was a cute, courteous little girl and had a look of wisdom in her eyes way beyond her years. After a little more small talk, I politely took my leave, fully expecting never to hear from her again. Oh, well, I guess it was back to Oakland’s Ali Baba ballroom next Saturday night, dancing to the smooth music of Sid Hoff’s orchestra. Maybe, maybe, I’ll run into Ms Right, or even, Ms Left.

Sometime later in 1961 after I was well settled in my house on Tenth Street, I received a letter from Kathlyn forwarded from my old Kains Avenue address saying that “fate has dealt me another card from the bottom of the deck,” and would I come and see her again. This may sound hopelessly naive to my Memoirs readers, but I accepted this call from this “damsel in distress.” So when I arrived she told me she was pregnant again and her belly showed this was true. After a little probing, she told me she had had a sexual liaison with a 17-year-old Polish immigrant boy who lived in the neighborhood which had gotten her pregnant. Common sense should have told me to turn around and run at this point, but I just felt sorry for her and her existing two little tykes and soon I was bringing them bags of groceries and seeing them on almost a daily basis. No doubt Kathlyn was in a tough crisis and glommed onto me in desperation although she remained outwardly cool. She was no raving beauty but not unattractive and with a sensual bearing. So it didn’t take long to entice me into bed as a regular sexual partner, the first and only time I’ve slept with a pregnant woman. Kathlyn was a good actor and with her manipulatory skills responded in kind when I declared my love for her. She was in big potential trouble with Alameda County, as an older woman in her early 30s having had sexual relations with a minor which would have exposed her to criminal charges and having her children taken from her by the County. By this time I was strongly attached to little Christine and Danette. So I became the “noble rescuer” and asked to marry her. I can understand her saying “yes” with alacrity as she had no other options. So a nice young Portuguese-American couple I’ll call Tony and Angie Garcia, who lived next door to her in a duplex apartment with young kids of their own, watched over Chris and Dani while their mother and I took a quick day flight to Reno to get hitched by a Nevada justice of the peace. So our next move was to my house in Berkeley which gave her and the girls a real home while we awaited the new arrival. I enrolled them under my Kaiser health plan. With Christmas coming I was now a bona fide pater familia. Mamma was none too happy, particularly with me marrying a pregnant woman with two children, writing that I was being taken for a ride. I paid no attention to her common sense concerns. Kathlyn’s mother and stepfather, a working member of the Butchers’ Union in San Francisco’s industrial Dogpatch district, were invited by Kathlyn to join us for Christmas chicken dinner at our house that she cooked. Her Italian stepfather was a talkative guy and a solid union man whose company I enjoyed. Her mother was a quiet, retiring type who seemed pleased that her errant only daughter had finally married a stable man with a decent job. Four days later, on Dec. 29, 1961, Andrea Michelle Siitonen was born at the Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. She was named Andrea in deference to my middle name Andrew (Antero in Finnish).

Initially, the marriage went reasonably well, except Kathlyn never wanted to meet any of my friends and comrades or invite them to visit and would occasionally make snide remarks about my socialism which she knew nothing about. Although she was of San Francisco working class origin she had no sympathy for unions. She referred to my going to work at the “office” instead of the “shop”, reflecting her middle class attitudes. Besides her parents, the only visitors we ever had were Tony and Angie and their three little girls who had been her neighbors in Oakland.

I got along famously with the girls, Dani affectionately crawling all over me on my lap in our easy chair, constantly calling me “Daddy,” the only word she then knew. I loved it. Chris was enrolled in an elementary school in the neighborhood and I had some wonderful conversations with her. Chris’s ninth birthday was on February 3, and Kathlyn suggested that Chris and I both get dressed up that evening and I take her on a “date” at some nice restaurant, just the two of us to celebrate. I bought the child a corsage and we did just that. Christine was mature beyond her years as her childhood experiences had seen some hectic stretches with the numerous men coming and going out of her mother’s life, always on the run with suitcases on hand for some new abbreviated adventure. But she didn’t reflect panic or fear and was a normal kid with even composure and inner strength. We ordered a small cake with candles for dessert which she blew out. She told me of her childhood hopes and dreams and yen for stability and love. One of the most beautiful days of my life and the best of that marriage to Kathlyn.

While Kathlyn stayed home with Andrea, I’d take Chris and Dani to the Carousel with its merry-go-round in the Oakland-Berkeley hills which the girls loved. Nearby were pony rides for children with Chris in her love for animals making a few circles around a dirt track thrilled with her first equestrian experience. Another excursion was to Children’s Fairyland at Oakland’s Lake Merritt which we all enjoyed. In the early 60s there was a children’s theatre doing plays with kid actors on San Pablo Avenue near our house in Berkeley. Once I took Christine and Tony’s and Angie’s six and four-year-olds to see a show with a fairy tale theme for their first experience with live theater. This was the personal lifestyle I felt ordained to lead!

But not all was well in Mudville as far as the marriage with Kathlyn went. She became colder and less and less communicative as life went on. The last time we’d had sex was the day we were married at the last stages of her pregnancy. Stan Weir stopped by one day and she disappeared into our bedroom without even saying hello. The same with Bruce Aubry. None of my old friends were welcome at the house. I was on the lobster shift now as I was taking a weekly evening class on advertising mark-up in our changing technology at John O’Connell Trade-Tech High School in San Francisco from one of my Chronicle workmates Lynn Jensen. So this left daytimes at home to sleep mornings after the lobster stint and weekday afternoons for domestic duties. Everything was fine with the kids but there was total withdrawal from me by my spouse. So I began to fall back on my old crutch — alcohol. Which just added to the failing marriage crisis. One night after my class, I stopped by a North Beach bar before showing up for work and met a kindly, warmhearted black prostitute for a quick toss in bed before work. I was that desperate for affection. While she was still talking to me, Kathlyn said that she’d had two other daughters older than Christine by different men and a son who had died in infancy. Who was raising them I never knew. They were totally out of her life. What had I done by marrying someone that unstable? Didn’t she know or care anything about contraception, with bringing children into this world with such abandon? There was no doubt she cared very much for Chris, Dani, and Andrea and very possessive of them. One morning after work after taking the bus back to Berkeley I stopped off for a beer at one of the neighborhood bars then in the vicinity of University and San Pablo on the way home. I was in a deep depression and continued to drink until the bartender refused to serve me more and told me to leave. While staggering home on foot, a Berkeley squad car picked me up and the cops locked me up to sleep off my drunk. When I woke up toward evening in panic, I called a bail bondsman who picked me up and drove me home. Kathleen was in bed and though I apologized profusely she didn’t say much but just turned her back to me in bed. The marriage had reached rock bottom.

Mamma had expressed a desire to come see me. probably more in anxiety to see me rather than to meet her new daughter-in-law and step-grandchildren. At this stage I didn’t think it was that smart a visit but I did send her the money for a Greyhound ticket to Oakland. As the date approached, Kathlyn decided to move out with the children and effectively end the marriage before Mamma’s arrival. She and her old neighbors, the Garcia’s, decided to rent adjoining apartments in an Alameda apartment house with all six young children. She asked me to leave the house for three days so she could pack and leave with the kids. The furniture was mine, so all she took was their personal possessions. She noticed my mutual love with the kids and gave me permission to visit and see them in Alameda. Christine in particular was disturbed by the move because of our great mutual affection, but kept her cool, seeing me as the latest of a parade of men to pass through her mother’s and her young lives. I moved to a working class hotel near Fifth nd Mission near the job. I was totally distraught and outside of work, spent most of my time drinking and sleeping it off so I could pull off another tortured shift on the job. After three days I returned home to try to pick up the pieces of my own shattered life. I did visit the kids on a couple of weekends before Mamma’s arrival and did fine with them, until Kathlyn told me my visits disturbed het and asked me to take a raincheck on them until further notice.

I was totally in the dumps when I picked Mamma up at the Oakland bus station. She had even brought some small gifts for the girls. She was greatly disturbed when I told her on the way home that Kathlyn and the kids were gone. She tried her best to console me but my anger at myself and Kathlyn even caused me to vent it on Mamma inadvertently, rejecting her desire to help. My main concern was that I”d never see the kids again. It wasn’t a happy visit for either of us but I think she was privately glad the marriage was in effect over. Healing would take time.

I did keep in touch with Kathlyn by phone and letter in vain hopes the girls could still become part of my life in some way. She urged me to get a divorce and she wouldn’t contest it or ask me for alimony or child support as she was back on welfare allowing them to scrape by, with strong moral support from Angie and Tony. So I secured an attorney through the Typo Union’s law firm and began proceedings. My divorce petition included the proviso that “there were no children the issue of this marriage.” I no longer wished to keep the house and put it on the market through Arlene Slaughter’s Realty Co. in Berkeley. Arlene was an SP member and so was Rodney Sloane, her young salesman she assigned to my case. But all was not that great with Kathlyn, situation, either. She had forged a close bond with Angie and even created a rift between her and Tony as well, suggesting she also file for divorce. She and Angie saw an afternoon performance of a lesbian-themed film together. I can’t remember if it was “The Well of Loneliness,” based on the 1928 novel. I don’t know if Kathlyn and Angie were forming a lesbian bond themselves, but whatever was her role in creating a divisiveness between the Garcias, Tony, the strict Catholic family patriarch, ordered Angie to never speak to Kathlyn again. With the future of their three young kids at stake, Angie conceded and resumed her role as a dutiful housewife and mother. Kathlyn had received the divorce proceeding notice served on her, and with Bruce Aubry as my witness, the court procedure ending it all was a cinch. With the rupture of her friendship with the Garcia’s, Kathlyn and her brood disappeared, with her next unwitting paramour to Southern California, I heard much later. Rod Sloane found a buyer for my house and I moved into a unit of an apartment house complex on 10th Street in Berkeley near Hearst owned by a Swiss watch repairman who now lived with his family in Sebastopol. He kept the bedroom in my apartment as a workshop to which he repaired a couple of days a week to serve his old Berkeley customers. I slept on a cot in the living room and had a lot of privacy as I claimed a dayside slot at work.

LIFE IN UNION, CHAPEL CONTINUES

All this time I was involved best I could with goings on in Local 21 and the Chronicle Chapel. Art Stagliano had defeated longtime Chapel Chair Gary Samson in a hard-fought election for the post. Abe Schaffer had replaced Cliff Conley as general foreman who returned to his job as a page make-up man. Stag appointed me as one of his assistant chairs, filling in on shifts as needed. Handling the slipboard in hiring subs for regulars who called in to take the time off was a fairly complex procedure which could only be learned through experience as chair. I was a fairly quick study for that and other aspects of chapel processes one needed to know since over 200 men and women situation holders, plus a lengthy, constantly changing sub board were involved. Toward the end of a shift the foreman or assistant foreman in charge would call for so many printers to work overtime. To prevent management favoratism, the chapel chair on duty was to solicit for the OT which, according to union law, had to be in priority (seniority) order. At the start of every shift a number of subs would show up in the chapel room to wait for a hire either by a sit holder calling for a sub due to illness or personal business or by the office (management) itself hiring to fill extra production needs. More often than not, the foremen were instructed not to hire any subs by the office, hoping enough regulars at the end of the ensuing shift would be willing to work OT, saving the company money. The union was wise to this as we wanted more hires for our sub board members, so if I was duty chair, and all subs had “walked” (weren’t hired) at the beginning of my shift, when asked to solicit overtime for the next shift, I’d do that but at the same time say to each prospect: “By the way, all the subs ‘walked’ this morning.” Which was the signal for our class-conscious members to turn down the OT, because a brother or sister member had earlier been denied a day’s work. Most members took the hint. We generally had a great spirit of solidarity in the ITU.

Women comprised a relatively small minority in our chapels although since the mid-1800s women could not be discriminated against in hiring in ITU composing rooms, and unlike in most jobs, earned equal pay and benefits with their ITU brothers. They just needed to prove competency in the work they slipped up to do. So in most cases, women worked either as proofreaders and linotype operators due to lack of experience on make-up or adroom composition during the hot metal days in newspaper printing. It was later when teletypesetters and cold type (paste-up) came into the picture in the 1960s that we got a large boost in women’s numbers working at our trade.

We had very few black ITU members working at the Chronicle in the early 1960s although laws against workplace discrimination were in place. The only ones I remember in the adroom when I started were two storefront preachers, Lou Puryear and Willie Miner, both solid union men. Jimmy Herndon was a linotype operator who later passed the bar and joined a prominent progressive San Francisco law firm. During the summer of 1962 I visited Chicago and stopped at the office of Chicago Typographical Union No. 16. which had a Prog President named McManus at the moment. He claimed bitterly that a number of non-union Chicago black printers had gone to Oakland, CA and picked up ITU cards through its President Jack Austin (also a Prog), then took travellers and came back to Chi and slipped up in its union shops. “We don’t need their kind here!” He also said that Fred Hunt, a former Chicago Indie president, had a staunch ally in noted Chicago Communist Molly Lieber West in union politics, whom I’ve cited earlier in these Memoirs. So this Windy City Prog leader was both a racist and red-baiter rolled in one! When I reported this back to our Golden Gate Progressive Club people they weren’t surprised. Prog ITU members around the country weren’t necessarily liberal or “progressive” though we in the Bay Area were generally politically to the left of our own Indies. We did have an undercurrent of racism among some rank and filers in our chapel which sometimes surfaced in ugly remarks.

OUR ‘DEAF’ MEMBERS

We had several dozen deaf (deaf-mute) members working in various chapels of Local 21, including a considerable number at the Chronicle Chapel, including women. Somehow, our deaf printers were quite adaptable to the printing trade and had received training in various special vocational schools around the country. All were staunch union supporters. They would appear regularly at the monthly union meeting and would have signing-competent members standing in front of the group interpreting the business of the Union to them. Arnold Sears was a regular interpreter as well as Dennis Crowley from the Phillips and Van Orden Chapel who could hear. I got along well with them although I never learned signing but would exchange notes with them in place of vocal conversation. But they also had their detractors, usually the Chapel racists who would call them “dummies.” Most of the deaf printers could read lips and were witness to these slurs by the bigots. Once one passed me a note, reading: “We may be deaf, but we’re not dumb.” (We had numerous printers who came to the work from various other countries as union printers and if so, were automatically issued an ITU card. They came from England, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Australia, South America and elsewhere. They were also targets of our nativists who sneered at them as “foreigners,” as a put-down. The same fears we have now in 2016 over immigrants crossing the border to “take our American jobs.”)

ABE’S ELEVATOR KISS

I can’t resist inserting this story concerning one of our deaf printers and Foreman Abe Schaffer. One day when Schaffer was riding up the elevator to work, he was joined by a gay alcoholic deaf printer who was very, very drunk named Bill Chester. Chester planted a big kiss on Abe’s mouth who immediately screamed: “You’re fired!” There were witnesses and when Chester sobered up, his friends urged him to request a chapel meeting to contest his discharge. Which he did. Amid a lot of guffaws, the chapel voted to reinstate poor Bill since he wasn’t working at the time, and it occurred outside the composing room. Schaffer, worried about his “straight” image, appealed the chapel vote to the Executive Committee of the Union. The meeting hall of the Electrician’s Union at 55 Fillmore Street was packed with printers when Abe’s appeal was being heard at the next monthly meeting of Local 21. What was a serious matter became an explosion of hilarity when the referral was discussed. Abe shrunk dejectedly red-faced into his chair and said not a word. The main points established were: 1. Abe Schaffer is the general foreman of the composing room where he has the power to fire for cause. 2. The incident took place in an elevator outside the composing room. 3. Therefore, the foreman’s authority was moot in the elevator. If Mr. Chester had showed up inside the composing room, the foreman could have fired him for his inebriation. Since he tried to discharge him in the elevator he had no case. The vote was overwhelmingly in Chester’s favor! Although we had some gay and lesbian printers in the shop, homophobia was rife in 1962. Nonetheless, a roar of laughter exploded in the room over the decision as Abe slunk out of the union meeting with his face beet-red. Bill Chester danced all over the room waving his arms and blowing kisses at everybody. But Chester’s elation was short-lived. Some months later his bludgeoned body was found in an alley behind a Skid Row bar at Sixth and Mission. Apparently, he had gotten bombed again and had tried to make a pass at the wrong person and met an early demise.

NEWSPAPER CONTRACT WITHOUT GIVEAWAYS

As I recall the first newspaper contract negotiated by the Wagle Administration was without any significant giveaways and brought about decent gains in wages, benefits and conditions. Before negotiations began, members were invited to a meeting of the Scale Committee at union headquarters to convey their ideas of what to include in the contract proposals. Our health plan had a good basis with Kaiser Permanente and another plan which gave members a choice of other doctors and hospitals. But I noticed we had no dental coverage. So I appeared before the committee and proposed we include a dental plan, which was well-received by the committee. So when negotiations were concluded and a new contract was approved at a membership meeting, it included dental coverage for the first time,\. It wasn’t the greatest as a specific dollar amount of $1000 a calendar year would be financed by management, with anything over that amount to come out of members’ pockets. But it was a start for future improvement.

But storm signals awaited us for the future. Newspaper publishers around the US and Canada were on the offensive to weaken and destroy the unionized industry. We had lost bitter newspaper strikes around the country and union representation in cities like Miami, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Portland OR and Worcester and Quincy., Mass. The American Newspaper Publishers’ Association had financed a printing school for scabs in Oklahoma City who were used by the hundreds to break strikes around the country in both large and small jurisdictions. So the heat was on all of us. From now on there was pressure by the bosses to break down working conditions in all union negotiations, occasionally by financial bribes on wages in exchange for eliminating worker prerogatives on the shop floor to give the employer increased control at our expense. But more and more the industry used lockouts and strikes to destroy unionism altogether. Local 21 and other craft unions in the industry would soon be bearing the brunt of these assaults.

One of Local 21's counter-strategies was to merge smaller independent suburban locals into our larger metro entity to give us more clout in bargaining. The Peninsula shops of the former San Mateo County Local had already joined our fold before I came to San Francisco. In 1962 we took in the Marin County Local #729 which was predominantly the San Rafael Independent-Journal daily newspaper and some smaller shops. Local #729 president John de Martini from the beginning became a leading part of Local 21 and its Progressive Club. In reference to the Progressive Club, Leon Olson’s added duties on the Executive Board made it difficult for him to continue as editor of the Golden Gate Progressive. So aware of my journalistic background I became its editor either in 1962 or 63 and continued in that task into 1965. There was lots to write about in the deteriorating scene generally with the Typo Union in North America so I concentrated on attacking the bosses who were relentlessly on the offensive. Of course, around union election time I would do my partisan duties in criticizing the Indies for their cautious conservatism, but I avoided personal attacks or character assassination re our political opponents. I’d rather promote our constructive policies to strengthen the union and focus my attacks on management. I was no attack dog on fellow unionists.

SOCIALIST PARTY 1962 WIND-UP

I missed the SP 1962 National Convention again in Washington DC because of too many things on my personal plate. I recall that Betty Elkin of Cleveland replaced Irwin Suall as National Secretary who went on to a lasting career as national fact-finding director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith. I’m not sure whether Comrade Elkin had a previous ISL background but I know she was close to Cleveland’s Max Wohl, a staunch left winger in SP politics for many years who was a long time board member of the independent socialist magazine New Politics founded in the early 1960s. As administrative national secretary Betty was no ideologist and was competent in her duties at the National Office. She was very fair-minded and stayed clear of the SP’s growing factionalism. Her politics were close to mine and she was easy to work with. Some of the Realignment politicians grumbled at her lack of partisanship in their favor. But I found her a refreshing contrast to the increasing political divisiveness, as being one above the battle.

Publication of Michael Harrington’s famous book “The Other America — Poverty in the United States” published in 1962 was an immediate sensation that has since sold millions of copies and put democratic socialism on the American political map to wide audiences for the first time. Reading it impressed President John F. Kennedy who contacted Harrington to discuss it. While 1962 was still a relatively good post-war period for the unionized labor at least one fourth of the working class lived in abject poverty, particularly among Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites in the South and throughout the country which “The Other America” brought into public view and concern. The book was acknowledged to influence the Great Society reforms of the later Lyndon Johnson Administration like Medicare, Medicap, food stamps, Operation Headstart, and expanded Social Security benefits to raise the living standards of previously hidden working and unemployed poor. And it made Mike Harrington the leading spokesman in the country for democratic socialism in the 1960s and beyond to his premature death in 1989. “Socialism for the Rich, Free Enterprise for the Poor,” was the common theme of Mike’s speaking tours around the country and in his writings as he stressed the nature of the widely disparate class divisions that marked American life. The only comparable discovery in today’s United States of 2016 can be found in the Presidential campaign of Vermont US Senator Bernie Sanders, a proud democratic socialist, in the Democratic Party primary race who is dramatically stressing the class divisions and the huge, growing income disparities between the corporate wealthy and a good part of the American working and middle class and is drawing many millions to his campaign rallies to enthusiastically support his candidacy.

PERSONAL CLOSE-OUT TO 1962

To my surprise, toward the end of 1962, I received an embittered letter from the man who had taken Kathlyn and the children to Santa Barbara to live. Mr. X, who had fallen for her lament of her fate had soon become disillusioned with her game. He said her life pattern showed that she was using the children as her tools to manipulate men to become sorry and enamoured of her to become the rescuer of her and her brood the same as me. Apparently their arrangement hadn’t lasted very long as she had taken up with another paramour who had taken her and the poor girls to Los Angeles for the next hectic round in their lives. While they were in Mr. X’s care he had wondered why I hadn’t fought to claim custody of Andrea since she bore my last name? Then he discovered among a bunch of papers she had left scattered about in his place in her hurry to leave that I wasn’t Andrea’s birth father. He wondered that wasn’t there any way that the children could be taken away from this screwed up predatory schemer before she destroyed their lives beyond repair?

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles my sister Irma had been dating a recent Japanese immigrant named Teruo (Terry) Iwamoto who was employed as a gardener while he was studying electronics at some technical school in the area. He was about a year older than me. They were married in November, 1962. Mamma had wanted to keep living with them but Irma objected that she needed privacy in her new marriage and since she had been there for Mamma all these many years, she asked me now to take over that responsibility. This was a reasonable request so I rented a small apartment for Mamma on Curtis Street near University Avenue in Berkeley as I didn’t really want to live with her any more at this stage of my life. She came but felt the place too cramped and dingy for her liking and soon through Finnish friends moved into a large apartment building on California Street near University where a number of older Finnish widows, divorcees or single women also lived. It was also only a couple of blocks away from the Berkeley Co-op Market at 1414 University Avenue for her grocery shopping needs. I would see her on a weekly basis to take her on automobile rides around the Bay Area and have lunch with her. Mamma was a very social person and soon made many new Finnish friends from the Kaleva (Brotherhood) Hall also in the general area. She loved playing cards and soon was involved in card playing groups with other Finnish women. Berkeley was the only Finnish community west of the Mississippi that had a Local (osasto) of the social democratic Finnish-American League for Democracy headquartered in Fitchburg, MA, home of its newspaper Raivaaja. Berkeley meetings or coffee klatches of the Berkeley local of FALD were held in the apartment of one of her neighbors in the building where Mamma lived. She never officially joined but was a meeting regular as they were conducted in Finnish. These socials were hardly political but gave an opportunity for a small remnant of Finnish-American social democracy to get together.

This is a good point to call it a wrap for Memoir #20.

End of Installment 20