by Mick Lowe
“Git away from that door, you cock-sucking Commie stooge!”
The pudgy little newspaperman, his glasses askew on his nose, was clearly terrified at this sudden assault and he was staring in disbelief into a snarling, gap-toothed face when, suddenly, it was gone.
“Hoople, you asshole, when you gonna start picking on somebody your own size?” Gilpin recognized the voice of Jake McCool, who had grabbed his assailant by the shoulder and spun him around. Behind Jake, and clearly spoiling for a fight, stood three older men, as tall as Jake, but much stockier.
Hoople sized up the four of them, and didn’t much like his odds.
“McCool!” he sputtered. He jerked loose, out of Jake’s grasp, and stalked off across the lobby, shaking a fist back at Jake. “Anytime, buddy, anytime! And I just hope you never need a steward on the job!”
Foley struggled to catch his breath. “Jake! Am I ever glad to see you!”
Jake, clearly in his element, shot the newsman a reassuring grin. “You okay, Foley?” And then he lowered his voice. “You wait right here. I’ll tell ya what happens inside soon’s I come out.”
Foley could only nod in mute gratitude.
28
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Jake strode across the lobby and pounded hard on the wooden doors, which were opened a crack by the Sergeant-at-Arms, who looked Hoople and the McCools up and down, nodded, and swung the double doors open wide.
The scene inside was all very familiar to Jake. The meeting was already under way, the same old tension, the air thick, blue with cigarette smoke, funky with the smell of sweat. The same wide aisle ran down the centre of the big Hall, splitting the rank and file into two seated groups. But now the seating order had reversed, with Hoople peeling off to sit with his comrades on the left, and the McCools pulling up chairs on the right. Their group, Jake couldn’t help noticing, was now visibly smaller than the one across the aisle—not even close. The faces at the long table up on the stage had also changed completely, of course, but the antipathy between the two groups down on the floor remained, as evident as ever.
Jake studied his union brothers as the speeches droned on. They were a nondescript bunch—old guys, mainly—dressed in workers’ garb—baggy, dark blue pants over matching shirts, or the same outfits, almost uniforms, really, in dark green. A rough, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, hard-working crowd, at home in a workshop or in the bush. Stubborn, self-reliant and resilient men who were functionally illiterate in both of Canada’s official languages because they had been forced to drop out of school at an early age in the Dirty Thirties, first to work on the farm, then to march off to fight Hitler.
Finally it was time for the main event—the moment they’d all been waiting for.
“And so I move, Mister Chairman, that in light of the total lack of support for this Local Union in our darkest hour of need—the fact that we received no strike pay from the National Office—after we poured good money into that organization for years—and where did our money go, Mister Chairman? … And so I move that we discontinue our check-off payments to this do-nothing buncha bastards, effective immediately!”
The crowd across the aisle, swept up in this peroration, roared its approval.
The new president gavelled for order and accepted the motion.
“And the Chair recognizes the Brother over there.” He was pointing at Sworski, who was sitting at the front of Jake’s group.
Spike, about the only rank-and-filer wearing a suit and tie, spoke passionately, even eloquently, against the motion. He proposed a series of manoeuvres to delay or defer the action, each of which was put to a vote, and each of which was quickly defeated by a show of hands from the floor, each side voting as a solid bloc—and Spike’s bloc was clearly a minority, reduced now to a sorry and ever diminishing rump.
Finally, inexorably, the main motion was put to a vote. The unspoken purpose, as, to a man, the multitude well understood, was to drive a dagger through the heart of the Canadian wing of the Mine Mill Union.
And it passed, with a great roar of approval and the thunderous stomping of work boots on the hollow-sounding wooden floor. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends.
All around him Jake could practically see the shoulders sag, the air come out of the balloon, as one by one Sworski’s adherents quietly made for the exits. Even the last remnant of his small rump was melting away.
Jake joined the quiet exodus, found Gilpin waiting anxiously just outside the doors.
“Well?”
Jake shook his head grimly. “It passed.”
Outwardly, at least, Gilpin greeted this news with equanimity, but inwardly his feelings were decidedly mixed. On the one hand his story had panned out, which was good for his career—and his pocketbook. On the other, he felt sorry for his old friend Sworski, and for the demise of the scrappy old union he was almost certainly bearing witness to.
“Wanna join us for a beer downstairs?” Jake asked Gilpin, motioning at the three large men who were still behind him.
“Sure. You bet.”
They trooped down to the union tap room, where their entrance did not pass unnoticed. They were greeted by hard stares of unmitigated hostility, which Foley, after his recent encounter with Hoople, found unnerving. But the McCools seemed oblivious to the cold shoulder. Soon Foley had met Jake’s father and uncles, and he’d reached into the pocket of his trench coat for his pen and notebook.
“So, what happened up there?”
Jake just sighed and shook his head, and his elders looked equally bereft.
“We got our clocks cleaned,” Jake answered quietly.
“They think they’ve killed the Mine Mill Union,” one of the senior McCools said softly—Gilpin thought it was Bud, but he wasn’t sure—he hated these group interviews. “Down, but not out, is what I say.” He wrapped a big mitt around his draft glass. “Here’s to the Mine Mill!”
His brothers and nephew quickly raised their own glasses, tapping the rims softly together, and Foley joined in.
“But what actually happened?” Gilpin pressed.
“We got outvoted,” Jake shrugged.
“Oh yeah we did,” agreed Jake’s dad, suppressing a snort of indignation.
“But ya gotta hand it to ’em,” one of the uncles said ruefully. “They sure know how to pack a meeting.”
“Christ, yes,” agreed the other uncle. “Ever notice how we seem to be the only ones actually paying for our drinks?”
“But it gets results, Uncle Walt,” Jake remonstrated.
“Aye, laddy,” Walt McCool agreed. “And it is a form of organizing, I suppose.”
Bill McCool grunted and surveyed the room with a baleful glare. “If you can call this organized.”
Gilpin felt increasingly apprehensive, sensing that the despairing mood at the table was on the edge of boiling over into dark, menacing rage. He had a story to write.
Even now the words of his lede were circling inside his head like some spinning carousel. He knew from long experience it wouldn’t stop until he got them tamed, ordered and written down.
Gilpin rose, shrugged into his trench coat, and excused himself, muttering an explanation about having a story to write.
Of course his story wasn’t due until six o’clock of the following evening, so Foley took his time to get it right. This would be the first news feature he’d filed to the Globe, and by far the most substantial piece of writing. He’d even managed to find a Labour History prof out in B.C. who was willing to predict on the record that the loss of Local 598’s hefty dues payments would likely lead to the demise of the Mine Mill in Canada—the prof was the type of source known as “a pipe-puffer” in the business. Gilpin balanced him out with the “down but not out” quote he’d picked up from whichever of the McCool elders in the bar the night before. He attributed that to “a veteran union insider.”
Gilpin wrote the story as he always did—on the same portable typewriter he’d carted from Chic
ago to Guatemala City and back to Chicago and on to D.C. before moving back to Chicago one last time and then on to Canada. He typed it out double spaced to leave room for edits—of which there were many—before he finally picked up the phone to dictate the finished product to the rewrite men in Toronto. It had, as Gilpin knew, all the elements of any great news story: bitter infighting and a struggle to the death for power, rich history and colourful local lore, and, perhaps the death throes of a legendary trade union whose roots ran deep—all the way back to the turn of the last century—a history Gilpin summarized as succinctly as he could. In the end it ran to nearly three “takes,” or pages, and, after countless edits Gilpin was well pleased with the result.
The next morning he scanned the Globe bulldog more eagerly than usual. He was delighted to find his story on page three. Not the front page—which had been described as “the most influential newspaper real estate in Canada” because of the way it set the day’s national news agenda in newsrooms across the city of Toronto—but page three was the next best thing. Still no by-line, either, Gilpin noticed, even though it was longer and more prominently displayed than many of the staffers’ stories which did run under by-lines, but Mike O’Neill was notoriously stingy with by-lines when it came to his stringers, of which he had a legion. Foley, in fact, had never had a by-line in The Globe and Mail. No matter—the story had received the best play he’d had yet, which told him that, by-line or no, his work was being noticed—and appreciated—by someone in the nether regions of the paper’s editorial management. A big fish had risen to the bait, and now, Foley sensed, he was about to set the hook.
29
Spike’s Plants Come Home to Roost
The morning’s Globe, carefully folded to Gilpin’s story, made its way around the big oak table before coming to rest where it had started—in front of the national president of the Canadian Union of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union, who was chairing this emergency meeting of his executive board.
He tapped on the paper. “So, what do we do now?”
The story had not caught his National Executive Board entirely by surprise—Spike Sworski had forewarned them such a move was in the offing. Even still, the mood around the table was sombre.
“Trusteeship!” came the first response.
The president grunted noncommittally. He had expected this knee-jerk response from an especially hawkish member of his board.
“Anyone else?” He scanned each of the faces turned towards him up and down the long boardroom table.
Only silence and a stubborn, gloomy air greeted his query.
He paused reflectively. Trusteeship—where the national executive appointed a trustee to run a Local’s affairs, effectively revoking its charter, was a legal and time-honoured means of dealing with a rogue Local whose executive members were guilty of financial malfeasance or violating the Union’s Constitution. But trusteeship was a draconian, last-resort measure, and this situation was different—far more delicate. The new executive up in Sudbury had been duly elected, after all, by a rank and file that everyone around the table knew, and respected. How would such a heavy-handed response play out with Sudbury’s hard-nosed, volatile rank and file?
“It’s risky,” the president said at last. Several heads around the table bobbed in agreement.
“So is doing nothing!” insisted the outspoken, hard-line board member.
Once again the president noted heads nodding in agreement. The board numbers appeared to be about evenly divided. Where no one dissented was that something must be done—their backs really were against the wall; inaction was not an option.
And so the debate was joined.
“Abe, what can you tell us?” the president directed his question at Abraham Bluestein, the union’s Toronto legal counsel.
Bluestein cleared his throat, and began speaking carefully, as he always did.
“Well, first of all, trusteeship is certainly a viable legal option in this case. But politically, the issue may not be so clear cut. If the ultimate concern here is not to lose the hearts and minds—to say nothing of the dues dollars—of the members of Local 598, then an overly hasty move to trusteeship could present an untenable risk over the long term …” The lawyer paused to let his words sink in.
Silence greeted his equivocating observations.
“What about the assets, Abe?” asked the national treasurer, breaking the silence at last.
“The bricks and mortar, the properties up there, yes,” Bluestein nodded. “Excellent question. I suppose a prima facie case could easily be made that all of that, which was paid for by the members of the Mine Mill Union, remains the property of the Mine Mill Union; most courts are inclined to regard such property rights as inviolable and applicable in perpetuity …”
The president paused reflectively, before posing another question. “So if we could prove that the new executive up there was conspiring to confiscate our property illegally, and to transfer ownership to another entity—say, another union—would that provide legal grounds for an injunction to oust that new executive, give them the old heave-ho off our property?”
“Ye-es, I suppose the answer would be yes,” replied Bluestein. He looked down the table at the president. “But have you such evidence?”
The president paused, and looked down at the table, stumped.
“No, I suppose not, Abe,” he admitted reluctantly at last.
The debate droned on through the lunch hour, until, finally, in mid-afternoon, the group reached a consensus: Local 598 would be placed in trusteeship, after all. The national vice-president, a mild-mannered and unassuming individual, would be dispatched to Sudbury to “babysit” the new local executive and to serve as trustee. Abraham Bluestein would accompany him in the event that the opportunity for legal action might present itself.
They arrived at the Junction, an obscure, little-used whistle stop in the farthest northeast reaches of central Sudbury. This was standard practice for Mine Mill officials wanting to come and go while avoiding the myriad of prying eyes likely to be present at the city’s bustling downtown passenger railway depot on Elgin Street.
Abe Bluestein felt as he always did whenever he ventured up to the northern mining capital; the place struck him as raw, uncivilized. It still felt like a frontier town: wild, uncouth, even a little dangerous. The whole scene struck him as starkly surreal as he stepped down onto the platform of the Sudbury Junction.
Their train pulled out of the station—little more than a shack, really—almost as soon as they had stepped off, and Bluestein and his companion were left alone to find their bearings in the black expanse of the limitless bush that surrounded Sudbury.
For the first time in his life, Bluestein, who had made a career out of representing progressive, left-wing clients, felt he truly was an agent in the Cold War. There was a clandestinity in the darkness and isolation of this arrival.
A single streetlight illuminated the scene, throwing sharp, angular shadows that reminded Bluestein of old Bogart movies. Right on cue a tall figure in a trench coat emerged from the shadows beneath the eaves of the shack cum station. His face was obscured by the brim of a snap-brim fedora pulled low on his head.
“Welcome to Sudbury, gentlemen.” The voice was low, but warm and familiar.
“Spike? Are we ever glad to see you!” Bluestein pumped Sworski’s outstretched hand.
They briefed Sworski on the national office decision as he drove them through the eastern outskirts of the city to his home in Coniston.
“How do you think it’ll play, Spike?”
“What, the trusteeship, you mean? That all depends. The new executive’ll hate it, that’s for sure. The membership’ll be split right down the middle. Personally, I’m all for it.”
Spike pulled up into his driveway. “C’mon in. I’ll make us a pot of fresh coffee.”
The trio had just settled into Sworski’s house, and were sipping at their coffees around the kitchen table when there was a loud rappin
g at the door.
There was something about the urgency of the loud, rapping staccato knocks that startled all three of them.
“Were you expecting someone?” Bluestein asked Sworski.
“What? At this hour? No, not at all,” Spike replied as he rushed to the door.
He glanced through the window in the door before quickly swinging it open.
A big, shambling bear of a man stood at the kitchen door.
“Brother Alaavo!” Spike exclaimed, clearly surprised. “Come in, come in! What brings you out at such an hour?”
“Sorry it’s so late, Spike, but I seen your lights was on, I’m just back from Sturgeon, and I thought you’d want to know what just happened—Oh, I’m sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt—”
“No, no, it’s quite all right, Risto. Here, let me introduce you. Whatever you have to tell me you can say to these gentlemen …”
Spike went on to explain to Bluestein and his other guest that Risto Alaavo, a Coniston smelterman also known as “Grizzly,” had, since the previous summer, been one of a pair of trusted Mine Mill veterans he’d assigned to the special duty of “shadowing” the leaders of the insurgency within the Local. They had been instructed to work closely with the insurgents, to win their trust over time and to report personally to Spike.
“So, what was going on in Sturgeon River, Ted?” Spike asked as he poured the big man a coffee.
“Special meetin’. Listen to who all was there—” He rhymed off names that were familiar to everyone at the table. Beside the newly elected president, vice-president and recording secretary of Local 598, Alaavo listed a well-known CCF Member of Parliament, the vice-president of the Canadian Congress of Labour, and the senior Canadian man in the United Steelworkers of America. “And they were talkin’ about Steel takin’ over the Local! Just like that! I couldn’t friggin’ believe it!”