On to the Seventies
1969–1971

One day sometime in 1969, I was hand-billing boycott information on behalf of the United Farm Workers in front of a family grocery on San Francisco’s Haight Street, when my ex, Kathlyn showed up with her two younger girls Danette and Andrea whom I’d last seen in 1962. Somewhat of a shock as the last I’d heard she had gone to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara leaving one boy friend for another in a hasty departure like with me. It was probably a mistake to engage in conversation with her but the sight of Dani and Andrea aroused my curiosity. Kathlyn knew how to turn on the charm when she wanted to and soon we were engaged in talk again. The girls were as cute and loveable-appearing as ever. She was now living in the middle of the Haight surviving on the aid to dependent children welfare program, but never did say anything about her life elsewhere in California. My rational mind said: “Stop here!” But my emotional being accepted her invitation to visit them. Christine was now sixteen and in a SF public high school for slow learners and had a part-time after school job in the Haight-Ashbury Branch of the SF Public Library. She was the amiable girl of whom I was so fond in Berkeley, wholesome and common sense-wise as ever. In no time was I hooked and engaged in a love affair with Kathlyn again. Remarriage came up and before we knew it we were off to Carson City in my new Volvo sedan to tie the knot before a JP. She wanted a home of our own instead of a rental flop. So while I was at work, Kathlyn went house-hunting. She found one through an Excelsior District realtor at 56 Oriente Street near Geneva Ave. in Daly City just over the SF city line, a hair over a stone’s throw from the Cow Palace exhibition hall and convention center. The price was right and we moved in. The girls stayed in San Francisco schools, Chris in her opportunity high school and the little ones in St. Agnes parochial elementary school where Kathlyn was friends with the nuns, although she wasn’t a Catholic. I commuted to work via public transit.Everything went swimmingly well for starters. Kathlyn was a bit older now and seemingly more stable, The girls were a joy to be around. One Sunday we all packed into the Volvo and spent the day at Stinson Beach, frolicking in the sand and surf, enjoying our picnic lunch. One evening I drove my tribe to visit Bill and Nikki Campbell in Bernal Heights. Seeing my friends were unheard of in my first marriage to Kathlyn. Bill and Nikki, who had no children of their own, loved the kids. At home, Andrea and Dani enjoyed having me read to them in the evenings. Although Kathlyn had been negative toward my union interests in our first go-around, she agreed to go with me to a testimonial for Local 21 President Russ Wagle which had been organized by Sam Ciofalo, chapel chair at Sorg Printing and she seemed to enjoy chatting with some of my union brothers. Our sex life was better than ever.

Disturbing things begin to develop, however. Kathlyn showed distinct favoratism to her older daughters, but treated Andrea like a comparative pariah. One night she told Andrea in my hearing: “I love you because you’re my daughter, but I don’t like you,” as part of her frequent hypercritical remarks to her. Andrea was a somewhat rebellious child but did nothing to earn such hateful remarks to someone she had brought into the world. Andrea just glowered. All children in a family deserve to be treated alike. So I made it a point to always be kind and affectionate to her. Next, our sexual relations started to cool off, like in the early 1960s until they went into a deep freeze, no matter how I tried otherwise. She became more curt to me, and our conversations became more stilted as her hostility toward me increased. It was the same pattern as in 1962. I didn’t know how to turn it around as I foresaw the end closing in again. So one night I had more than enough beers on the way home although I had stayed sober so far in this marriage wanting to make it work. I yelled at her and bawled her out and then went off to bed seething. I went to work the next day and when I returned home in the afternoon she and the girls had left with whatever essentials they could carry. I was left with a houseful of furniture and a two cats she had brought into the marriage with the female giving birth to a litter of kittens shortly before her departure. Kathlyn did call me and told me they had moved in with the household of nuns she had befriended in the Haight. The cats and kittens were driving me nuts and I asked what should I do about them. She coldly said: “Call SPCA and have them put to sleep.” A drastic statement from a professed animal lover! So I did and when the SPCA people came they were reluctant to follow through as both the tom and its mate were beautiful animals. So I gave them the phone number of the nunnery to call Kathlyn, who just cold-bloodedly reaffirmed her order to put them away. So the warning Ken Ball had written me from Santa Barbara earlier in the decade about her instability came true again once more! This time we did stay in phone contract and I mailed her some family photograph albums she had left behind. I was quite devastated about what happened. After a cooling off period she suggested I file divorce proceedings and she would not ask for alimony and I could do what I wanted with the house. Of course, she did not invite me to see the girls again, although a couple of years later I was able to reconnect with them again. So I hired Jimmy Herndon my ex-union brother, cum attorney to handle the divorce. It would be uncontested with no demands from her. She even went to Jimmy’s law office to pick up the service papers for the divorce. I hated staying in the house and the long bus commute to work in Downtown San Francisco. I had gotten a dog which gave me company, an Aleutian breed I called “Kiska.” Some time later Art Stagliano called me to tell me he was leaving his wife Mary, and asked if he could move in with me for awhile until their situation was sorted out. Mary stayed in their large Victorian on Potrero Hill with their teenage children, Moira and Sean, who were attending boarding school during the school year. Stag was my closest friend in the shop and stayed with me for some months batching it until he moved in with his printer girl friend at the Chronicle, Anita Reinthaler. After Art left, I put the house up for sale with the same realtor we had bought it through, who also found me a rental tenant in the meantime, so I could move back into the City in walking distance to work, where I settled into a small apartment in the Polk Street district.

BLACK POWER ARISES IN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

New militant currents were arising in the Black Freedom Movement which challenged Rev. Martin Luther King’s Gandhian nonviolent strategy as being insufficient to the task. Black nationalist separatist movements were rising as alternatives as well as the class-oriented revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party. Let’s flashback to the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968 on a motel balcony in Memphis, TN where he had gone to support a strike of Black sanitation workers and that of Black Muslim radical leader Malcolm X at a mass meeting in New York on Feb. 21 1965 by gunmen from the conservative Nation of Islam from which the fiery Malcolm had split earlier. King’s movement had been multiracial, whereas that of Malcolm X was all black. Yet toward the end of his life, King began to look toward democratic socialism as the only feasible option to transcend the problems of capitalism and to urge immediate US military withdrawal from Vietnam to the chagrin of his establishment liberal supporters. Meantime, Malcolm was being influenced by the Trotskyist Socialist Worker Party’s Marxist-Leninist ideology. So both men were seeing capitalism as the main impediment to a better life for all when their own brief lives were cut short by killers’ bullets.

I was extremely upset and saddened by King’s murder, as only a few short weeks before a carload of us, including Linda and Ken Stevenson and John King from the shop and Delano regular Lou Berman, an old NY radical, attended a huge meeting at the Oakland Arena addressed by Dr. King, Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Baez and other celebrities. King had been as eloquent as ever and Joan Baez charmed us as usual with her golden voice. I wrote a eulogy for King which I presented in near tears at the next union chapel meeting at work as a proclamation. There were no dissenting votes and our racists kept their silence. MLK will always remain one of my favorite heroes. Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) a pre-eminent Black Power advocate, was a early supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and worked with Dr. King, Robert Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer. His stance was more militant than King’s as he developed his support of Black Power. He claimed it was at his persuasion that King publicly urged an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. He also fought against the imposition of the draft to increase the armed forces in the war and claimed authorship of the slogan; “Hell, no we won’t go!” He was arrested numerous times and founded the All-Africa Revolutionary Party and lived on the African continent for a number of years. The ultra-conservative FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saw both King and Carmichael as “threats to national security” and both the FBI and CIA hounded both men for the remainder of their lives through Cointelpro and other means.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale

Elaine Brown

Kathleen Cleaver

Eldredge Cleaver

Fred Hampton

Ericka Huggins

Chicago Court Scene

Another major Black Liberation force was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense founded in Oakland in 1966 by two Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who advocated armed self-defense if necessary. The California State Legislature went into shock one day when a squad of Black Panthers, clad in black berets and leather jackets, armed with unloaded rifles appeared in snappy military drill formation to scare the daylights out of the legislators in a brilliant piece of theater. Police brutality against black youth was a daily occurrence on Oakland streets and soon Panther patrols, rifles in hand, followed the cops on their street beats deterring them from beating up on Black citizens. The movement grew into several thousand in 68 different cities. The Party was anti-capitalist from the get-go and advocated a revolutionary Marxist politics. It was much more than an armed defense organization and operated valuable free breakfast programs for the children of the community, schools and health clinics. After its male macho beginnings, the BPP developed some important women leaders like Elaine Brown who headed its Oakland chapter from 1974–1977, Kathleen Cleaver, the spouse of early Panther militant and 1968 Presidential candidate Eldridge Cleaver, briefly activist and academic Angela Davis, and Ericka Huggins of its New Haven Chapter. Of course, its rapid growth immediately alarmed J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI which soon provided lethal force in an attempt to destroy it through Cointelpro tactics including undercover informers, fomenting deadly factionalism with other militant Black organizations and within the BPP itself. FBI operatives were responsible for murderous warfare between the BPP and the black US Organization in Southern California in which members of both groups were killed. Other Panthers were killed in shootouts with police elsewhere. In Oakland, 17-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton was murdered with at least 12 cop bullets pumped into him after he had laid down his gun and stripped off his clothes. Eldridge Cleaver and two cops were wounded in this shootout. . Cleaver jumped bail and fled to Cuba and Algeria as an aftermath, and returned to the US, converted to Mormonism and became a right wing Republican in 1980, disavowing his radical past. He died a sick, broken man in Southern California in 1998. The most grisly of these Cointelpro assassinations was that of Fred Hampton, 21, the brilliant chair of the Chicago BPP affiliate who was murdered in a meticulously scripted operation between the FBI and Chicago police while he was asleep in his bed on Dec. 4, 1969. He was sound asleep in a room that included several children and with Panther Mark Clark, 22, providing armed security in an outer room in the apartment when the hit team burst in and killing Clark in the process as they rushed in to finish off Hampton. I read later that the Feds had visited the progressive mayor of Seattle offering to provide the same kind of deadly service in eliminating the BPP leadership of that city. To his eternal credit, the mayor had allegedly told these predators-of-the-law to get lost! BPP co-founder Bobby Seale was sentenced to four years in prison for allegedly conspiring to foment the street riots around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and for his militant resistance in the courtroom which separated his trial from that of co-defendants: veteran pacifist David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and academics John Froines and Lee Weiner. (These defendants came from disparate political backgrounds so that the wit of Abbie Hoffman nailed it: “We can’t even agree on lunch.”) All these accused were found guilty, but Seale was the only one who served jail time. While on bail, Seale was again busted in New Haven in late 1969 along with Ericka Huggins as an alleged part of a murder case in which FBI BPP informant Alex Rackley had been tortured and killed by local Panthers. Thousands of movement activists were in New Haven protesting at the 1970 trial calling it a travesty as no one could get a fair hearing. Both Seale and Huggins had hung juries with the judge himself dismissing charges against them as the explosive atmosphere in the case precluded the possibilities of anyone getting a fair trial. After completing his prison sentence based on the Chicago trial Seale returned to Oakland where he ran for mayor in 1973 getting the second largest vote among nine candidates. He was still alive at this 2016 writing and has been on extensive lecture circuit, as well as otherwise recounting the history. BPP Co-founder Huey Newton wasn’t as lucky as-now elder statesman Seale, its original national chair. Despite his action packed life, Newton somehow managed a PhD from UC Santa Cruz, but by 1989 was a crack cocaine addict. As a contentious revolutionary he had made his share of enemies, including the Black Guerrilla Family, many of them ex-Panthers with drug dealing prison records who accused their former leader of abandoning BPP members in prison and of fratricide. So BGF member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, 24, shot and killed Newton as he was emerging from a crack den in the streets of Oakland at age 47 on August 22, 1989. By that time the BPP had disintegrated as an effective, cohesive organization. Panther elders like David Hilliard have done much to make known the positive achievements of the Party to the community as a whole and its profiles of courage despite the record of death and violence, much of which can be blamed on the oppressive murderous crackdown by a malevolent, militaristic capitalist government against all forms of popular rebellion from below. For most of my years I’ve been a Tolstoyan type of nonviolent rebel against state and corporate oppression with all its militaristic police powers, but I can sympathize with the motives of all rebels against racism and other forms of tyranny, no matter how counter-productive these can be at times. Even Gandhi thought that some violence is better than doing nothing at all against capitalist or state oppression.

I ‘LINE UP’ WITH THE IWW IN NOVEMBER, 1969

“Would you have freedom from wage slavery,
Then join in the grand Industrial Band;
Would you from mis’ry and hunger be free,
Then come, do your share, lend a hand.

(Chorus)

There is pow’r, there is pow’r
In a band of working folks
When they stand hand in hand,
That’s a pow’r, that’s a pow’r
That must rule in every land —
One Industrial Union Grand.”

(Adapted from “There Is Power In A Union”

—IWW song written by Joe Hill, 1913)

In 1966, Mamma was having terrible back pains for which she was hospitalized briefly at Berkeley’s Herrick Hospital. It was increasingly difficult for her to continue her independent living without someone available to assist her adequately. I did the best I could but working and living in San Francisco, I could only attend to her on one of my off-days of the week. Meanwhile sister Irma and Terry, her husband, became parents to a son, Steven Hideo Iwamoto, on August 4, 1964 in Los Angeles. My sister quit her medical secretary’s job as Terry was making a sufficiently good salary to support a small family on his income as a micro-electronics technician in the defense industry. Irma was old-fashioned in her choices and believed in raising her child as a full-time mother. So since she could check in on Mamma more frequently than I could, it was more practical to move her back to LA. Irma rented Mamma a small apartment in mid-town Los Angeles within minutes of her own rented cottage. This would enable Mamma to have frequent access to her new grandson. So in 1966 I took time off work to rent a truck and drive her and her possessions to the Southland.

In November, 1969, I made a decision to join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in addition to my membership in the ITU. During my involvement as part of the business union environment that pervaded the labor movement I saw its goals were to work for reforms within the capitalist system without transcending it to a democratic form of socialism. My political grounding was in the class division of capitalist society and in seeing labor on the losing end since the 1970s. The bureaucratic hierarchical rule seemed to be predominant in the US trade union movement whereas my own values supported rank and file democracy. My ITU had a better record on this score than most unions, but it was far from exempt from Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy.” The ethos of the IWW was influenced by the anarcho-syndicalist outlook of workers’ control from below and its recognition of the class nature of capitalist society in its Preamble which was the clincher for me. In its essence, the Preamble reads: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among working people, and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.* … By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society in the shell of the old.” (*At the 1992 San Francisco IWW Convention the Preamble was amended by deleting “take possession of the earth” and adding “and in harmony with the earth” at the end of the sentence. This amendment was written in by committee by the late Judi Bari, of both Earth First and the IWW, and later ratified by membership referendum. Fellow Worker Ray Elbourne of Australia and I were co-chairs of the Convention session where this amendment was adopted for the referendum vote. This proposal, of course, was approved in recognition of the grim reality of climate change and environmental despoliation.)

Most Wobs I’d met and worked with in Chicago, LA and the SF Bay Area were down to earth decent folks and anti-authoritarian in their makeup. My most idealistic image of the IWW came through my uncle Antti Saikkonen who died before my birth who my mother praised over the years, and to whom I co-dedicate these Memoirs along with my beloved older cousin Lempi. However, the IWW had almost died out in the early 1960s to less than 100 paid up older members until a major influx of younger people joined as refugees from the excesses of the New Left in the violence of such groups as the Weather Underground and the M-L zealots of the authoritarian left like the Progressive Labor Party and similar sects. The IWW provided an anti-authoritarian home yet never lost its revolutionary aims for transforming a capitalist society to something qualitatively better for human liberation. Despite its modest size I was glad to apply for membership through the General Headquarters in Chicago where Walter Westman was serving then as General Secretary-Treasurer. I was readily accepted as I was not an employer of wage labor. Fred Thompson, who helped organize the stove plants in Cleveland into the IWW, had been a class war prisoner at San Quentin for alleged “criminal syndicalism” and had taught at Finnish-run Work Peoples College in Minnesota whom I met during my Chciago years sent me a good welcoming letter. He introduced me to Eugene Nelson who lived in Forestville on the Russian River raising his young daughter Tamar as a single father who wrote the book Huelga on the Delano Grape Strike who I had met in 1965 on my first visit to the epicenter of the strike and boycott. Gene introduced me to the San Francisco General Membership Branch, but I seldom went to meetings because of involvement in Typo Union 21 and the Socialist Party Local and now the national Debs Caucus of the SP. Frankly, I found the meetings of the SF Branch at that time rather boring with not much happening at the time although I grew to like my Fellow Workers. But I had answered another ideological calling I’ve never regretted.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

LABOR ASSEMBLIES FOR PEACE

Under George Meany’s rule the AFL-CIO acted like a monolith in supporting the miltary aggression of Lyndon Johnson’s regime during in the Vietnam War. Meany, with his CIA labor front The American Institute for Labor Development, run by his ex-Communist Cold War henchman Jay Lovestone, tried to stifle any incipient opposition to the war within the labor movement. In 1965, Meany had categorically declared that the AFL-CIO supports President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War “no matter what the academic do-gooders may say, no matter what the apostles of appeasement may say.” He dismissed them as “victims of Communist propaganda.” In August, 1966, the AFL-CIO Executive Council declared: “Those who would deny our military forces unstinting support are, in effect, aiding the Communist enemy of our country — at the very moment it is bearing the heaviest burdens in the defense of peace and freedom.”

But dissident elements were rising in the left of the labor movement against this bloody onslaught in service of empire against the peoples of this poor Asian country to which millions of people in the United States as well as elsewhere in the world were developing growing antiwar movements in opposition. In November, 1967, the Labor Assemblies for Peace was formed nationally in a somewhat cautious dissent at first to the belligerence of the AFL-CIO ruling hierarchy on the war. But in 1969, Walter Reuther and the UAW pulled out of the AFL-CIO for its rigid conservatism and joined with the Teamsters Union to form the Alliance for Labor Action which called for an immediate end to the Vietnam conflict. This gave courage for increasing antiwar militance within labor on getting out of this quagmire where kids of working people were losing their lives.

There where giant demonstrations on campuses when President Nixon invaded Cambodia to expand the slaughter in late April, 1970. The one at Kent State University, a public university in the Northern Ohio industrial belt with numerous working class students, ended up in the Kent State Massacre on May 4, when the National Guard opened fire on student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine, which horrified the nation and brought more student uprisings all over. This brought about a “hard-hat counter-revolution” called “Bloody Friday” on May 9, in New York City when 300 unionized construction workers attacked and beat up student participants in a protest demonstration on the Kent State Massacre in downtown Manhattan. On May 20, New York construction workers staged a pro-war hard-hat rally in the city, that Peter Brannan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York approvingly called a “spontaneous action” by the rank and file. This was a lie as that day union officials and construction firms agreed to call off work with pay for workers to participate in the rally. If someone declined to go, they weren’t paid!

So during this period, a Labor Assembly for Peace chapter was formed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its founding meeting was hosted by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, AFL-CIO, at its meeting hall at the cotrner of Seventh and Market Steets in San Francisco. Amalgamated was critical of the pro-war politics of the Meanyites and the union’s regional director Sam Kripps was happy to host it. Several hundred gathered at the Hall that evening representing a numer of unions. Harry Bridges’ ILWU was a prominent sponsor. Both socialists Hal and Anne Draper ( the Union Label Director of Amalgamated) played an active part in the proceedings. Lefties of a number of other unions were in the mix. Then I noticed a couple of members from the SP’s East Bay Realignment Branch, disciples of Shachtman’s pro-war politics, huddled nervously in the front row. What the hell were they doing here? I soon found out. Sam Kripps opened the meeting by angrily saying a couple of people seated in the room had approached him in his office before the meeting with a criticisms of the gathering to ensue that drew his ire without pointing to them or what they had said specifically, and that he had ordered them out. I guessed immediately that they were my nominal “comrades” at the front of the room. I suspect redbaiting had been what had angered Sam. Some lefty critics were heard: “Throw ‘em out!” But ring-wise radical pro Hal Draper, aware of what was happening, got up and said that “we should just ignore the unwelcome visitors and proceed with our agenda to establish our chapter.” Shortly after the Realos sneaked out of the meeting on their own. and we went on to put our Labor Assembly for Peace chapter on the map as an activist organization.

Larry Swaim

I attended chapter meetings regularly, accompanied by a new young member of our SF SP Local, Larry Swaim, a member of the Postal Workers Union, an aspiring novelist, who was its delegate to the SF Labor Council. (I was no longer a delegate to the Council as the Golden Gate Progressive Party had axed me from its slate because I was no longer willing to be a rubber stamp to its union politics and had also resigned as editor of the Golden Gate Progressive.) Larry had attained a measure of fame on the Labor Council, by introducing a resolution putting the Council on record in calling an end to the Vietnam War which carried handily because of the rapidly changing mood against the war in the ranks of the working class, despite the opposition of its aging Meanyite ruling bureaucracy. Council Secretary-Treasurer George Johns, of the Cigar Clerks craft union, complained bitterly to Larry after the vote, saying that: “We had a nice little Council going here until you ruined it!” Our SP Local was quite proud of our new Comrade Swaim for his gutsy action.

NATIONAL POST OFFICE STRIKE OF 1970

On March 18, 1970 Postal Workers in New York City went out on a spontaneous strike in protest of poor pay and lousy and unsafe working conditions and the right to bargain collectively for their improvment. The only way for them to do so previously was to try to get Congress to pass legislation to benefit them. As Federal employees they were barred from striking. But desperate times called for desperate measures and New York postal workers struck in large numbers which spread rapidly throughout the country. President Richard Nixon called the strike illegal and ordered the National Guard and Federal troops to handle the mail. San Francisco postals acted no differently and were soon out on the streets. Larry Swaim was 2nd Vice President of his union which worked in a huge dismal building handling distribution with similarly poor conditions. The strike which lasted two weeks at its height amounted to 210,000 workers on the streets nationally. The President and 1st Vice President of Larry’s Local went into hiding for the duration so the top leadership of the strike fell on Larry’s shoulders. He had a wife and two young kids who saw little of him during those hectic two weeks. I was working the day shift then at the Chronicle and he called me to assist in advice as I’d had strike experience to his previous none. So most evenings I joined him in Action Central around First and Mission Streets. There was little I needed to contribute. He had formed a strike committee of rank and filers which ran the show quite well. With the increasing number of black postal employees many of them had rich experience in the civil rights movement of the 1960s as did a lot of other younger posties who had earned their spurs in other struggles of this period. I felt their conduct of this battle was living proof of the effectiveness of workers’ self-management, Screw the big leaders and experts or some cadre of vanguardist leftoids calling the shots. Larry told me the story one night when some Progressive Labor Party “revolutionaries” came on the scene with their leader calling to pour gasoline on the idle postal delivery trucks and torching them. Larry, who was a big strong young guy, punched him out with one blow to the jaw putting an end to such insane adventurism. Despite his dire condemnation of the strike, Nixon encouraged negotiations to conclude it instead of bayonets and bloodshed. It was a victory for the strikers as they won some of their key demands and for the first time in the history of the post office collective bargaining became the pattern for settlement. The Post Office Department was now called US Postal Service which gave it a quasi-public character. The no strike clause remained, but in case of some extreme crisis in the economy who is going to stop a massive outpouring of workers on the streets? And in the case of the Great Postal Strike of 1970 not one worker was fired!

1970 SOCIALIST PARTY CONVENTION

An open rupture in the ranks of the Realignment Caucus exploded for the first time in which I was the catalyst to ignite it at the 1970 National Convention of the Socialist Party in New York City in the summer of 1970. The Realos were seething with dissension underneath the surface between Harrington and his supporters and the hard-core Shachtmanite right, but as usual, expected their iron Bolshevik style discipline to prevail which underwrote their majority on the convention floor. But the Debs Caucus had been organizing for two years and was making inroads into the membership reaching some newer members who hadn’t signed up through the selective political recruiting by the Realos. We had a successful weekend meeting in Indianapolis the previous summer and our newspaper “Socialist Tribune” was gaining support from comrades from the pre-Realignment period. Again, I was the only delegate present from Local San Francisco. Bill Briggs of Local Los Angeles was our minority Debs Caucus member of the important Resolutions Committee of the convention. He and I had a meeting to discus resolutions of the Debs Caucus he would submit to the Resolutiions body, with its Realo majority. Former National Secretary George Woywod, now working as a business agent for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in New York, brought us a copy of an Anti-Vietnam War resolutiion recently adopted by Amalgamated which was quite good and which George laughed would put the Realos on the spot on the Convention floor if we submitted it as is. Bill and I reviewed it and thought it was a tad too moderate in tone and decided to amend it by calling the war “criminal” in its imperial character. I added a resolution commending the work of the Labor Assemblies for Peace in opposing the war submitted by my Local San Francisco. Indianapolis, part of our Caucus, submitted a resolution written by Carly Anderson, in support of the good work being done by the National Organization of Women (NOW).

When these issues came up on the Convention floor, all those submitted by us Debsians came with a “NO” recommendation by the Realo majority of the Committee. None of them were bizarre ultra-revolutionary diatribes but showed in what contempt the Realos considered us. The Amalgamated resolve on the war was debated fairly extensively on the floor. It did get considerable support in the floor debate including poignant testimony against the war from our aging last Presidential candidate Darlington Hoopes of Reading. PA. Mike Harrington critcized our resolve strongly particularly on our amendment calling it a “criminal war” being waged by the United States, A bit too heady for Mike, I imagine. It might alienate him from his liberal friends who were already to the left of the official policies of the SP on the war. I believe it was decided on a standing vote that we lost. The same fate befell Indiana’s NOW resolution which showed how out of touch the Realos were with modern middle class American feminism, although the Shachtmanites had some tough woman operators in their ranks like Sandra Feldman, second in command to right-wing social democratic leader of the Teachers’ Union Albert Shanker, a Meany favorite. Feminism didn’t seem that high a priority in top echelon AFL-CIO politics.

Our Labor Assemblies for Peace Resolution didn’t make the floor until Sunday, the final day of the Convention. National Chair Michael Harrington and his ally Carl Shier, a UAW regional functionary, were co-chairs of that sesssion. Although a growing number of large unions were part of the Assemblies, that apparently didn’t represent George Meany’s pro-war line. Our resolution was attacked vociferously by Realo Caucus speakers, I made the most impassioned speech of my life supporting it and was joined by other Debsians. Both Harrington and Shier remained silent during this entire debate. The voice vote on it was in doubt as we all shouted to be heard. Immediately we called for a standing vote. The call was for the Ayes first. When we stood up we saw that both Mike and Carl on the stage STOOD UP WITH US! As did their supporters on the floor! When the NAYs voted we saw we had the majority for the first time. The Realos had broken discipline and we had won! Since I had made the major speech in support of the resolution, people came up and congratulated me, hugged, shook hands, with hearty back slaps. This action proved the high point of the whole convention for many of us. (We heard via the grapevine that both Mike and Carl caught holy hell from the Realo hardliners, so though their caucus stayed nominally intact for the moment a total split looked inevitable.) I heard later that National Secretary Penn Kemble saw me as the evil mastermind of the whole Debs Caucus. Hardly that, though I was part of a good consensual team with my comrades. I returned to San Francisco, a very happy dude.

DISASTROUS 1970–’71 SAN RAFAEL NEWSPAPER STRIKE

After 50 years as a union shop in which the ITU represented the printers, the new owner of the San Rafael Independent-Journal forced a strike. Long time paternalistic publisher Wishard Brown had turned the paper over to his son who was completely hostile to organized labor. After 14 months of futile negotiations Local 21 was forced to call a strike on Jan. 7, 1970. The place was ratted by scabs. Members of four other unions, honored our picket lines, refusing to work with scabs. It was a militant strike culminating in a mass attempt one Saturday to shut down the plant in which hundreds of us printers and other unionists from around the Bay Area joined in. We were greeted by police Tac squads from the area including San Francisco’s, numbering in the hundreds in full riot gear. We were massed around the plant trying to block trucks from entering into the parking lot. Midmorning the Tac Squad army made its move. it advanced on our people with clubs swinging. We retreated to the street uphill and east of the parking lot. As I started to get away a young woman fell down in front of me, who was part of our demonstration. I stood her up and pushed her along in our retreat and caught a few billy club blows on my back. As we were reaching our getaway street, the cops released tear gas toward us in its awful impact in permeating the air around us. The cops didn’t follow us into the street as they cleared us from the parking lot. A few of our lot were badly beaten. Later I found one of them was an old Inde Party regular Jack Clancy, a conservative Catholic trade unionist in his sixties. I recall shortly before our mass descent on the I-J, he was at our Union headquarters talking to Leon Olson, our newly-elected Local 21 president, where I was working on our strike bulletin. This was in the turbulent period of confrontation where a lot of the young radical left called the cops “pigs.” Clancy had two young sons in our trade and he told Olson that if he ever caught either of his sons calling the law “pigs” he’d yank them from the picket line. Ironically, this cautiously conservative Typo politician got the heaviest beating of any one at San Rafael by the Tac Squad hit teams, and I’m not sure he ever fully recovered from it.

Another repercussion of that day’s confrontational happenings were the arrests of our Local President Leon Olson, Organizer Don Abrams, and Jack Goldberger, President of the Newspaper Periodical Drivers of the Teamsters Union, who’d given us unstinting support at San Rafael. Despite some significant pro bono high-powered legal defense, we lost and they ended up serving short jail sentences for their troubles. The strike itself dragged on for a total of 17 months and ended when the I-J publisher petitioned for an NLRB decertification election in which only the scabs voted with our strikers and the other I-J newspaper unions on the streets looking in. It was a sorry end to a fierce battle, and another step in the gradual decline of the ITU as an independent union in the USA and Canada.

MARRIED TO TINA IN 1971

In 1971 I put the Daly City house up for sale so I could move back into City closer to the job and my realtor found me some renters to occupy it until a buyer could be found. I moved into a tiny place in an apartment buiding on Post Street between Van Ness and Polk which was transitioning into a gay neighborhood and was an easy walking distance to the Chronicle building. The weekend I moved in, my Local SP comrade and movie critic Margot Skinner invited me to a book party celebrating the publication of a first novel by a young woman friend of hers at the latter’s flat near Polk and Union Streets. The usual type of San Francisco literary crowd was there sampling hors d’oeurvres and sipping wine. The only people I knew were Margo and the author slightly and a young SP comrade Bruce Ballin who had moved to SF from New York recently to get away from the Realo crowd and became part of our local Debs Caucus grouping. During the course of the eveniing I was engaged in conversation with a young woman dressed in a typical psychedelic long hippie gown with numerous strings of beads. She had moved to SF recently from LA and was working as a bookkeeper at a Van Ness Dodge dealership at a low wage. My interest in her perked up when I learned she hailed from Milwaukee where she knew Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler and was best high school pals with his daughter Clara. Her name was Tina Smith, 32, and she had a Masters Degree in Russian Language and Soviet Area Studies from Indiana University and had been a part of two cultural exchange tours to the Soviet Union. Her own politics were democratic socialist and she claimed to speak Russian with a Midwest accent. She was a lively person with a marvelous sense of humor. We adjourned until the wee morning hours to a Polkstrasse late night coffee house drinking endless cups of black coffee and smoking her cigarettes although I was normally a pipe and cigar man then. There was no end to our animated conversation. Finally, I left her at a rooming house on California near Polk with a sign outside reading “Nicely Furnished Rooms.” When asked where she lived she would respond honestly: “in nicely furnished rooms.” Her quick wit was part of her charm.

We were in the blur of a romance of several weeks during which she gladly joined our SP Local. At last, I was involved with a woman of solid political compatibility. So, in my usual petulent haste, I proposed. No one had ever done so before with her. So with me at 45 and she at 32 we got hitched one day at SF City Hall and had a one-day honeymoon on the Tiburon Peninsula topped by dinner on Sausalito’s Bridgeway. We moved into a slightly larger apartment in the Polk District a lttle later. But not for long. Since I had no car then, it was hard to find all-night parking for her Dodge Dart in the crowded Polk. So we finally found a nice flat in a Victorian duplex at 22nd Street near Castro on top of the hill, which became our home. Tina was loaded with debt and her low income couldn’t cover it. But she soon found a temp job as an eligibility clerk at SF Social Sevices in the Mission which paid a bit better. She soon joined SEIU Local 535 for social workers in which she became a dedicated activist. Not long after she was called to fill a regular slot as a social worker for Alameda County for whch she had applied when she first moved to SF, commuting to Oakland with her Dodge.

The marriage went swimmingly at first sexwise and otherwise. But she had a basic frigidity toward sex, so in time our sessions were fewer and fewer and farther apart. but we both enjoyed our beer and bar-hopping that became part of our lifestyle which proved disastrous for me. At the time I met Tina I was involved in an alcohol recovery group progarm that met a couple of nights a week in the Mission led by a counselor named Bill Cameron. Tina would accompany me regularly. Problem was that after our session we would adjourn for beers afterwards, sometimes more than a few. Then on weekends Tina would often say; “Let’s go to North Beach and make whoopie!” which we needed like a hole in the head. Yet life was much more than the booze. We were both active in our unions and in the SP Local. With the latter, we had a goodly contingent in the giant anti-war marches in SF that drew up to 100,000 people to protest Vietnam. We’d go to Los Angeles and stay with Tina’s brother Johnny and his buxom Austrian wife I’ll call Helga in Echo Park.. We’d visit my sister Irma and Terry and my young nephew Steven. (Tina couldn’t get over the fact she now had a nephew.) Tina and I took Mamma one night for dinner on the town. They enjoyed each other.

At the end of 1971, Tina and I flew to LA and went with Tina’s sister Tammy and her new husband and mother-in-law in their car to spend the holidays with Tina’s stepmother in Ensanada who had lived there with Tina’s father in a beautiful hacienda he’d built for their retirement years. However, well before I met Tina, her Dad had committed suicide from acute emphysema contracted from a life of heavy smoking. Tina’s family who came also included her oldest sister and husband, plus Johnny and Helga. Tina’s other brother was working as a journalist in Key West, FL and he and his wife couldn’t make it. Plenty of eating and drinking as usual. I got so wasted that I fell against a large Mexican designer wrought iron table and broke its glass top in the grand living room. Thoroughly embarrassing, although the next day the table was taken into town and new glass purchased and mounted. Nobody criticized me but I felt so wretched about it that I went cold turkey on alcohol consumption until the next September, 1972.

End of Installment 23