Bay Area, Europe, 1963-64

The period covered in Memoir #21 was of general turmoil as the 1960s unfolded not only in the San Francisco Bay Area but across the country in labor strife, in the fight for civil rights which engendered an unheard of youth movement in mass rebellion for civil rights in the streets and on campuses for student rights. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As the war in Vietnam began to heat up, it fostered a massive anti-war movement that continued into the 1970s to its conclusion in US defeat. Personally, it brought about my first trip to my ancestral homeland of Finland and travel in Western Europe. (On January 9, 1963, an old comrade and friend from my LA days, Matilda Robbins, now living in Berkeley, passed away at 75. An IWW organizer as a young woman, she has remained a lifetime role model and exemplar of a dedicated, principled socialist I will never forget.)

In the Bay Area the opening gun in this resistance to the relative ennui of the 1950s conformity, came in the police riots at San Francisco City Hall when students from neighboring universities came by the hundreds to protest the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in another of its series of witch hunts against the Left on May 13, 1960, just shortly before my move to the Bay Area. The cops turned their fire hoses on the demonstrators and resorted to beatings and made numerous arrests. An old friend Albert Lannon, former Bay Area labor leader and educator now retired in Tucson, wrote to me that this was his first arrest. McCarthyism had reached its end here and in the public protest over this police travesty, all charges were dismissed and the whole affair was a decisive death knell to the discredited HUAC. And the positive upshot was that this debacle was the decisive trigger to the 1960s culture of rebellion in the Bay Area.

DIRECT ACTION AT THE CHRONICLE

We Chronicle printers had our own part in this direct action kind of rebellion reflective of the times. Abe Schaffer, our foreman, was given his walking papers as boss. Abe enjoyed his spirits, particularly on Friday nights when he’d go to the Chronicle newsroom after the edition was wrapped to join the Guild members in their weekly poker game. The whiskey flowed freely and Abe would get thoroughly lubricated in the process. The Guild card sharks welcomed his participation as they would regularly clean out his clock in the game the more plastered he got. The production chiefs of the Chron probably got wind of it as one day he was demoted as general foreman. Abe decided to leave his composing room situation and took his union working card to the San Mateo Times, the chapel he eventually retired from.

He was replaced by an obnoxious little twit named Ron Spindler, a 27-year-old who had quite recently gotten his journeyman’s card. He had probably given management a snow job that he’d tame these rebellious printers who thought they were cocks-of-the-walk in the composing room. He tried to come on as a frontal assault foreman. He fired all the previous strawbosses as such and picked who he could intimidate into following his dictates. He barged around angrily trying to impose his will on one and all. His obvious aim was to break the power of the union in the Chronicle Chapel. But he was dealing with a bunch of ring-wise union stalwarts. He received no cooperation even from old pro-management types. The printers would thwart his commandments in every way. Frequent smoke and coffee breaks. Slowdowns, malingering, agreeing to do what he ordered and not doing it. It was like an IWW workplace where the finesse of syndicalist sabotage became the pattern of the workday when the boss was a tyrant. We had an experienced work force that needed no one to tell them how to put out a newspaper. Edition deadlines became constantly late. Our Guild brothers and sisters knew what was coming down as well and sympathized with us. Finally, top management had enough when editions were constantly late and after seven weeks gave Spindler his walking papers. He picked up his travel card from Union headquarters and was never seen in San Francisco again. So an old IWW adage applied well this time to ITU printers: “Direct action gets the goods.” Management wised up and hired an old-time experienced foreman from the Cincinnati newspapers named Edward Griesemeyer who knew his job and respected his composing room workforce.

FIRST TRIP TO FINLAND AND EUROPE

Exciting campaigns were taking place on Bay Area streets to end discrimination against racial minorities in service industries like hotels and automobile dealerships during 1963 and onward, but at this point I will intercede with a description of my first trip ever to Finland and Western Europe of six weeks that summer.

Berkeley Co-op had arranged with a local travel agency for a six-week charter plane trip to Europe for its members and families. The flight would take us to Paris and return us to Berkeley from London six weeks later. During that time we were free to roam in Europe to our heart’s content. The price was right so why not do it? I then made my own arrangements with the travel agent for my personal itinerary from Paris on. After three days in that glorious French capital, I’d fly to Finland for two weeks, then return to Copenhagen, take a train to Brussels, Amsterdam and Hamburg with brief stops in each, fly to Cologne, then on to London spending my last two weeks in England. The flight from San Francisco was uneventful, except we had a one-night inadvertent stop on the way at London’s Heathrow Airport due to a quickie work stoppage by the air controllers at Paris. Ah, those revolutionary French workers, descendants of the 1871 Paris Commune, would strike at the drop of a beret any time, any place, to settle a beef!

So, we checked into a hotel overnight at Heathrow. It was still daylight so I took an Underground trip to London Center for a quick glimpse of that historic capital. There wasn’t time for much so I spent a little time in the British Museum where Karl Marx had spent many a long laborious hour doing his research for what became his monumental Das Kapital. I partook of a dinner of the notoriously insipid British food before returning by Tube to Heathrow for the night. The next morning we resumed our flight uneventfully to Paris. I expect the French air controllers had won their grievance. I settled into a modest hotel on Ile de Cite on the banks of the Seine near the majestic Notre Dame Cathedral. I bought a long loaf of French bread with a hunk of cheese and a bottle of wine which I enjoyed in my room, with bidet and all, and pictured myself as an expatriate American writer or artist of the 1920s. Wandering the streets near the huge Les Halle market place that still occupied central Paris in those days, I ran into a comely Madamoiselle of the streets whose bed I shared briefly that evening. I just had to experience sex in this grand romance capital of the world!

My American SP comrade Michael Harrington and his wife Stephanie were spending the summer in Paris enjoying themselves on the proceeds of his successful “The Other America.” National Secretary Betty Elkin had given me his Paris address and phone number. So I wandered into his neighborhood, gave him a jingle, and Mike came out in his tee-shirt and we shared lunch at a nearby outdoor café and talked a little about Paris and politics. Paris was a city where I wanted to spend much more time in the future, but soon I was on a Finnair flight to Helsinki.

Toward evening we landed at the nearly empty old Seutula airport later replaced by the large modern airport at Vantaa. The only other plane on the ground was an empty Soviet aircraft. I was met by my cousin Pertti Kuokkanen, son of Mamma’s sister Hilja Kuokkanen, and Raimo (Raiku) Hellgren, Pertti’s brother-in-law who was married to his twin sister Pirkko. During my brief Helsinki sojourn I stayed with the Hellgrens and later with my uncle Eino Saikkonen and his wife Helmi and their beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Irma. I was the first American relative who had visited them since my parents in the Fall of 1925. I was taken all over the capital and our talking and catching up was non-stop. I also spent some happy hours with Aunt Hilja and her husband baker Toivo Kuokkanen with whom Pertti, their still bachelor son, lived, at the time, a postal worker.

Mamma’s youngest brother Otto Saikkonen who had lived in the States for some years had returned to Finland after WWII to marry his old fiancee, Miriam, with whom he had two young daughters. He was working as a union house painter when he had been hit and killed recently by a Helsinki street car one Saturday morning which tragedy Mamma had learned from a news clipping shortly thereafter that her siblings had sent her. Uncle Eino and Aunt Hilja told me the full story of Otto’s death which they hadn’t told my mother because of Mamma’s dislike of her kid brother’s heavy drinking habits. Otto, after getting his paycheck on a Friday, spent the entire night getting plastered with his work buddies. Came morning they had wanted to skip their party going and sent Otto downtown to buy more beer and on his staggering way back had been struck by a Helsinki ratikka (trolley) and died. So Otto succumbed to my grandfather Paavo Saikkonen’s family curse of alcoholism as I did for many years before my recovery in 1972. We stopped for a brief evening’s visit to Miriam and her girls who were living on public welfare in a poor section of town. As a result of her husband’s tragedy, Miriam had a religious epiphany and isolated herself from the rest of his family from then on. I never saw them again.

Juhannus, or the Midsummer Eve’s Solstice, occurred during my Helsinki visit, a most celebrated annual Finnish holiday. All my maternal relatives and I spent that weekend at the old farmhouse Aunt Hilja and Uncle Toivo owned in Järvenpää, their summer retreat north of Helsinki where Mamma’s family side went to celebrate Juhannus. And a festive occasion it was for all of us kinfolk. Since liquor was expected to flow copiously all the men folk turned their car keys over to the women on that evening lest someone had the urge to drive to central Järvenpää during the weekend in their cups. For Finnish drunk driving laws were severe guaranteeing a couple of months of jail time at hard labor plus stiff fines. No excuses! Soon as we got together on Saturday night we heated up the sauna where the men went stag first while the women did the cooking and baking for dinner. Soon as we hit the sauna we began circulating the bottle around to get thoroughly lubricated while self-flagellating with bouquets of birch twigs called vihtas. We entertained ourselves with ribald jokes and songs. By dinner time we were in a most jovial space as we dived into our copious holiday meal. After dinner the women and children retreated into the kitchen while us guys dedicated ourselves to some serious drinking, jawboning and laughter. The sky in central Järvenpää was aglow from the light of the Juhannus community bonfire or kokko that entertained the townsfolk that night. We were pretty much aglow ourselves about midnight when the women burst into the dining room bearing us trays of a bounteous second supper and dessert. After which we engaged in nightcaps until one by one we nodded off for the night on the benches where we sat. We breakfasted off our hangovers the next morning and lazed around talking and shooting darts in which Uncle Eino was the undisputed champion. During the afternoon after cleanup, one by one our carloads repaired back to the workaday world of Helsinki. What a glorious homecoming to the Finland of my extended family!

NORTHWARD BOUND

Now it was north to Lahti to meet some cousins from Pappa’s side of the family. There I met four middle-aged sisters who were daughters of my late uncle Pekka Siitonen and their families. The oldest was Bertha Saarinen, a widow whose son Pertti Saarinen was the proprietor of a large sporting goods store in downtown Lahti who was a year my junior. Next was the widowed Elvi Pajunen whose daughter Anneli was married to brewery worker Kalevi Häggröth and had two daughters Maija and Liisa. Kerttu was married to Matti Silvennoinen who were partners in a neighborhood grocery store, whose son Pentti was a civil engineer in Lahti, who was married to Soili and had a son and two daughters. The youngest cousin was Meeri Kapanen, married to Osmo, with two adult daughters and a son. Meeri and Osmo moved to Boras, Sweden later to work in a factory since there was considerable unemployment in Finland in 1963. After Osmo’s premature death, Meeri came back to Lahti to live for her retirement years. My uncle Pekka, a baker by trade, had been a Marxist Socialist who had died from an illness contracted in a White Guard jail during the 1918 Finnish Civil War, cited early in these Memoirs. Bertha and Elvi were the only ones of his daughters who were political: Bertha a Social Democrat and Elvi a Communist. These two sisters hadn’t spoken to each other for years due to their political differences, as Meeri tearfully told me on a subsequent visit to Finland. All were exceptionally hospitable to me as their Amerikan serkku (American cousin). It was a great visit for me. Kerttu and Matti escorted me to a hovercraft ferry boat at Lahti’s harbor which skimmed through a chain of lakes and negotiated a series of locks all the way to the thriving city of Jyväskylä in Central Finland where I took the train to Oulu to meet family.

OULU

The progeny of Pappa’s late sister Maiju Majonen lived in Oulu moving there as refugees when Karelia was evacuated to Soviet rule as a result of the war years. Two of Maiju’s offspring, a boy and a girl, had died from tuberculosis. Her son Eino and his wife Hilma had ten children born to them and her daughter Lempi Jaakkonen lived with her husband Voitto and four young children in Kemijärvi in Finnish Lapland. My cousin Eino had died shortly before my visit and Hilma lived on welfare with her brood in a poor working class area of Oulu. Two of her sons were absent on my visit. The oldest Pertti was in Russia working for a Finnish company building a power plant in Soviet Karelia. The second boy Wilho had been adopted by my U.S. Uncle August Siitonen at 15 and was living in Connecticut as I’ve cited earlier. Hilma’s oldest daughter Terttu was working and living at home in Oulu as was a third son Martti, a young machinist. Four teenage daughters were living with the family and still in school. Two last-born boys Tapani and Harri (perhaps named after me) were recent arrivals before their father’s death and were sleeping in bureau drawers in the cramped tenement. I had brought them a large box of chocolates, and only stayed a few hours and left in time to pick up the Helsinki to Rovaniemi evening train to Lapland. It was not my last visit to the Majonen second cousins, my next being in 1977 when I got to know them better. After taking a group photo of the brood in the back yard, I walked back to the station accompanied by Terttu and Martti.

KEMIJÄRVI

I believe I slept all that night on the train to Rovaniemi, the capital city of Lapland. Since it was midsummer there was sunlight 24.7 in the northern reaches of Finland. A local train took me to Kemijärvi toward Finland’s Eastern border with Russia. I took a cab from downtown Kemijärvi to my cousin Lempi’s place. I don’t recall their children’s name except for the only girl’s which was Ansa, about eight years old. Also Kari, the middle son who was a bit developmentally disabled, but a good hospitable kid. The oldest boy may have been 12 and the youngest, four. Lempi was quiet, but smart and embittered by a hard life that had known war, poverty, and hunger. and in her late thirties. Husband Voitto was a power line electrician by trade whom Lempi had met in Karelia where he was a Finnish soldier during the Continuation War of 1941–’44. He was from the Kemijärvi area and brought his bride home with him after being released from the army.

Voitto was a strong union man and a dogmatic party-line Communist. Stubborn and set in his ways but a good provider for his family., and more of a talker than Lempi. One might wonder after facing off with the Russians during the war, why he wasn’t anti-Soviet? If you’ve ever read the great Finnish war novelist Vaino Linna’s celebrated book, Tuntematon Sotilas (Unknown Soldier) about the Continuation War in its poor English translation, you’ll find that Lahtinen, the machine gunner, who was one of the best soldiers in the novel with a high kill ratio, was a Communist who remarked that once Finland had crossed the old border into Soviet Karelia, Finland was no longer fighting a defensive war. But he fought for Finland until his own death at the front. The Finnish Civil War had been fought as recently as 1918, and there was considerable hatred of Finnish capitalism among the ensuing generation of working class Finns that Mannerheim had worried about in assessing the loyalty of his troops. Probably the reason why a Finnish communist would stick with the Army and not rebel was that in combat situations the soldier’s loyalty is not so much a love for “Mother, God, and Country,” nor his officers, but one of allegiance to his buddies in the foxholes, the only family he had when trying to survive in the reality of his immediate daily perils. There is no one so close to you then than the buddies whose fate you share in those situations. Ideology becomes meaningless. “Unknown Soldier” bore that out.

I’m sure Voitto was a loyal Party member but the people of Northern Finland who led hard daily lives had a more elemental hatred of passion against their class masters than the disciplined middle class intellectuals of the Party. Theirs was a hatred of the wealthy classes known as herra viha, (hatred of the bosses) as was common in the industrial working class through bitter historical experience. In the rural forested reaches of the Tornio Valley between Finland and Sweden among the sparsely-educated poor the extremes were fundamentalist Laestadian religion and korpi kommunismi (backwoods communism.) Their communism was not necessarily that of organized party membership but an anarchic hatred of all authority. (For years I had a large red poster on my wall which read “Fuck Authority!” In the lower right corner was a tiny cartoon character who questioned a friend: “All authority?” Response: “Yep, all authority.” This fierce rebel spirit was also more true in Lapland’s town and village industry than in wealthier Southern Finland’s urbanism. Even in Voitto’s deep sense of CP conformity I spotted a spark of this anti-authoritarianism. My Kemijärvi cousin Lempi was leftist herself due to our family background which had seen two of our uncles as victims of White Terror in 1918. Yet she was cynical of her husband’s politics and would make cutting asides when he would boast of some article in his CP paper. Lempi was an omnivorous self-educated reader of a higher level of literature than appeared in any pedantic party press. I became quite fond of her and we had numerous discussions of common interests over the years during my Kemijärvi visits and correspondence. I really felt solidly at home with this branch of our family.

TAMPERE

On the way back on the train to Helsinki I just had to stay overnight in the historic industrial city of Tampere toward the south of Finland where the final great battle that broke the back of Finland’s Red Guard workers’ army in its civil war by General Karl Gustave Mannerheim’s White army in 1918. The Red Guard resisted fiercely in its last redoubt in the great market square (tori)in the city center. The White forces had a commanding hillside position at Tammela market tori south of the great marketplace where their artillery could bombard the Red defenders of Tampere at will taking a huge toll. Finally, with no food, little ammunition left they were forced to surrender unconditionally. A sizeable detachment of the Red forces led by a colorful, resourceful commander named Werner Lehtimäki did escape the slaughter traveling over the ice of one of the lakes dotting the city and eventually fight its way over the border into the new Soviet Union. Lehtimäki, originally a Red Guard cavalry leader from Turku, had a great initial importance in founding the Soviet Air Force in which he was promoted a colonel. But he met the fate of many a Finnish Communist in Russia in 1938 when he was arrested by the NKVD and executed by Stalin’s death squads. Meanwhile, a mass slaughter of both Red Guard warriors and left-wing civilians turned Tampere into a bloodbath. Tauno Ahonen, a Berkeley Co-op social democrat and Hall Finn told me many years later that he was 14 years old in Tampere when he saw the White gendarmes shoot his civilian father in broad daylight for having a membership card of the Finnish Social Democratic Party in his pocket.

Tampere in 1963, a beautiful industrial leftist city still, was split in two, by the mill rapids cutting its through its downtown, joined by a bridge called Tammerkosken Silta (Tampere Rapids Bridge). It housed and still does the elegant Workers’ Theater where I’ve seen some magnificent drama over my many visits to what has become my favorite Finnish city. Tampere’s Labor Temple still houses the Lenin Museum, the only one of its kind, outside of Russia, that I’ve visited over the years and is a popular tourist attraction. It reflects historic accuracy in its exhibits and not CP propaganda. The evening I spent in Tampere was at a dance held in the big ballroom of the Labor Temple and chanced to dance with several women. Beer and wine were sold at the ballroom but the Finnish law then read that one needed to buy a dinner to be served alcohol whether you ate it or not, to discourage drunkenness. Both the dinner and the beer tasted good. My tablemate was a young Finnish factory worker and trade union rank and filer with whom I had a good conversation.

SO LONG, FINLAND — FOR NOW

My last night in Finland was a “boys’ night out,” with Uncle Eino, Cousin Pertti and Cousin Pirkko’s hubby, Raimo Hellgren. The men gave their car keys to the women, and we took the bus downtown to the Olympic Stadium where we watched Finland’s national soccer team play Portugal. The lads from the Iberian Peninsula won. We then repaired to a popular Helsinki night club where we ate dinner. Featured that night was a modern dance orchestra from Spain. We did a lot of drinking with the food where we celebrated the conclusion of my first visit to Vanhaan maahan {The Old Country). Deep in my cups, once during intermission I approached the stage and tried to converse in Spanish with the musicians, making a spectacle of myself which the band members took in good humor as just another drunken Finn making a fool of himself. We went home by taxi which dropped Uncle Eino and me off at his and Aunt Helmi’s place where I was staying. Next morning after waking up hung over and nauseous, Raiku picked me up and drove me to the airport to catch my Finnair flight to Copenhagen.

COPENHAGEN, BRUSSELS, AMSTERDAM

Sightseeing in Copenhagen included hanging around in the Tivoli, a grand recreation park; eating and strolling the streets. An unusual sight for me was seeing matronly, prosperous Danish women through restaurant windows sitting and enjoying lunch and drinks, smoking fat cigars! Quite common, I learned. In the evening I wandered over to Nyhaven, the port for Copenhagen and had a couple of beers in the seaman’s bars along the docks, where numerous ships were moored. It was dusk by then when I spotted a bunch of somewhat drunken Finnish seamen walking by and talking and singing loudly. One of their crew mates came running up to them yelling: “Hey, Saastamoinen, I just found a bunch of Belgian seamen who want to fight!” Whereupon all the young Finn huskies ran off eager for a good old-fashioned brawl along the docks. Shades of Isontalon Antti and Rannanjärvi, two notorious Finnish knife fighting street brawlers around Vaasa, who were the dubious heroes of song and legend in the early 20th Century. I doubt if the passing Finn sailors were packing sharp steel where their ham-handed fists would do the trick. Being more of a lover than a fighter, I slunk off into the night to my lodging, to get a good night’s sleep before catching the morning train to Brussels and points east.

In Brussels after checking into a hotel, I took a guided bus tour around the city with its impressive period architecture. The only specific feature of the tour I remember was the statue of the famous little boy holding his pecker and pissing and pissing forever into the waters of the harbor, the most popular postcard image of what you can send home to loved ones from that city. After dinner I stopped for a couple of brews in a dance bar before retiring for the morning train to the Netherlands. When I pulled up my blanket in the hotel I saw my sheets crawling with cockroaches, my first and only such experience in a lifetime. I killed all I could and slept that night on top of the blankets with all my clothes on. Merci, Brussels!

Passport inspections and money changing from Belgian francs to Dutch guilders took place as the train crossed the border between the two countries. I tramped all over the streets of colorful Amsterdam during the day, and took in a visit to Anne Frank House, a must for every anti-fascist and compassionate human being. That evening I walked the canal streets around Amsterdam’s notorious red light district, which featured picture windows with prostitutes sitting behind them awaiting visits from a horny international clientele. I saw a young Indonesian beauty awaiting behind one of them, rang the doorbell and walked in. She was extraordinarily pretty but had a cold, bored look and never cracked a smile the whole time we were perfunctorily engaged. Our only witness was her large pet dog who looked equally bored as he watched our all-too-brief exchange. As I walked further in the district, an attractive, tall, and buxom Dutch streetwalker approached me with a broad friendly smile and asked if I wanted “to play.” But I was too sexually spent at that point and politely demurred. It was a wrap for the evening and Amsterdam.

HAMBURG AND COLOGNE

Hamburg, Germany was my next train destination. I’ve always enjoyed seaports around the world, whether they be Boston, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Helsinki, or Copenhagen’s Nyhaven. Hamburg, which has had a revolutionary working class history with its raucous maritime atmosphere was no exception. Another walking experience of its streets, as well as a visit to its excellent maritime museum. My base was a bed-and-breakfast in the St. Pauli District near the raunchy night club tradition of the Reeperbahn. Allied saturation bombings during WWII had subjected the city to firestorms but by 1963 it seemed pretty much on the road to recovery with its pulsating nightlife that drew German as well as huge monster crowds from around the world. I spent a couple of hours in a packed transgender nightclub, where the performances left nothing to the imagination. A narrow alleyway named Herbertstrasse featured picture window whores like in Amsterdam but raunchier. The street outside was wall to wall people, both men and women (although women and juveniles were supposed to be barred), to gawk and take snapshots. Every once in a while a man would sneak in through a door when a comely fraulein would beckon from behind a window. I was one of them!

I spotted an older blond woman in one of the windows dressed in the leathers of a dominatrix with hip-high boots, with short leather skirt and exposed upper thighs. I had never been with a much older woman and was turned on by her leather garb. She smiled at me and motioned with her forefinger. I was tempted but saw her wrinkly skin and briefly moved down the row of windows. I then spotted a younger beautiful commanding-looking dom garbed in green leathers plus a visored cap. She noticed me and nodded to me with an imperious look whereupon I meekly went inside. She was a tall, athletic woman with the muscularity of a discus thrower. She pushed me onto my back on her cot, pulled my trousers down and pinned my arms and shoulders to the mattress with her superior strength. She never cracked a smile as she straddled me haughtily. I totally surrendered to her and discovered a profound submissiveness in me, a kinkiness I had only experienced in my imagination before. As mentioned earlier I occasionally frequented the gay baths in San Francisco, but now discovered a new aspect of my sexual personality that has stayed with me since. Politically, I’ve always been anti-authoritarian but in this sense of intimate sexual kink I found another me. I recall this all-too-brief episode on Herbertstrasse the highlight of my visit to Hamburg.

Next morning I was on a plane to Cologne (Köln), fourth largest city in Germany and the biggest in the North Rhine-Westphalia region. The taxi driver who picked me up at the airport, said his wife operated a bed and breakfast service in their home, so I immediately found a place to stay. Founded by the Romans about 50AD, Cologne numbered close to a million people around my visit, although its city center had been devastated by Allied aerial bombing during the war, including its leading tourist attraction, the twin-spired Cologne Cathedral. 20,000 civilians were killed and it lost 95% of its population, mostly through mass evacuation. But the industrious Germans had pretty much rebuilt the center by 1963. There was still some serious damage to the Cathedral but I was able to climb the iron stairs to the top, although quite winded due to my smoking habit then. I had a magnificent view of the Rhine River and the surrounding area from its height.

Later in the day I sat in an outdoor restaurant overlooking the west bank of the Rhine River where I enjoyed watching an endless cavalcade of shipping as it served the commerce of that great body of water. I enjoyed dinner and afterwards was invited to a nearby table for beers by a grossly overweight middle aged man with a puffed out face and thick lips surrounded by a bevy of beautiful young German women who knew no English. The man spoke a very broken and limited English. I couldn’t figure out whether he was a pimp overseeing his stable of desirables or a gangster boss with his own personal harem. I was uncomfortable with his questioning, pumping me for information, licking his thick lips in an unsavory manner, sizing me up through his thick glasses. He had the appearance of some hanger-on from the Nazi period. I was apprehensive about him and his motives but left the café and the creep and his entourage soon afterward for my B&B. Next day I was on a Lufthansa flight to London to round out my European tour.

LONDON, OXFORD, AND HOME

I settled into a popular bed and breakfast in London’s Kensington District for my remaining two weeks in Europe. I had broken off a porcelain cap on a prominent front tooth before the trip and went to a neighborhood dentist in London hoping I would qualify for free treatment under the National Health Service law. Not true, so I ended up with a $26 payment for several visits total in British currency. English meals weren’t the greatest so most of my evening meals I ate in the Soho District with its Italian, Greek, Chinese, Indian, and other European-style cuisine. We were served an enormous but not very tasty breakfast at the B&B and that generally sufficed me until dinner time except for the delicious bar foods at London’s comfy pubs which I washed down with warm draft beer as did the local “proles” although bottled beer was available, kept in refrigerated coolers. As they say: “In Rome, do as the Romans do.”

I probably would have gotten besotted every night except for the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner orators where I listened most evenings. The park was packed every night and I heard the best, cleverest soapbox artists I’ve ever heard in my life in their eloquence. The hecklers were as clever and their retorts frequently surpassed those of the speakers in the quality of their responses. May we have mercy on the soapboxers who didn’t have some of their facts straight, as the hecklers were relentless in cutting them down to size. Some of the best comedy I heard in my life was in Hyde Park. Both the regular crowds and I enjoyed these spectacles and were a highlight of my London stopover.

Exploring the usual tourist sites was part of my London itinerary. I even visited the infamous Tower of London where beheadings of royalty were commonplace in early British ruling class history. Although capital punishment was no longer on the political agenda, these earlier official murders were no different from those practiced by the Islamic State and Saudi Arabia in 2016 as this journal is being written. The death penalty has been ended in many of the countries of Western Civilization, except in our own United States but for some states. To me, hangings, firing squads, gas chambers, and electric chairs are as much “cruel and unusual punishment” as beheadings. Killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan by drones launched remotely from secret sites in the United States are no less reprehensible. “Collateral damage,” indeed!

The House of Parliament was another institution that was a must visit for me. Left Labor MP Fenner Brockway had invited me to look him up at Parliament if I ever visited London during his speaking visit to the Los Angeles SP in the 1950s. He was a WWI pacifist who had done jail time, but during WWII supported the Allies because of Hitler. Along with Bertrand Russell, Brockway was an advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament, fought racism and to free Britain’s colonies. He was a member of the newspaper Tribune’s left bloc in Parliament which included Barbara Castle, George Woodcock, Michael Foot, and led by Aneurin Bevan who differed from Brockway on nukes as he wanted to retain them as a bargaining chip with the Russians. I did meet Brockway in the lobby of Parliament who invited me to come listen to his speech advocating independence for one of the African countries that same day. Which I gladly did from my visitors’ gallery perch. Amid “Hear!, Hears!”, from the Labor side of the aisle, and silence from the Tories’. Seeing English Parliamentary debate in the flesh shored up my belief in political democracy and free debate. In Great Britain, which brought civilization the Magna Carta, while the processes of full democracy only came about because of the working classes’ Chartist mass movement of the 19th century to establish universal suffrage, although British women didn’t fully win the vote until 1926 at age 21, with no property restrictions.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

The Summer of 1963 produced one of the greatest public scandals in modern English history with the Profumo trial, splashed far and wide by a sensationalist press. John Profumo was an older Secretary for War in the Conservative Government of Prime Minster Harold MacMillan who in 1961 was exposed for his sexual dalliances with a young aspiring model and “party girl” Christine Keeler, 21, whom he met at a swimming pool party at the home of Stephen Ward, a celebrity osteopath who was something of a glorified pimp who brought powerful politicians together with young women of “loose virtues” which also involved Keeler’s close friend Mandy Rice-Davies, 19, also trying to make it as a model and sleeping around to achieve these goals with numerous men. The two were not exactly high fashion models walking stylish runways, as Keeler’s photos had appeared in a salacious little rag called “Tit-Bits.” The yellow press and other media broadcast the details of the trial in garish and full living color on a daily basis. Profumo denied his involvement with these young women but finally admitted it. He was forced to resign his cabinet post and later the same year MacMillan’s Tory government fell. In August celebrity party host and sexual fixer Stephen Ward committed suicide. One of my housemates at the B&B was a young factory worker from the north of England who was spending his two-week vacation daily sitting in the gallery at the Old Bailey savoring the trial of this prominent ruling class figure, and enjoying every minute of it drooling at the juicy details as they unfolded. He would give me a full account of what he witnessed during the day each night, delighted in describing the most lurid elements of the testimony. It was the most exciting experience of his young life to that point as he thoroughly reveled in hearing this arrogant henchman of the English ruling class being cut down to size.

OXFORD — SO LONG, ENGLAND

My old SP Oakland comrade Bruce Aubry was now studying at the Ruskin Labor College in Oxford, so I took a day trip by train to see him. It was a humming ancient university town and a lively commercial center. Because of its lack of heavy industry it had escaped much of the bombing by the Luftwaffe during WWII. I walked about town, got a haircut and joined Bruce and one of his young Laborite professors for an early evening dinner at picturesque outdoor café along the Thames river. We engaged in lively conversation about political events. Much of this was centered around the Kennedy Administration in the States. We focused somewhat on the Cuban missile crisis from August 16 to 28 of the previous year. The United States had established American missile facilities in Turkey and Italy pointed toward the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev had countered at the request of Fidel Castro to secretly transport Russian missiles to Cuba to confront the Americans in turn. This was discovered by American U2 spy planes which came within a hair of turning the Cold War into hot war which would have set off the nuclear arsenals of both powers guaranteeing our mutual destruction. The US set up a blockade of Cuban waters to intensify the crisis. Khrushchev blinked first and proceeded to remove his missiles from Cuba in a deal that followed. A hotline was established between the two superpowers which cooled off similar confrontations ever since. Secretly, JFK later removed his missile weaponry from Turkey and Italy. While Bruce was condemnatory of Kennedy throughout our discussion, his friend and I both concurred that reason on both sides prevailed over insanity at the brink of total disaster. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were rational men who finally backed off from an unspeakable precipice of a nuclear holocaust. I took the evening train back to London and shortly thereafter met my Berkeley Coop friends at Heathrow Airport for our long flight back to the Bay Area. Thus ended the first of my several European trips over the years. Later Bruce returned to Ruskin full-time and became an important scholar immersed in the life and career of miner James Keir Hardie, an early British working class socialist and labor MP.

S.F. JOB PRINTERS’ STRIKE — JFK MURDER

I returned to work with the Union bogged down in stalemated negotiations with the Graphic Arts Association of commercial shops which included the phone book publishing giant Phillips and Van Orden (PVO) and the Daily Recorder which published a financial daily plus a number of other shops, including Mercury Press, a major commercial plant.. I learned later that PVO plant management had approached the Independent Party leaders which ran the Chapel whether they’d like to accept the jurisdiction of a new technology camera the company was planning to install. “Hell, no, we’re printers, not photographers,” the hot metal hardnose politicos responded. So the company turned around and gave the camera jurisdiction to its pressmen,. I don’t know when downtown headquarters or the ITU International got wind of this, but it became central to the negotiations as this camera technology was more naturally related to typography than presswork. But the genie had escaped the jurisdictional bottle and seemed impossible to jam back in. ITU President Elmer Brown was furious and our local union negotiators led by Russ Wagle tried their best to bargain for its return with ITU Reps breathing down their necks. PVO refused to budge. There were other difficult issues in the negotiations as well that might have made a strike inevitable, but this bedrock impasse made it certain. So at a hugely-attended union meeting at the S.F. Labor Council Redstone Building main auditorium took place to consider a strike vote. Animated debate followed which climaxed with a hellfire and brimstone oration by Georgia-born rank and file Chronicle Chapel member C.M. Yongue who bellowed out: “If you ain’t got jurisdiction, you ain’t got nothin! You’re too old to dig ditches, and now they’ve got machines doin’ that. So if you ain’t got jurisdiction, you ain’t got nothin!” An uproarious cheer went up, and the strike vote was a foregone conclusion, with little visible dissent. So in September 400 job printers in these shops hit the bricks which became a difficult eleven-month strike stretching well into 1964. The struck employers were prepared for this and immediately brought in hundreds of professional scab printers to take our jobs. The American Newspaper Publishers Association financed a school in Oklahoma City to train professional strikebreakers by the hundreds to undermine and defeat newspaper strikes with considerable success. This may have been their first major venture into commercial ITU strikes as this scurvy lot flooded the composing rooms of PVO and The Recorder.

Strike sanction was refused to us by the S.F. Labor Council because with the objection of the Pressmen’s and Lithographers’ unions it was considered a jurisdictional dispute. So it looked like we would be going it alone without broader union support. But the more militant unions in the S.F. Bay Area began to rally to our support over the stench of hundreds of scabs polluting the environment of one of the strongest labor towns in the United States.

So the strike became a dominant factor in the lives of us newspaper printers as well as in our spare time after or before work we’d augment the picket lines of our commercial shop brother and sisters or volunteer for assignments at strike headquarters in a warehouse South of Market Street. This extracurricular strike activity work took so much of my free time that I moved back into San Francisco and gave Mamma the opportunity to move into my watchmaker’s apartment in West Berkeley which she loved as well as I did. I rented a rather decrepit first floor furnished apartment on 15th Street near Mission in the City where I hung my hat for some months. The saving of a long commute from Berkeley to S.F. did give me some extra breathing room. I did enroll in a labor studies class at the University of San Francisco to learn practical points about collective bargaining and labor law.

As we union printers were generally older people we had no easy way to physically get rid of the scabs. But innovating ideas came to the fore to hit the ratted plants. During the baseball season Mercury Press printed the score cards that were distributed at Candlestick Park during S.F. Giants’ games. These cards were now being printed by scabs inside Mercury. Hank Saucedo one of the striking Mercury typesetters came up with a brilliant strategy. Why doesn’t the union have its own scorecards printed at one of our shops not on strike, and send our members to Candlestick to distribute them free to the fans, with a message not to buy the scab cards or programs but use ours at no cost? It worked! Many of us would show up at the ballpark entry way to give them out to the fans before a game. Of course it wouldn’t bring Mercury Press to its knees, but it was one of these innovative strike tactics that helped our cause. Around the afternoon quitting times around the Recorder newspaper on Van Ness of Market, a concentration of members would arrive to supplement the picket line to intimidate the scabs getting off shift. Dennis Crowley, one of the PVO strikers, a burley giant of a man would join the Recorder pickets at that time to accentuate our presence even more. Not that there were any physical altercations involved, as there was also a large police presence on the scene. Many of S.F.’s “finest” weren’t that happy to be there to protect the “ratfinks” coming out. In more than one conversation with them, a cop would insure us that he came from a union family, with both parents involved in organizing into unions following the General Strike of 1934 and had no use for scabs. Generally, a cop would come to inform us during shift change when the scabs were leaving the building. Of course their job was “to keep the peace,” but rest assured if any violence occurred on the streets, it wouldn’t be the scabs who would get their heads bashed with police night sticks. So if any of this scurvy lot was to get a thumping, it would have to be done out of the sight of the picket line.

1963 MARCH ON WASHINGTON

One of the greatest mass demonstrations for human rights in US History was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC on August 4, 1963 which drew an estimated 250,000 participants. It was highlighted by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr’s magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, one of the greatest of its kind in American history. But it took extraordinary organizational skills and inspiration to accomplish its success. Credit needs to go to two U.S. Socialist and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, president of the Sleeping Car Porters’ Union, and brilliant on-the-ground organizer of events of these dimensions, Bayard Rustin, whose great successes were accomplished mostly behind the scenes. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the long-range results of the March.

BULLETIN: PRESIDENT KENNEDY SHOT! I was working on my ad frame during the day shift on November 22, 1963, when someone ran out of the Chronicle editorial room yelling that our President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed while in a car cavalcade on the streets of Dallas, Texas. A somber mood enveloped us for the rest of the day. Although I was no great admirer of Kennedy, I didn’t think this was right. The whole country went into mourning. Consensus was that his assassin was an unstable loner named Lee Harvey Oswald who had fired the shots through an upper window of the Texas Book Depository as JFK’s procession was passing by who himself was shot by nightclub operator Jack Ruby while Oswald was in police custody. All kinds of conspiracy theories immediately hit the fan of who JFK’s real killers were, which still persist to this day. My own conclusion was that the public version was true, as none of the conspiracy theories had sufficient credibility to back them up. So Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as President setting up his own contradictory precedents. To his credit, LBJ in his early stages was able to carry out a lot of the Great Society domestic reforms that had stalled during the Kennedy Administration. It was, of course, the massive pressures from the movements in the streets that brought about these legislative results, as the late American historian Howard Zinn often pointed out. And so ended the year 1963.

SHERATON PALACE AND AUTO ROW SIT-INS

The explosions in the South for civil rights direct auction were really catching fire for voters rights and integration in 1964 and the San Francisco Bay Area joined the fight particularly with the demonstrations, picketing and sit-ins firing up at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco demanding the opulent hotel hire blacks for visible front desk jobs besides those of maids, custodians and baggage handlers. On March 1, 1964 the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, led by an African-American woman Tracy Sims, 18, a college dropout, descended with mass picketing of Sheraton Palace with hundreds of interracial supporters, mostly college students. Blacks were employed as maids, janitors, kitchen help and baggage handlers at the Sheraton, but none holding visible front lobby jobs who would be seen by the affluent guests. So there were hundreds of arrests of protestors sitting down and linking arms in the front lobby, defiantly singing “We Shall Overcome” and “America, the Beautiful” as the cops beat them up and dragged them into the paddy wagons. Sims herself was arrested and cuffed several times but she came back for more. Future S.F. supervisor and City Attorney Terry Hallinan and three of his brothers were among those busted as well as well-known African-American community leaders. But the impact of this non-stop militance that lasted several days was not to be denied, the Sheraton caved in and Sims and her movement finally hammered out an agreement with the Sheraton whereby the Hotel Employers’ Association agreed to open hiring to all minority groups for all jobs across the board in the City’s hotel industry.

Immediately upon victory, this nonviolent movement of the streets moved on to Van Ness Avenue’s Auto Row, focusing on the prominent Cadillac dealership to break open its resistance to the hiring of non-white sales clerks on the showroom floor. The same wave of action, street picketing, mass sit-ins in the sales spaces, numerous arrests and re-arrests proved an irresistible movement that ended up with victory for its demands. This time Vivian Hallinen, mother of the fighting Hallinan brothers and wife of prominent San Francisco left wing attorney Vincent Hallinan felt the pressure of handcuffs on her wrists for her activist role in the Auto Row campaign.

FREEDOM SUMMER IN MISSISSIPPI

“Black and White Together” was the theme of the 1964 Freedom Summer project in Mississippi to register black voters and to involve them in politics on a large scale was initiated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to bring hundreds of white college students from the North to join with the Mississippi African-American community for a massive voter registration and political organizing campaign in one of the most segregated states in the Union. Civil rights leader Robert Moses was the director of the project. It involved the development of Freedom Schools around the state to facilitate the campaign. Mississippi NAACP leader WWII veteran Medgar Evers had been murdered by a white supremacist in 1963 to punctuate the urgency of the campaign. Coordinator of the Freedom Schools was a young scholar-activist Staughton Lynd (b.1929) who eventually became a prominent attorney in the US human rights and rank-and-file labor movement along with his wife Alice. About 60,000 Mississippi black residents were involved in the successful registration campaign assisted by young student volunteers such as Mario Savio who soon after became prominent in the UC-Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and Marshall Gans who went on to earn his spurs in helping organize the United Farm Workers in 1965.

DEM CONVENTION STIFFS MFDP DELEGATION

The most successful preliminary outcome of Mississippi Freedom Summer was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party led by Fanny Lou Hamer (1917–1977) with its all-black delegation going to the August, 1964 Democratic Party Convention with aim of unseating the segregated all-white regular Party delegation. They got a complete run-around from the Party honchos whose primary aim was to elect President Lyndon Johnson to a second full term. The only concession that liberal Dem powerhouses like Walter Reuther and Hubert Humphrey made to the MFDP was an offer to seat one of its members to one non-voting guest seat with the segregated all-white delegation maintaining their seats and voting status, So scared were these mainstream liberals about upsetting the applecart. Hamer and her colleagues rejected this insulting tokenism and returned home. Hamer did run her own independent MFDP campaign for Congress and lost with this electoral effort for racial equity fading from the scene.

GOP CONVENTION PICKS GOLDWATER

Another major commercial strike action took place around the time of the Republican Convention which was held in San Francisco in July of 1964. The convention itself was held at the Cow Palace in Daly City while the GOP Convention Headquarters was in a hotel on Powell Street near Union Square. The extreme right wing candidate Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona (1909–1998) at the time of the convention was favored to win the nomination with his hard-charging campaign, after the candidacy of moderate Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller had collapsed amid accusations about his personal character by his political opponents on the right. So the liberal Republican governor of Pennsylvania William Scranton tried to step into the breach to represent the more liberal Eastern Seaboard GOP politics and stop the Goldwater tide. But it was too late.

Our Union saw that the Goldwater campaign literature had no union label and was being printed in some of the ratted job shops. So one afternoon several hundred of us converged on Powell Street at the GOP headquarters with leaflets and signs to protest the scab printing by the Goldwater camp. Supporters of the Scranton candidacy talked with us sympathetically since in those days, usually even the Republican Party campaigns had seen the value of the union label and used it in their election printing. My former Socialist comrade Larry Brayton was now present with the Alaska Scranton GOP delegation and sympathized with us. But the Goldwaterites who were vehemently anti-labor could care less. There were some fisticuffs at our demo on Powell as a vehemently obnoxious young Goldwater campaigner with a straw hat tried to jump one of our ranks, when a hefty older printer knocked him down with one solid blow, bloodying the squirt’s nose. Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination easily on the first ballot over Scranton at the Cow Palace. His campaign set the Republican Party on a right wing trajectory that has continued to this day in 2016 where any moderates hardly exist within it, and the ultra-right nativist Tea Party faction is a major factor in its ultra-right composition.

LOCAL 21 ENDORSES LBJ

The war that the French colonialism sensibly abandoned in Vietnam was escalating with US imperialism increasing its stake in the conflict against its communist National Liberation Front and its control in North Vietnam. Presidential candidate Senator Goldwater boasted that the US should escalate its bombing of the region turning the country into one big parking lot. At that point Democratic candidate President Lyndon Johnson said that: “In Vietnam it’s the Asian boys who should be doing the fighting rather than the American boys.” Traditionally, the ITU had not made endorsements in Presidential campaigns, but Goldwater’s belligerence scared the hell out of me, fearing it would bring about a wholesale world conflagration again. So I wrote a proclamation that I presented at the local union meeting to officially endorse LBJ’s candidacy in the 1964 elections in face of the Goldwater threat. Here I was an opponent of the Realignment politics of the Socialist Party and making a huge departure from my old stance of not supporting capitalist political parties for what I saw as an emergency exception. My motion carried almost unanimously despite some token opposition. Now I very much regret my action in that it was LBJ who made the biggest commitment of US ground troops to Vietnam of any one based on a fake Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the war into a disastrous major conflict which we eventually lost.

1964 SOCIALIST PARTY CONVENTION

I don’t know how I found the time that Summer but I attended the Socialist Party Convention in Chicago as a delegate. Factional lines were hardening between the Realignment Caucus and its opponents of Third Camp persuasion. Right wing Shachtmanites were leading members of Realignment whereas their left wingers Ann Draper and Phyllis Jacobson generally voted together with our traditional SP anti-war activists like David McReynolds with which group I identified. With contrasting resolutions on unilateral and negotiated nuclear disarmament, after extended debate the latter statement won out by not too much of a margin. In another debate over war issues an old Chicago comrade Virgil J. Vogel went emotionally ballistic in his retort to remarks of another delegate who was somewhat critically supportive of US foreign policy. Virgil then tearfully apologized over his outburst to the convention: “I’m sorry, comrades.” In another hot debate, an anti-Realignment delegate compared working in the Democratic Party to that of a whorehouse, whereupon Paul Feldman, a top Realignment supporter and editor of the Party’s newspaper “New America” angrily took the floor and screamed: “Yes, we’re going into the Democratic Party whorehouse to fuck and not play games!” Venerable Sam Friedman, the SP’s former Vice Presidential candidate, rose to object to the obscene language just expressed. One of the more memorable events I recall from the convention was the featured speech by the recently-recruited world-renowned social psychologist Erich Fromm at the University of Chicago on “Socialist Humanism” before a packed auditorium. He was elected as a member of our National Committee at the Convention where he generally voted with the left wing. I generally ate breakfast at the convention with our national secretary, Betty Elkin, who had our Third Camp sympathies but administered her duties in a fair and impartial manner to all sides. In caucusing, our left delegates were able to get Robert “Lefty” Yamada, manager of the Berkeley Co-op Books Unlimited store, on the NC. I also got to know another young Berkeley comrade Tom Condit better who later served a short time as national secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society and was later a leading member of the Peace and Freedom Party of California founded in 1968.

SCABS DRIVEN OUT — STRIKE ENDS

The commercial strike was taking its toll on our morale and 400 scabs were still ensconced in our shops with our members doing the best we can could with no visible end in sight. Tommy Dillon, well-respected Chapel Chair at the Recorder and an Independent Party leader, was so depressed by the impasse that one morning on the way to strike duty, he drove his car to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped to his death over the rail. Tommy was a devoted family man with children and a devout Roman Catholic so his demoralization was so extreme that he saw no other way out except suicide. Another popular younger job shop striker Willy Walraven was struck by a car and killed one day on the way to Strike Headquarters, as I recall. Harold Rice, a PVO striker, would sometimes stop by at Union Headquarters and often see our cerebral President Russ Wagle sitting alone in the dark at his desk, slowly getting drunk and in deep depression. An SP Realignment social democrat of an obsessive Shachtman anti-communist tradition, and an S.F. union lithographer, blamed Leon Olson as the prime instigator of the strike as part of the CP “political line.” As I’ve gone over some of the causes earlier, this accusation was groundless. It was true that once the strike was underway, Olson used his considerable organizational talents to lead in tirelessly prosecuting the strike to the best of his ability. The S.F. Labor Council didn’t lift a finger to help us as an unprincipled Printing Specialties Division of the Pressmen’s Union signed up the PVO scabs as members with the company’s blessing! The Alameda County Central Labor Council, led by Secretary-Treasurer Robert Ash, helped us organize a car and truck caravan of East Bay unions to bring back scab-printed telephone books to PVO that had been distributed in Alameda County. That was our most successful strike tactic to that point. But something much more dramatic had to be done. By this time many unions on both side of the Bay realized that the cancer of the mass scabbing of our printing plants was most destructive to the reputation of San Francisco as a powerful union town.

TEAMSTER, LONG SHORE MUSCLE TO THE FORE

Worried about the stalemate in our job strike, the ITU sent us its toughest and most effective staff representative Milton Lomas to help prosecute the strike to a victorious end. It was realized we couldn’t do it alone despite the assistance that more and more unions were providing us so far. Lomas was a fierce no-nonsense guy and immediately went for on-the-ground assistance from two of the most powerful unions in the Bay Area and which were then independent of AFL-CIO ties, the largest Teamster Locals 85 and 70 and the International Longshore Union. Almost immediately, dozens of Teamster pickets flooded the parking lot areas of the giant PVO plant on Berry Street where most of the scabs were concentrated. The company brought in cots into the plant and food to house the scabs 24-7 as they were now fair game if they stayed at the cheap South of Market hotels for the Teamo’s “educational committee.” A much increased around-the-clock police presence was now seen surrounding the plant.

I can recall when a bunch of us Chronicle off-shift workers came to augment the intensified picketing at PVO and stopped a truck delivering paper to the plant. We threw our bodies on the ground in front of the truck halting its movement. It was an eerie feeling lying on the pavement with our bodies braced against the giant front wheels of the truck with the driver not daring to move further to crush us. It was a tense stalemate until the truck backed up and drove away with its paper undelivered. Teamster Locals across the Bay also responded with the muscle of their guys. My old SP comrade Merle P. Bigenho, now a business agent for East Bay Teamster Local 70, was among them. One day ILWU President Harry Bridges showed up in front of PVO to survey the scene. One of the S.F. Teamo heavies, a giant of a man called “Tito, the Animal,” confronted Bridges: “Harry, you’re nothing but a pussy! You got no balls left! Where are your longshoremen?” Bridges just smiled, with no comment. Next day, hundreds of ILWU demonstrators made their welcome presence. Class war was seen on San Francisco streets again!

The climax came when Louis Goldblatt, ILWU Secretary-Treasurer, went to see San Francisco Mayor John Shelley at City Hall. Shelley who had his career start in the Milk Wagon Drivers’ Local of the Teamsters Union, was more than a little concerned about the latest strike developments. Reportedly, Goldblatt warned him along these lines: “Jack, this has gone on far too long! You go to the struck printing bosses to come to an agreement with the union immediately and get the scabs out of town right now, or tomorrow morning several hundred longshoremen are going into that plant and take them out! It’s not going to look pretty!” Shelley, fearful of having blood on the streets of San Francisco on his watch, delivered. The next day the struck Graphics Arts Association bosses met with the union to settle with a contract, and sent the scabs packing. The long 11-month nightmare was over!

Although it was a victory for the union of a sorts, it was a costly one. A number of the smaller commercial shops operating on small profit margins folded up, and with the nature of the trade changing technologically, the decline of hot metal printing increased rapidly. It was costly for the union, too, as 400 printers had been getting by on rather modest strike benefits all these months along with the sizeable drain on our treasury by the very nature of major strikes. There was a huge emotional drain on all of our members and their families. The biggest relief was in driving the hundreds of scabs out of town who constituted a major blight on our working community.

LBJ SWAMPS GOLDWATER

Lyndon Johnson was a huge winner over Goldwater in November, with even many Republicans seeing the Arizona senator as too far right. LBJ was elected by a large 61.1 % of the popular vote and with an electoral vote margin of 486 to 52. But a large chunk of Southern states went to the GOP for the first time historically, through the old conservative white vote departing the Democratic Party. Johnson was right when he said that with his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under mass pressure, the South would be a goner for the Democrats from then on. A deeply embedded racism had won out. South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Goldwater’s Arizona went Republican, with more Southern states joining them in later elections. The electoral map was changing for good. I voted for the Democratic candidate for the first time because of my unrealized fears about Goldwater as the face of an American-style fascism. The only other times that I voted for Democrats for President was for George McGovern in 1972 and for a hapless Michael Dukakis in 1988 because of George H.W. Bush’s attacks on his opponent because of his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union and poorly run campaign. In 1964 I might as well have voted a protest vote for Eric Hass, candidate of the moribund Socialist Labor Party, as Johnson easily carried the usually Blue State of California’s electoral vote anyway. Or not voted at all. Same difference.

FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT AT CAL

With veterans of the Mississippi Freedom Summer enrolling at UC Berkeley like Mario Savio and the successful civil rights campaigns like with the Sheraton Palace and Auto Row sit-ins in San Francisco, the militant tide of student activism was ripe for firing up the UC Berkeley campus in the Fall quarter. Huge protests involving thousands swept the campus to establish student political rights and independent activity severely circumscribed by an anxious university administration. As the loyalty oath battle for the faculty was won, the goals of free speech and academic freedom were now joined. Student Jack Weinberg took the initiative to table for CORE in the Sproul Plaza when campus police demanded he show them his ID, which he refused. As they tried to bust him, an enraged crowd merged around the police car in which he was sitting in protest of the arrest. He was trapped in the car for 32 hours, as impromptu speakers made their case on the roof of the car to the increasing crowd of students. Soon Sproul Hall was occupied with Joan Baez leading the throng in song. So on December 2, philosophy student Mario Savio made his famous speech heard around the world which in part appears at the head of this chapter. Other soon-to-be-notable activists included Michael Rossman, Brian Turner, and still then a CP member student Bettina Aptheker. Most radicals in those days were well-dressed with suits and sports coats and stylish dresses as hippiedom was some years away. Appeals were to the best sense of patriotism and American ideals by the speakers. My IWW Fellow Worker “Sparrow” a few years back showed me a photo with Savio and his entourage standing on the Sproul Hall steps with a well-dressed law student Leland Castleberry standing right behind them holding a large American flag. This law student was the selfsame “Sparrow,” later a poverty lawyer, who is now one of my housemates at Strawberry Creek Lodge senior housing in Berkeley. The late American radical sociologist C. Wright Mills was an inspiration to this generation of students more than Lenin, which was also out there opposing the Cold War and the increasing Hot War in Vietnam. The Cuban Revolution was still an inspiration to many of them. Mass arrests at Sproul numbered about 800 with charges against them soon dropped. Establishment liberal UC President Clark Kerr was nervously trying to keep things under order by approving some concessions. Beleaguered UC Chancellor Edward Strong resigned, and Acting Chancellor Martin Meyerson came up with new liberalizing rules that designated the Sproul Hall steps as a permanent free speech space with tabling of all political views allowed for the first time on Sproul Plaza. On December 7, President Kerr was addressing a crowd of 15,000 at the Greek Theatre space on the lower slopes of the Berkeley Hills when Mario Savio charged up for a say-so at the mike. He was badly beaten by the police on the stone steps jeopardizing any previous agreements.

Escalation of the campus and community conflagrations continued into 1965 but perhaps this might be a good place to catch our breaths and resume this narrative in Memoir 22.

End of Installment 21