Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  I said I could see why the longshoremen and the seamen had their backs up.

  “Nothing makes a capitalist madder,” Quin said, “than the existence of something he can’t buy with his money, confuse with his lies, or scare with his threats.”

  Conditions on the waterfront had turned the stevedores into dry leaves awaiting a spark to ignite them. The spark was both desperation and hope, the desperation brought about by the Depression, and the faint hope sent from FDR’s Washington that it was permissible for working people to organize themselves. Once lighted, the flames were fanned by the Reds, who saw every strike as a small revolution that could lead to a large one. In Quin’s opinion, the Reds were useful catalysts, not causes, in the strike.

  “Young Skinny,” Quin said, though he looked no more than a few hard-living years older than I was, “San Francisco is shaking more now than it did during the Quake.” As he led me around the Embarcadero we passed pickets at most of the docks. Quin shouted encouragement to them. “Twice as many longshoremen as there are jobs on the waterfront,” Quin told me. I said that was pretty much the situation among writers in Hollywood. “There you go,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t taking me seriously. “You got a union?” he asked. Maybe he was taking me seriously a little bit. “Yes,” I said. “Well no. We’re trying to have one.” “Get going,” he said.

  It was late May. The longshoremen’s strike had begun a few weeks earlier, essentially with the workers themselves—Quin called them the good old rank and file—defying their own leaders, who were afraid of the owners and didn’t want to rock, literally, the boats in San Francisco harbor. “Fellows bringing home only fifteen, twenty a week,” Quin said, “want maybe a buck an hour. That and a union shop with a union dispatcher. No more straw bosses. That’s the part drives the owners crazy.”

  Upstairs in the International Longshoreman’s Association headquarters just off the Embarcadero, Quin introduced me to men waiting to go on picket lines. Tough-looking guys, eating sandwiches in a single bite, soup in a swallow. Peopling the place with actors, I thought Victor McLaglen or Wally Beery would have been at home. Two men named Cromartie and Widdelstaedt, two sides of beef, each looked as though he could grapple an ox to the ground or perhaps just throw one into the hold of a ship. “Hey Nickie, me and the Crow could use six, seven more sammitches,” Widdelstaedt yelled to the back of the room. In a minute a composed, slender fellow came forward with two bowls of soup. “Soup!” Widdelstaedt barked. “Did I say soup? Crow, did I say soup, we don’t need no more fuckin’ soup, we’ll have to piss all afternoon, I said sammitches.”

  “Sorry boys,” the slender fellow said, “I’ve already served you more than the Strike committee says. Everyone gets one, two at the most, you guys each had four.” He turned to Quin and me. “Mike, you want their soup? And your pal?”

  I was introduced to the cook, Nick Bordoise, as he handed me a steaming bowl of potato soup with carrots, onions, and chunks of brisket in it. Bordoise wasn’t in the ILA but in the cooks’ union, and he’d had a recent appendectomy that kept him off his regular job in a downtown restaurant. He was from Crete and had been to sea as a cook on a freighter; he was helping the ILA while he recuperated. He was marked by his Greek accent and his outspoken sympathies. His name, Quin told me, had been Counderakis, but he changed it to his wife’s name to keep out of range of the immigration authorities. Bordoise looked vulnerable, and Quin asked him how he was after his surgery. “Still redder than your hair, Mike,” Bordoise said quietly. “The Reds are for what I’m for, workers’ rights and we own the fruits of our labors. Kali orexi. Eat up.”

  Bordoise spoke like someone being recorded, yet he had a sweetness in his voice I didn’t hear among the barrel-chested stevedores.

  “Don’t need fuckin’ Communists,” Widdelstaedt said. “Yer as bad as the finks.”

  “The Reds are supportin’ us,” another longshoreman said. “More than I can say for the papers, the cops, the damn city government. Did ya see the Examiner?”

  I actually had seen the Examiner the day before. Hearst’s paper said Moscow was using the waterfront strike to seize San Francisco as a colonial possession.

  “You know I feed you good, right?” Bordoise said and was answered with a small cheer. “Okay then, but five million Americans are swallowing poison every day, not with their mouths but their eyes. The five million readers of Hearst papers.”

  The union members banged their tables and said Nick should be an honorary member of the ILA. Widdelstaedt said any union member reading a Hearst paper should be beat up good, an ominous threat I didn’t sufficiently recognize.

  Bordoise was a gentle fellow, a little like the younger scenic designers at Jubilee, the designers who hadn’t yet become prima donnas. Whenever I was in the ILA hall, Bordoise was as eager to give the longshoremen a satisfying meal as fancier chefs are to know how a patron likes their bouillabaisse or veal Marengo. The others, even the toughs like Widdelstaedt and Cromartie, also struck me as honest guys trying to do a job and be paid fairly for it. At the moment I fancied myself more like a stevedore than a studio hack, more at home in the union hall than at Jubilee where I was trying to worm my way into acceptance. What a fool I was, I suddenly thought the following day as my attacker slashed the air with his knife and lunged at me when I’d temporarily broken his hold. I felt accepted up there in the union hall, yet I was only being measured. In a moment he had me pinned against a parked car. Here came the blade again.

  Outside the hall a day earlier, the afternoon atmosphere along the Embarcadero was of a battlefield where combat had not begun. The police lined up to protect the docks while the strikers marched on the landward side of the street shouting and shaking their picket signs. “It’s not the cops they’re shouting at so much,” Quin said. “It’s the scabs.”

  The nonunion workers, the scabs, were returning to work from lunch. Some were thickset football players from the University of California at Berkeley; their coach had told them strikebreaking was a healthy form of spring practice. Some were hoboes who needed any kind of work during the Depression; some had been imported from other cities along the coast, like Los Angeles, where strikebreaking was essentially a profession. A few were blacks whose only chance to work on the docks was as strikebreakers. In the years he himself had spent at sea before becoming a journalist and pamphleteer, Quin noted that the only blacks among the seamen were ones hired as stewards. “But it’ll change if the strike wins,” he said. “The Seamen will stay out in support of the Longshoremen, and both unions will bring Negroes aboard if they won’t work as scabs anymore. But first these owners need to be taught a lesson they won’t forget.”

  I never asked Quin if he was a Communist; I assumed it.

  As a landlubber, I did ask what was the attraction of the job for seamen. They were routinely mistreated by captains and first mates, underpaid, often robbed and beaten when they went ashore. Aboard ship, they were held almost like prisoners.

  “Yes,” Quin said, “and the cruelty at sea is matched by the cruelty of the sea.”

  “Then why ship out in the first place?”

  “It’s a job when you can get one. And have you ever stood at the railing with spray in your eyes at sunrise, come through a storm that tested every fiber of your body and brain, felt your ship roll under you like it was a woman, breathed with it as it plowed furrows in the fickle currents, or tangoed into a distant port with all that fun and possibility and strangeness ahead of you?”

  That shut me up.

  In addition to police on foot along the Embarcadero, guarding the docks as though they were working for shipowners, which in a sense they were, other police cruised the waterfront in radio patrol cars, on motorcycles and on horseback. The cavalry were everywhere. Quin pointed to police lookouts on top of the Ferry Building.

  “Pressure is mounting, Skinny,” he said.

  That night Quin took me to a workers’ meeting in Dreamland Auditorium. Four or five thousand Longshoreme
n, Teamsters and Seamen were packed in, many with their families. Curious San Franciscans also showed up, some no doubt hoping to see a fight, many interested in the strike that was paralyzing their city. A stout Teamster told me they called the hall Dreamland because it was used for boxing matches, and many of the fighters left the building unconscious. He horselaughed.

  The great cavern of Dreamland could have been a studio sound stage with seats. The various unions—most had already joined the strike, some hadn’t—were convened as if for a pep rally before a big game. Mike Quin said it was much more. It was the outpouring of a century of frustration, of overwork and underpayment, of earlier strikes that had failed, of a kind of barbarism where human beings were treated as beasts of burden. “The working men,” he said, “have now come together to claim their own.”

  Most of the huge crowd were not sitting but milling, greeting friends, shouting encouragement. Quin mingled. Small groups were singing labor songs. Nick Bordoise, the cook in the Longshoremen’s headquarters, was passing out sandwiches. He sang a Greek accented “Solidarity Forever”: “You can’t fooling me I’m stuck to the union.” In some parts of the auditorium there were arguments—whether the unions should all make common cause or hold to their separate crafts, whether a union shop was a necessity, whether Communists were helpful or bad for the labor movement, whether union members with families could hold out as long as single men.

  A bell sounded, the chiming kind used to signal the start of a prize fight. Lights dimmed and a spotlight coned the stage, where a microphone stood. As I looked for a seat I spotted a tall elderly lady, a white-haired woman in a long, rather foreign dress buttoned to her neck. She held her chin high as though she were under some kind of siege and needed to keep all her dignity about her for the sake of some principle. Peering at her, I was shocked to see Yancey Ballard escorting her, deferring to her. What the hell was Yeatsman doing here? Who was the old lady? Mike Quin reappeared as the bell was rung several more times, and we wedged ourselves into seats next to two large union men. “The Longshoremen’s national leader, Joe Ryan, is here,” Quin said, “and he’s sent around a deal to the local committees that he’s negotiated by himself.”

  “Boys, gentlemen, and ladies,” said a man in a business suit who had stepped to the microphone at the center of the stage, “I bring you greetings from the president of the United States.” This received conditional applause, some boos. In back of me someone said that if Roosevelt was on their side the best thing he could do was stay out of their way. The man on the stage introduced himself as Edward McGrady, the Assistant Secretary of Labor. “This strike,” McGrady said, “can be settled as all issues are, through compromise, and you men can be back at work with pay raises if you just won’t let the radicals and frankly the Red element control what you’re doing.” This was greeted by a shout from the rear of the auditorium: “No one controls what we’re doing but us!” Cheers. “All right,” McGrady continued, “what I mean is President Roosevelt, the most pro-labor president in our history, fully supports your right to collective bargaining, but he believes the continuation of the strike can only hurt everyone out here on the Coast, all the working people and honest businessmen alike. So it’s time to go back.”

  This line of reasoning was going nowhere. The general sentiment was, We’ve been pushed around enough. Chants erupted: “Support the strike! Support the strike!”

  A gaunt man of perhaps eighty shuffled to the microphone to respectful applause. “The old man of the sea,” Quin said. “Andrew Furuseth has worked for seamen’s rights since the last century, believes labor is holy and wages are like divine grace.”

  “The anger of early days,” Andrew Furuseth said, “the denial of our rights has led us to where we are. But the owners now offer us most of what we want. We can settle this far better when you’re back at work.” A few clapped; everyone else was silent. No one would boo someone regarded as a union saint, but they wouldn’t do his bidding either. “To work,” Furuseth went on, “is to pray. Your labor is your sacred possession. I want to say to our brothers who are former seamen come ashore to start your families and become longshoremen, it is time after three weeks to return to our tasks. As sons of God everything we want can be achieved, can be settled, and can be settled by arbitration.”

  As Furuseth ambled off to far less applause than greeted his entrance, Quin told me arbitration would not win the one point longshoremen care most about, the union shop. “Old Andy’s day is done, and at this point he merely clutters up the scene.”

  The strikers wanted their pep rally and were being told to end their strike. The next two speakers came to the stage together—Mike Casey, San Francisco’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader, and Joe Ryan, International Longshoremen’s head, whom Quin told me had made his own deal with the dock owners. Casey, who had once been so tough he was known as Bloody Mike, tried to shoo his men back to work and was met with boos. He left quickly.

  The dignified elderly woman with Yeatsman as her escort rose from her seat several rows behind Quin and me and began making her measured way to the front. She leaned on her cane as well as on the arm of a young woman I recognized with disbelief. It was Comfort O’Hollie from Jubilee. Yeatsman cleared the aisle in front of them.

  Joe Ryan strutted to the microphone. He had risen from poverty, but Quin told me he was now more comfortable with politicians, racketeers and even business leaders than with his own longshoremen. He was wearing a double-breasted suit, splashy cufflinks, a diamond stickpin in his ostentatiously handpainted tie, and a huge ruby ring on his pinkie. “You men have made your point,” Ryan began, “You’ve made it loud and clear, as your brothers have up and down the Coast. I salute you.”

  Scattered applause. But it was provisional; essentially the union members were applauding Ryan for applauding his longshoremen. “I’m here to announce very excellent news,” Ryan went on. “I’ve arrived at an agreement with the major industrialists here. We have the best offer we can get, and it will bring better offers in every new contract.”

  “It won’t bring us a union shop!” a man shouted from behind Quin and me.

  “High time to get the Bolshies off our backs!” Ryan shouted right back. “And high time for San Francisco to lead everyone on the Coast back to work!”

  “You’re leading us straight to Hell, Joe!” from another corner of the auditorium.

  “I’ve negotiated fair terms,” Ryan tried again, but this was met with guffaws.

  A beefy man next to Quin said, “I’ve been to fixed fights here before. This is nothing new for Dreamland.”

  Joe Ryan, a famous labor leader unused to opposition, made one more try, but he was angry at his own rank and file. “Now listen to me, all of you, I was on the Chelsea docks in Noo Yawk loading pig iron before most of you were born. I’ve fought for fair deals all my life, and this is the fairest deal I’ve ever made—it’s a gentleman’s agreement, raises for every dockworker, no scabs, no overtime without extra pay, no more kickbacks at the shape up … ”

  And that was as far as Joe Ryan could go. At the phrase “shape up,” which meant continued control of hiring on the docks by straw bosses working for the owners, Dreamland exploded in a thunder of boos and nos and catcalls.

  A longshoreman with an eyepatch, a former brawling seaman known as Pirate Larsen, ran to the stage and hurled himself onto it. “It’s unanimous, King Joe!” he shouted. “You’re a fink yourself and you’re trying to make finks of all of us! No to your shape up, no to the owners, and no to making separate sweetheart deals up and down the coast with any owner who pays for your next holiday in Europe!” Cheers.

  “And I say,” Ryan bawled, “no to your radicals and no to the Communist line!”

  “The only line I follow is the picket line, King Joe!” To the accompaniment of wild cheers, Ryan evaporated from the stage, taking a seat in the front row. Boxing had returned to Dreamland, and Pirate Larsen knocked out Joe Ryan in one round.

  Com
fort O’Hollie was now helping the old lady up the steps of the stage while Yeatsman waited below. Had he come along as Hibernophile and chaperone for Comfort, or were he and Comfort … ? I didn’t dare finish my own thought. “Is this a union meeting or a vaudeville show?” I asked Quin. “You might call it a resistance festival,” Quin said.

  Pirate Larsen was speaking again, and there seemed to be a program for the evening’s events after all. “Before we turn the proceedings over to the man who’s really representing us in the strike,” Larsen said, “meet a true worker’s hero, heroine rather, the courageous woman who not only stood on the barricades in Dublin against the might of the British Empire, who fought alongside the Irish Revolutionary Army after her brave son was martyred in the cause of Irish liberty, but who also happens to be the aunt of our own working-class martyr, Tom Mooney. Say hello to Patricia Mooney O’Hollie, best known as Grandmother O’Hollie!”

  Accompanying her grandmother, Comfort O’Hollie was paying her debt to the father she’d never known, who had been ambushed by the British in 1916. “What do the Irish have to do with this?” I asked Mike Quin. “Your guess equals mine,” he said. “I’d heard an old Irish firebrand came down from Vancouver to plead with the governor for her nephew’s release, but I didn’t know she’d be in the hall tonight.” On the stage, Pirate Larsen had taken the arm of Grandmother O’Hollie. Tom Mooney was a radical who had been arrested in San Francisco almost twenty years earlier when a bomb went off, killing ten people, during a World War Preparedness Day parade. Although the district attorney’s case against him was based on perjury and the jury was tainted, Mooney was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. His name became a rallying cry for the Left. Union members often chanted “Free Tom Mooney,” and that was what they did now as Grandmother O’Hollie hobbled on her cane to the microphone.