1. Arthur – Rank and File Union Man

      “We showed them. We showed those rotten bastards what we were made of.  It seemed as if everybody was against us. Of course, the steamship owners were against us, we knew that but all of the press, and the Chronicle was the worst. But after Bloody Thursday I heard from people. The butcher, Harry Green on Harrison, he gave me pork chops for the family. We are with you man he said. I needed something for those long days on the picket line but it was not drudging work, it was a joy we felt solid together.”
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2. Dorothy – Young wife of Longshoreman 

      My Jack, he had it pretty bad. My Mom had told me: ‘Don’t marry a longshoreman, he’ll be at the bootleggers, he can’t provide for you.  You will never know when he is coming home.’ But Jack was a sweetheart. We got married in `31. Our first home was a rooming house on Harrison, I still went round my Mom’s house on Capp everyday while Jack went to the shape-up at the Ferry Building to get work. I wanted to go with him he said: ‘No it is not a place for a girl. Don’t you ever go there.’ But you know you can’t say things like that to me. Poppy tried it. When I was fifteen fresh out of school Mommy said ‘Your Pop is down the bootleggers again.’ I marched right over to Paddy Hurley’s joint, it was smoky and dark, I saw Poppy in the back around a table playing cards. I said: ‘Your family needs you.’ He said, ‘Can’t you see I’m busy.’ I snatched the cards out of his hands and stared at him. I know he wanted to hit me. But I was fearless.
       Jack had to go to the
shape-up on the empty lot across the street from the Ferry Building at 6:30 every workday. I never knew when he was getting back sometimes it was ten in the morning other days ten at night, ‘sorry, luv, had to do a speed-up.’ He would say.
       One morning I sneaked out right after him. Put my long tresses up under a cap. I went down to the Embarcadero. It was a gunmetal gray day, everything looked drab, washed out that morning. There were a couple of hundred men milling around on the hard dried, trash-strewn lot. Men of all sizes and ages, in dungarees, in baggy denims, wearing battered windbreakers or service cast-offs, and either caps or woolen pullovers. The mood was somber and restless. I paid the blue book dues of 5 cents and went in.
       Up on a wooden balcony overlooking the men were the hiring bosses, thick men gritting cigars in their mouths, a tough arrogance about them, aware of their power over these lesser men below them. "All right boys, shape up!'' One of the bosses leaned over the paling, jabbing the air with his fingers, pointing at the men. “You and you go to MacCormick’s dock 5.”  Or he said in a condescending tone, “Say Joey, my boy, take your gang over to Matson.” The boss would go back and huddle with the others, passing pieces of paper from hand to hand talking in undertones, their backs to the men. As time went on the crowd of men began to dwindle. At the front just below the balcony, was a small knot of men with imploring faces. They spoke up. “Give me a break. It’s been two weeks since I had any work.” Another said. “I got five kids. I need a day bad.” A beefy looking man in woolen stocking cap said. “How about me, Big Mac? I knew your old man.” The boss on the balcony said. “Come on, you bums, keep quiet. I'll do the picking.”
       By eight thirty, one of the bosses finally said. ‘OK boys nothing more, go home.’ I left with tears gathering around my eyes before my Jack lifted his head and turned around to see me at the back.
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3. Chris – Striking (slightly inebriated) Merchant Marine in a Bootleg Joint

       Here's my supposition, on what it could be like. Destroy all the ships, machines, everything, every industry. Then strip the laboring man down to his skin, and the captains and bosses, too.  Strip them too. Then have all of them revert to their primeval instincts. Then we'll see who survives. Why, man, we'd have a new order. One thousand top dogs working the ass of a hundred million guys! It ain't right for them, running the factories, the docks, the building sites. Why, they buy our collective ideas, our creative thoughts, our energy, our vitality that's all. Shoot, a saltwater bath would give any of them blisters.
       I say we need a revolution, not a bloody revolution, an industrial revolution. I say give the superior brain-worker the advantages, he deserves it but give him a motor car and private baths, but no surplus. For christ’s sake, accumulating capital and things, that’s stagnant, laying back that's not going to do you or me no good ever, but we can work and build it all up.
       If I had the dough, boy, I'd get me a freight train and ride out on the rods as far as I could go across this country. My own train. Whoops. Shoot. I know, I know I am gassed up on the Embarcadero, too many joints along here. They all want to cash my brass checks. All you need to do is stick a feather up my nose and I'm a frigging submarine. A goddam beautiful sea-jamming submarine, for christ’s sake.
       Lot of nice girls out there, nice girls from all over the world, but the biggest disappointment for me was Turkey, their religion is to shave the hair off the organs, a goddam bald skillet, that's all it is. You couldn't give crabs to nobody. And down to my shirt I am, and what a shirt. Comes from Hong Kong, I bummed it off a guy in Frisco, one washing and it shrank up to my elbows. That's the sea for you.”

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4.  Mike – Rank and File Union man

       “Dirty Scabs. Dirty rotten frigging scabs!” We walked in step behind the American Flag and the ILA banner, chanting in unison, passing the steel shutters on the mouths to the piers, now lined with coils of barbed wire, policeman standing to attention every few yards. I felt strong and alert. We marched up to a line of police, some of them on horseback. The word came down the column. They are enforcing the anti-picketing city ordinance. One of them in peaked cap dressed in black uniform had a bullhorn.  “By order of Mayor Rossi you are …” Dougan, next to me, said they are telling us to disperse.
       I was in the middle of the column, hands clapping, honking hooters and shouting. “Get the scabs out.” I saw the line of policemen charge with batons out. Our column of men who had been so peaceful and disciplined a few minutes ago began to break and shatter into a thousand little fragments. The disciplined chants had ended and now it was just a loud roar:  shouting, running crowds, screams, breaking glass. I heard the crack of guns and saw smoke. They were firing tear gas, and I began to see the police moving in on me with clubs above their heads. Men scattered. I followed a mob of men running I did not know where down the cobbled streets out onto King Street. A truck had been overturned, rice spilled out of sacks with slits from knives. Gasoline spilling onto the road, Dougan had a gleeful expression on his face as he pocketed a blade. He said. “Look out.” I twisted around and there was a group of policemen - five or six of them running towards us some waving clubs. I moved towards a little alley leading to Brannan. One of the policeman peeled off towards me but he tripped and fell flat, dropped his club and his hat came off.  “Hey, Turk!” I could not fail to recognize that bullet head, it was my cousin Turk. We both grew up in the Mission district, his family on Capp, mine on Shotwell. He pulled himself up on one elbow and looked at me: “Mike, you lazy commie bastard.”
“Now, now are you alright?”
He felt down to his knee, moved his leg and winced as his ankle turned. He moaned, “Oh that hurts.”
“I might have known you would be one of the police.”
He was a year older than me, his father was my mother’s older brother. We grew up playing together and I remembered he had a volatile temper especially when things did not go his way.  We went to the same Catholic elementary school, St. James’s on Guerrero. We had stopped getting together for Christmas with his family but still saw him at weddings and funerals. I always loved playing the piano, jazz style, and I had drifted into longshore work, its casual nature fitted in with my life, what I expected and wanted.
A trickle of blood appeared on the grey tar.
“You’re hurt man.”
“Oh it’s nothing.”
“Why are you doing this?”
I stared at blank brick walls punched in by metal grilled windows.
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5. Sam - Negro Stevedore

      “Hope. That's what we’ve been talking about down on the waterfront. Hope for our children, not just surviving. It’s strange but hope feels dangerous, like we'll be punished for thinking it.

      That limey got me thinking. He came down to the Ebenezer Baptist one Sunday during service and spoke out. He begged us to get out there and join the strikers on the picket. You know I used to think that unions’ were just for the white man not for folks like us. They set them up to keep us out and keep their goddamn jobs. But Bridges said if we join the strike, he promised we could work on every dock on the West coast, every single one of them. Work with the Irish, the Italians, the Polacks and all the others in the same gang. 

      I dared to hope a little bit, that we, the Negroes on the waterfront, some day would have respect. We were brought here fifteen years ago by Luckenbach to break a strike of that lily-white union.  But now I am beginning to hope we can work at any of the piers in San Francisco or even Oakland without getting beaten up by a bunch of hooligans. To hope to have regular work, not the speed-ups and slow-downs, of not knowing if we were going to be working today or tomorrow or next week.

     Despite the hope in my chest, there is still fear. But what is better? Fear and hope, or fear without it?”

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6.  Old Guy – Veteran of the Waterfront - Longshoreman

       “My stepfather, he was all right. When I left Fresno he gave me some money and a little pack. My stepmother was no good. She was a bitch. My father died at sea coming into San Francisco. I was drawn to the sea, but as far as I’ve got was the waterfront in San Francisco. It’s been tough on the waterfront, once you got a job in a gang, you stayed there, because they were valuable jobs. There's about 12 men in a gang. I was working in a steady gang for the American Hawaiian Steamship Company just before the strike. We were the ‘star gang’ at pier 26; we worked the number two hatch. There were steady gangs and what we called casual or ‘fou fous,’ Every company had a bunch of steady gangs that worked all the time.
       I remember one job. It was the Matson Navigation dock on pier 24, you know the one. I worked straight through five days and four nights unloading steel girders. We made money in them days. I was with the winch gang. The only time we got off was two hours for breakfast, one hour for lunch, one hour for supper and one hour at night. Then I went into the bootleg joint and I went to sleep. They couldn't wake me with a sledgehammer. I felt kind of ashamed of myself that I couldn't take it. Falling asleep and all that. We were unloading 16-ton girders on that job. That was a good job, we made money on that job. I’ve been in this racket 32 years. You wouldn't believe I am 51 years old. Take a good look. You wouldn't believe it, would you. It's a hell of a racket.
       I was on a job once and my friend George Morgan got killed. We're just sitting there joking around, you see. He was tying on a girder to the sling rope and it rolled. The next morning we had to go over and work at the spot where he fell down. I had him in mind, I slipped over a beam and I landed in the Saint Luke’s Hospital, three vertebrae broken and the collarbone. Here you can feel the bump where the back was broke. Go on, feel it. You ain’t a dock worker unless you get hurt. We ain’t got any stories around here. All we got is hard luck. If they'd give all the damn work to our union, we'd all be working.”
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 © Keith David Cooley 2009