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Memoir by Mike Zetteler
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Well then, what is -- or was -- the truth about local dockworkers? True, if hard work alone made one a ruffian, we would have filled the jail and detox centers. With 12-hour days the norm in the spring or fall rush, or whenever captains were in a hurry to make the turnaround, 50- or 100- or 110-lb. bags of swirling, choking flour or similar commodities to be unloaded from boxcars and stacked on pallets and unstacked by hand overhead to the tops of the hold -- the lower deck of the hold above, and so on for maybe 10,000 tons -- the job could fairly be called grueling. Given the weather I encountered myself, I would even call it torturous: from seven below zero on a December morning when a biting wind turned the flesh gelid under layers of clothing while standing on the unsheltered stringpiece as the arriving ship's hawsers were slipped over the yellow bollards by the linesmen, to leveling off an open upper deck in the full noon sun as the temperature baked at 101 degrees. (The summer of 1988 had more than 30 days in the 90s, and six days at or above 100 degrees.) When we unloaded a steel ship straight through until after 5 o'clock the next morning -- not that unusual during a rush -- it demanded more stamina than I thought I had, deserving of the triple-time rate; and slinging green, salted hides by their tie strings merited more than the extra so-called "obnoxious pay" of 15˝˘ an hour. So did graphite, saturating you with black powder that meant you had to scrub even your leather boots afterwards and clean the rims of your eyelids and nostrils with cotton swabs. Indeed, my first day turned out to be misleading as to what I could expect in the future: I was sent out of the hiring hall as a replacement to find my way aboard a ship loading hides recently skinned from Wisconsin's huge cow herds -- it was America's Dairyland, after all, and the exporter of one-fourth of the world's leather. They were salted down, folded over with the greasy fat-side out for lower quality skins and brown or black or spotted fur sides exposed for the higher-grade specimens. There in the wide-open hold, the hides were netted immediate origin in similar freight cars, where we unloaded them onto skids, with the quaint surprise that unopened boxcars left baking in the sun bred what looked like masses of white rice wriggling under the top layers. No wonder that after I had enough years in I gave up my warehouse number to take my chances on making it to a ship on the second round after the roll was taken or gangs were beefed up. As a measure of how much cargo a man lifted in one day, consider that in 1971, four men unloaded in a day three boxcars, usually carrying 2,000 50-lb. bags each, or 37.5 tons per man. [A lead acid car battery weighs about 43 pounds: Envision toting 2,000 of them in an eight-hour day for a comparison, factoring in another seven pounds apiece.] By the '80s, in an indication of how the production was driven up to keep the port competitive, two men were doing two boxcars, or 50 tons apiece in an eight-hour day. In contrast, Arnold Schwartzenegger remarked on the "Tonight Show" that in his workouts at their extreme he moved some 40 tons -- distributed to employ a whole range of muscles, of course. But bodybuilders generally schedule a day or two between sessions, while longshoremen are posted to work day after day until the job is finished; on a ship this ordeal, though output varied more than in the warehouse, averaged about 42 tons an hour for an eight-man gang, or 63 tons each in 12 hours. And this was not an air-conditioned facility or the breezy beach of Gold's Gym, but in heavy work clothes and safety shoes and hardhat in a humid, airless hold or on a freezing steel deck under a wintry midnight moon, while bulky with thick clothing. The bitterest fact of all for anyone hired after 1967 was that as the pie kept shrinking, from 34 gangs [usually made up of eight men in the hold, four on the inshore side and four offshore, along with the complement of hold boss, winchmen, dockmen and several forklift drivers as needed] to a handful, the same men kept their coveted spots on the deck or the dock while the rest -- even as they gained seniority -- aged 25 years doing young men's work, throwing bags in the hold 90% of the time. I myself finally trained for the winch at age 49, retiring two years later [when an early pension buyout was offered us as the major employer, Meehan Seaway, switched to a defined contribution plan, as many companies have, to reduce future obligations and facilitate its eventual sale to Federal Marine Terminals] without ever being posted to that job, after 21 years. [And even the training and tours as a relief man, with hand-on-the lever responsibility on the inshore (dockside) or offshore (above the hatch) winch with tons of cargo swaying on the hook as it traveled over the gang -- with very little to stop a load once it was on its way but the finesse of the two operators continuously judging the speed of their opposing, married lines or an ignominious crash against the hold's bulkhead and a dumped load -- was a terrific experience, completely absorbing to a rookie. [Interestingly enough, the nature of winches is that your first impulse when a load seems out of control as both winchmen try to feed their lines down together to land it, is to yank back on the lever like a brake if the load starts to overshoot its mark. This is the worst thing you can do, since the momentum keeps the top of the payload going while the hook above it jerks to a halt, most likely spilling everything. [Actually, following the law of conservation of angular momentum, a load moving to the offshore too fast has to be given more slack in the line, dropping it even faster, but reducing its sideways motion. Scary stuff for a beginner.] But of course, the pay was good [even after we accepted substantial cuts], when there was work -- today [1994] over $17 an hour plus benefits -- so we could afford to relax in hungry, thirsty clusters at noon or after work at 5 or 10 p.m. in Bay View taverns such as Marino's on E. Superior and S. Russell streets, a block from Groppi's grocery store, or the Club Carneval and Americana, or Inner City bars like Kern's Penthouse and the Midnighter's. But the married men usually left early in the evening, if not always when we were rained out of the job earlier in the day, and most of us turned up for work the next morning. At least this was true of the Marino's bunch, mostly aging white hippies and leftists and native South Siders who found it a hospitable place to eat soup and a sandwich and run a tab, even if, like myself, they drank only soda at noon -- though some bottles of Special Export were quickly downed -- while closely watching the weather reports on TV. At Marino's -- later the Palomino -- we could look out the front door at the park where the Bay View Rolling Mill Massacre of 1886 was marked with a plaque in commemoration:
The little known history
of the massacre that occurred in Milwaukee, when
The deadly stand-off between workers and the National Guard was
the
A historical marker, pictured above [see
Site], is located at Russell and
Superior on
In early labour history before workers had fought for and won
rights which we can committed union members and officers -- at least appreciated this sacrifice, aching as we were, even if the average citizen long ago had forgotten the struggles of the workers. The irony, of course, was that we were still putting in 12-hour days -- and even resisted as a union going to three 8-hour shifts, since that would drastically cut overtime in a seasonal and sporadic job. But then, it was our choice. (Sadly, when he died in 2012, at age 80, owner Dick Marino was little-remembered by local patrons of the Palomino -- having sold the business in 2000 to be run by East Side bar and restaurant entrepreneur Leslie Montemurro -- despite a remarkable life found that out when when I stopped at the tavern after Marino's memorial service and no longshoremen showed up for a planned gathering, and I toasted his memory with a fine dark Milwaukee craft beer, alone. I was especially grateful to recall the casual way we could hurry out of Dick's bar to our scattered cars after a rushed lunch and merely call out to the bartender what we had consumed, to be put on our tabs. By the time we got a good paycheck -- which Dick would convey to the bank to cash while we worked -- this could run to hundreds of dollars, and it could even take until the the middle of the snowy off-season for me to get paid up. Unfortunately, the sight of envelopes of cash being handed back to us over the bar didn't escape the notice of agents who already had him under surveillance, as his tax difficulties would later show -- and no doubt the fact that the tab system bypassed the cash register entirely could be considered skimming, especially added to the speculation about sub rosa sports betting. But whatever went on behind the scenes, with his lovely wife Marion cooking it was a noontime haven for minestrone or pea soup and liver sausage with a thin slice of raw, among other choices, and the satisfying Saturday spaghetti and meatball dinners were always a wide draw. (I did learn later that at least winchman Harvey Taylor -- now domestic partner with Dick's younger longshoreman crony Fred Krause had attended the funeral, as friends of the family.) And if there were no ships scheduled, or we were too exhausted or hungover to answer the bell the next shift, and notified the hiring hall accordingly (called "checking out"), that was the joy of longshoring -- the freedom to show up or not, or chase extra work if the opportunity was there, trying for a spot at noon or even 6 p.m. as a replacement [which is how I got one nickname, "Mr. Six O'clock," mostly from not showing up during the day, from rotund hookup man Dick Schiller]. (That rain we watched for, that meant the hatches had to be closed to keep the grain products from getting wet and moldy, even had a name, it was so welcome. Though in the song they may call the wind Mariah, on the docks, yells of "C'mon, Raymond" rang out in threatening weather.) But the possibility of getting work in smaller chunks also led to complacency that could backfire, illustrated by the common claim: I can do anything for four hours. I found how arrogant this was, at least in my case, when I descended to do my four hours in an open hatch that had baked in the sun all morning. Slightly queasy and unsteady from all the beer the night before but smug that I had gotten my sleep and was beating the game, sweat immediately soaking my bandanna under the hardhat, I cradled the coarse 110-lb. flour bags and staggered with their unusually heavy weight. Surely I must have put in a good hour, drenched as I was with my sleeves soon rolled down to protect my already scratched forearms even in the heat of the sun, building a row that started at our feet and soon extended above the waist -- when I looked at my watch to see that 10 minutes had passed. Pleading illness to the leadman -- accurately enough, and still possible that early in the shift -- I bailed and headed for my car. Clammy and sopping wet, I had learned some kind of lesson, if only about the toll of growing old in a dead-end job. I could take some small comfort in the fact that I had finished high school as a 125-lb. smoker who couldn't run a block to catch a bus, and now it took a serious hangover and punishing heat to bring me down. Still, I wondered if I shouldn't have managed to become a Freshman English instructor instead of dropping out of grad school due to boredom. But the truth is, most of us could work far beyond normal endurance: loading freezer cargo such as tongues and sweetbreads in boxes up to 100 lbs.; or frozen horsemeat -- or the horses themselves, in quarters wrapped in burlap -- intended for Le Havre; running dunnage between the crane and the forklift to chock skewed logs like giant pick-up sticks which could rumble across the hatch at any moment; rolling and upending 400-lb. barrels, from soy oil to olives for the Sentry Supermarket chain. Soybean oil was also shipped in blue pails filled right on Jones Island, carried one in each hand to be stacked, always slick with a greasy film that quickly saturated and ruined standard split-leather gloves. Rubberized rain gloves were the only thing that would handle the task, for those who thought to bring them. Rarely, the job had us unloading the occasional car from across the lake in Michigan, or even crates of plate glass or slabs of marble or granite. Much cargo traveled to or from Rotterdam, Europe's busiest port. Or manipulating newsprint rolls destined for the Journal [where I had once been a library clerk], weighing many tons, with curved staves (spinners) and padded mats to topple them onto, working overtime simply because the work might not be there the next day. And in the end, of course, it wasn't. They did it because they had families, and bills and mortgages and car payments and even boats to pay for, and would send their kids to college like proper Americans. Some owned their own small businesses -- restaurants and taverns -- or would even send themselves to college. No, hard work merely meant that most of us, from the naturally brawny to those who, like myself, spent a lot of time in the gym in the off-season to keep in shape, had nothing in common but pain. When my own hands began going numb in the morning if I raised them to my face in front of the mirror for any length of time, I diagnosed it as incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. This came in addition to the agonizing tenosynovitis treated with cortisone shots and a wrist brace -- whose immovability shifted the stress to my elbow. But the early Milwaukeeans who built the port may have been hardier -- Irish and Scandinavians, then Poles (first used as strikebreakers, becoming the majority by 1921). Still, they were no doubt individuals. (In Hoffer's widely reprinted phrase, "the people I work and live with are lumpy with talents.") As, too, were the blacks, beginning with the northward migration of the 1920s and taking over as the majority by 1945. According to then-Port Director John A. Seefeldt, the local was "90% black" in 1971. Finally came the Hispanics, whose participation was successfully opposed by Business Agent Brzek as late as the 1950s, according to Vrana, because they turned the otherwise amicable blacks and whites into an "explosive mixture." But every influx probably had table manners as good as the radicalized sons (and tiny number of daughters) of the middle class who began turning to physical labor in the late '60s after it had become unfashionable for most whites except those with a strong blue collar heritage, or the hippies. At any rate, every group showed its desire for stable employment and respectability through involvement in the union, Association president -- later ejected for alleged "communistic activities" -- Aaron Toliver, in 1934. It was an amalgam of five shippers, the Great Lakes Transit Corporation (GLTC ) -- which threatened to move its operations to Chicago because of a perceived militancy on the part of the union -- that pressured the rank-and-file to oust Toliver in a referendum in 1939. Ironically, it was after 1941, when the purge of "the Left" was completed, according to Vrana, that the GLTC moved anyway, in a lesson that should not have been -- but was -- lost on succeeding union leadership. Despite the fact that Milwaukee's first recorded strike, in 1848, involved longshoremen (and it was a port before it was a city), local unions could never afford to aggressively resist the pressures on all workingmen since before the organizing days of the Knights of Labor, which culminated in the largely unsuccessful -- for longshoremen -- "Big Strike" of 1887, begun by dockworkers in the Port of New York and spreading through sympathy strikes to an estimated 50,000 men. Vrana speculates that local longshoremen who worked winters in San Francisco with the original, more radicalized International Warehousemen's and Longshoremen's Union (ILWU) under Harry Bridges, kept the progressive spirit alive here. Nevertheless, the anti-Communist and anti-CIO faction was in power by the '50s, and when the ILA was expelled from the AFL for racketeering in 1953, re-formed Local 815 as part of the Great Lakes-based International Brotherhood of Longshoremen (IBL), rejoining the AFL in 1960 when the ILA was reinstated. [However, Brooklyn ILA local union boss Scotto, nephew by marriage of Murder, Inc. enforcer be head of what became the Gambino crime family, later went to prison himself in 1979 despite enormous influence with local and national politicians as organizer for the 100,000-member union. He was succeeded by the widely-respected anti-Communist became ILA president as the union adjusted to containerization by obtaining the first Guaranteed Annual Income, in New York.] Perhaps the peak of cold war Red-scare activity was reached when Brzek, a union member since the '30s and first elected president in 1942, testified against Illinois Communist Party leader Claude Lightfoot (a high school classmate of dockman Oglesby's), convicted under the Smith Act of conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the government. (The US Supreme Court reversed the decision). Still, with the changes in society, hippies and radicals (often, but not always, the same) eventually found a refuge on the docks, freedom to come and go while following other pursuits, after overcoming an initial hostility to what was first seen everywhere as bizarre appearance and unpatriotic talk. With the longshoremen's traditional acceptance of mavericks and misfits -- no doubt because employers held down wages by drawing on an available pool of new arrivals to the country, the unemployed from all walks didn't care to -- meet the scrutiny demanded of full-time employees elsewhere, pony-tails like my own became common on the whites in the 1970s, and a dockworker without facial hair was rare. The freaks were joined by East Side denizen Annie Holzhauer -- a waitress at the Granfalloon coffehouse (one of the underground newspaper Kaleidoscope's peripheral businesses under publisher and editor John Kois) and daughter of the chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Social Welfare, whose mother, Jean Dorheim, was an educator and writer -- as the first woman to perform the work, in 1971. The first female to actually break into the union, with President Bill Mosby's backing, was Amy Kirkland chairperson of the Milwaukee District Nurses Association Board of Directors), in 1976. [Joanne Yuenger, Hildene Callies, Amy Kirkland, Rt.] (Mosby, who went from cotton picker to entertainer and restaurateur, was described by the Journal's Jerry Wilkerson in a 1977 series as "one of the leaders of the old longshore school." (The grizzled Mosby was "an articulate Tennessean who has talked with US presidents about port business," whose "brawn fits the old longshore image -- 240 pounds, 6 feet 2 inches and still as firm as a burlap bag of pinto beans." Milwaukee Magazine readers may recall him from the story on the Bronzeville jazz and blues clubs of the 1940s as the owner of the old Chateau Lounge on Third Street.) As Andi McKenna, now secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 715, recalls about her hiring in 1976, attitudes towards her as a woman were "pretty good. I've been harassed more in other places, believe me." Writing in the alternative newspaper Bugle American at the time, the modestly lower-case judy Jacobi quoted McKenna as feeling ". . . men on the docks are eight times more respectful than men working in the (counterculture) community. Some of my negative opinions about men changed from working at the docks." As Jacobi noted, the equality extended to the co-ed bathroom, a lavatory with stalls and urinals connected to the lunchroom by an open doorway: "'It doesn't bother the men or us,' according to Amy," now a nurse living in Mequon. "'We work together and piss together.'" [The unisex policy did create problems for the men in the hold, since traditionally no one took a break just to leave the ship to urinate; one usually went to a corner at the sweatboards under the wings, as far away as seemed appropriate. But the presence of women seemed to raise the level of discretion needed, and sometimes there were no dark or obscured corners in the more open hatches, especially during the day. I'm sure all the women waited for their break times, or took one, but I remember the embarrassment while working a hatch with a busty female union member named Joanne -- whose nipples made dark sweaty circles on her T-shirt, creating a nice diversion of their own -- when I returned from a quick trip to the shadows to see a yellow stream following me back down the pitched deck.] But if the men were tolerant, the employers weren't. Two women fired in 1972 before attaining the 30 days required for union membership alleged sex discrimination in suits before the State Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations. One, Sarah Casey, did cite the lack of separate bathroom facilities. The other, a black woman named Maxine Griffin, would have been the first woman into the union, but was discharged by Stearns Marine for "leaving assigned post for unusual duration." Though Jacobi terms Griffin's subsequent firing by Hansen Seaway on her 29th day as "suspect," she adds that Mosby "said 'she was taking too many breaks,'" and "Veteran black longshoremen say she screwed it up herself." [Lodging a formal complaint against a fellow longshoreman or a company official was said to be taking him Downtown, something not carried out nearly as much as it was threatened.] But though both women lost, Casey -- fired by Hansen Seaway for "Not being physically able to perform the job" -- had more support. A white supervisor, Bill Harris, was the only one to testify against her, stating that she was not unloading a boxcar as as fast as the others, but her crew "testified that she was a capable, even spunky worker and was able to do the job." It is also suspicious, says former Vice-President Rad Keener, that as women began applying for work the standard was raised from 50-lb. bags to 100 lbs. and 50 kilos (111 lbs.). Even with the lighter bags the norm, except for the occasional birdseed (millet) or tannic acid shipment, "Of about 50 women that have tried longshore work in the past five years, about half made it through one day before quitting," Jacobi wrote. And as the newcomers became active in union affairs, Krause -- "Big Hippie" -- who was the underground newspaper Kaleidoscope's distributor [before I took over those duties] was elected to the executive board, and a 29-year-old Mao-style revolutionary named Pat Huck ran for president. As Huck -- not a big man but an enthusiastic worker who had nevertheless earlier served a 20-day suspension by Hansen Seaway because he "encouraged" a one-day wildcat strike by the warehousemen -- told me, he considered the flamboyant Mosby a glib "showboat" who didn't regard employers as the workers' adversaries, and overly PR-minded as well. These newcomers -- as well as uncontrollable blacks, according to researcher Vrana -- sent Brzek into rages, as anyone who attended a union meeting where he officiated can attest. It is not surprising that Brzek, a force in the earlier movement to purge the ILA of Communists, identified in the Journal as "an undercover agent for the FBI in the 1940s [who] joined the American Communist Party to spy. . . ." retired at age 56 in 1973 to take over at the all-white local in Green Bay. (What is puzzling to this union member, who often witnessed Brzek's ferocious outbreaks, is why the Journal's Leon Hughes, generally perceptive, referred to him as "soft-voiced" and "a peacekeeper." Still, Hughes recognized the cliche problem when he wrote that Brzek "never lived up to the movie image of a brawling, fast dealing longshore boss." The departing top union officer did acknowledge to Hughes that "he thinks his brand of leadership does not fit the changing work force." And if there was now a certain amount of pot-smoking in the shadowed corners of the holds, the work got done. Any substance abuse was most prevalent among the old-timers with enough seniority to be hold bosses who could sleep it off (in one case, to discover he had been sealed in with a wall of corn-soya mix bags by his crew), or hungover winchmen who occasionally sent the gang working below them scattering in terror, or even to the hospital, when they were hit with dumped loads. [A 50-lb. bag falling on my foot as I sat in the open square of the hold, dislodged from a load brought in without warning too soon after lunch, sent me to the clinic with a twisted ankle and a mass of broken blood vessels, though presumably the signalman was sober.] For most, if they drank during the work day at all -- and the majority didn't -- a few bottles of beer at lunch time was the norm, with an occasional half-pint smuggled on board after 6 p.m. for a long, freezing night ahead. The point is, an excessive amount of drinking is common among many American workers, and professional types too, as a visit to any Downtown fern bar will show. But gluttony and profanity? About the same as at any college hangout. And the rough stuff? Yes, I can recall a 1970s casual worker named Lepak who was blown away by the cops in a shotgun holdup of the Blust drugstore on the East Side; forklift driver Fred Adams killed in a North Side tavern shootout; hold boss Lee Witherspoon, shot by his wife in retaliation for a reported history of abuse; the hold man (Bobby Sanford) who never returned, whom we heard was ambushed by the FBI on a visit back as recounted by Harvey Taylor [left] years later, is that he was killed in a squabble over a pool game, involving a trivial amount of money, maybe 50˘]. And not too long ago, feisty holdman Floyd Raymond -- still energetic despite the gray in his wiry black hair -- was murdered near his home in the inner city as, according to newspaper reports, he objected when drugs were offered to a young relative. But does this show, statistically, any more belligerence than the average paper mill worker, say, or postal employee? Given the number of personnel involved -- including several professed Christians and sometime preachers, inevitably called "Rev" -- probably not. [OK, I stacked the deck on that one.] (One such peace-loving "Rev," Henry Grant, who sold bulk peanuts from the trunk of his car, was wounded in a holdup in the grocery store he owned, but certainly not because he was a longshoreman.) And if any shared experience, besides hard work, could be said to shape the longshoreman's attitude, it should be the presence of danger. Local poet, songwriter and performer Taylor, a winchman with over 25 [now 46] years seniority, writes about number-two Hold Boss Jesse Boatman: . . . . Goose, who laughs completely, climbs on board the Amazonia, gold tooth flashing & down the ladder into the hold, where a monstrous crate of machinery parts crushes his life away against the sweatboards of the ship. Hookup man Marshall Wingo lost half his face when an improperly placed hook slipped from a huge metal piece being picked up by the crane -- never returning to work and recently dying at an early age -- and candidate Pat Huck, shortly before the 1976 elections, was found dead in Kenosha after falling into an uncovered hatch the crew of the Jugoslavian ship Makarska had opened the previous night while berthed in Milwaukee, apparently to save a little time. Though Milwaukee has a reputation as a relatively pilferage-free port, nothing can stop some minor "breakage" of crates in the hold, not even crew members sent down to watch over more attractive cargo, such as bottled beer, during unloading. [These components of the crew were the lowest of the ship's ranks; though the officers even on the foreign-owned ships registered in countries of convenience tended to speak English and represent the affluent classes, the rest were recruited mostly from third-world regions. Occasionally they chattered in what African-American hold boss Top Cat (Milton Collins) called boogie-woogie talk.] But it is ironic that the zealous Huck, as I heard from workers in his gang that day, realized he had been seen hiding a bottle of Greek Roditis wine in the hatch and rushed out at noon to change his clothes to confuse the spotters from the ship's crew. Evidently, he started back in the dark at quitting time to retrieve the bottle from the area where he had stashed it, but never made it. He bled to death overnight after falling into the open hold and breaking his neck. Still, one rare, balmy afternoon was enjoyed by our top gangs when hold boss Joe Taylor used his clout to land several loads on the deck to block passage by the ship's crew, keeping them from investigating as we trooped in and out around a cold tapped beer barrel, sampling cheese and ham from the reefer locker. Of course, because Huck was a militant who wrote for the Revolutionary Communist Party newspaper The Worker ("I don't consider myself a Marxist," he told me), who died on a state-Communist regime ship, some friends, like Marc Olsen, suspected internecine foul play. But this seems like fantasy, and the FBI -- though perhaps favoring Marshal Tito's rule -- agreed. Still, Huck was no dilettante, and could have won office in another ten years or so, becoming his generation's white Aaron Toliver. [And in those Cold War years, some paranoia was inescapable; when I rather idly asked a Jugoslavian sailor whom I had heard speaking English on deck about who might take over for the ailing Tito -- a subject of much press speculation here -- he became resolutely silent, as if fearing a trap.] But if all this seems like significant lawbreaking, it should be pointed out that Charles A. Krause, president of Milwaukee's Krause Milling Co.-- original formulator and supplier of many soy-fortified relief products -- was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $25,000 in 1978 on charges of price-fixing in the biggest recent scandal involving the port. Krause was estimated by the Justice Department to have helped rig bids with Lauhoff Grain Co. of Danville, Ill., and ADM Milling Co. of Shawnee, Kan., on $313 million in US Department of Agriculture [USDA] purchases donated to overseas, resulting in an overcharge to taxpayers of $19 million. "It was a classic white collar crime, conceived by grain milling executives over drinks and lunch at a private Chicago club in early 1970," wrote the Minneapolis Tribune's Eric Pian in articles condensed in The Milwaukee Journal. "The object: to agree in advance on bidding practices for a highly visible foreign aid program -- Food for Peace." But the danger of the job is shown by union brother Ed Manske's orange hardhat, to this day a cautionary exhibit in the hiring hall, marked with a black outline around the crater left by a turnbuckle -- used to help lash down cargo -- that was dropped from several decks above him. Never the same again, Manske [now deceased] retired to the Riverview senior high rise housing project [where I live now] and became active as vice president of their Citywide Residents Organization. Once, the Goat and I were unloading a pallet when a rib that had worked loose from the ship smashed down between us, missing our heads by inches; what could we do but move it and keep on working? Another co-worker tripped and fell through an open hatch and broke his back, while yet another broke both thumbs when a loaded pallet was let down unexpectedly by the winchmen. Several simply collapsed on the job and died of stressed hearts, such as the guy who was found after lunch at the bottom of the many rungs to be climbed straight up from the depths of the hold several times each day. (And if amphetamine use contributed to at least one warehouseman's death, this says something about the demands of the job). In Kenosha, two linesmen were killed tying up a ship when a line snapped and swept them into the water. In Milwaukee, a poorly secured gangplank flipped and sent two workers overboard and then to the hospital. And poet . . . .the machine started shaking like a bucking horse's hoof, the boom crashed down through the warehouse roof, far below, my friends scattered like ants, & i was ready to mess up my pants -- a rampaging cable brought a shower of glass, there wasn't even time for my life to flash past -- man alive! i thought i was dead! Blood was pouring out the top of my head, hydraulic oil squirted from a broken hose all over my face, & drenched my clothes -- Bales of raw rubber weighing 350 lbs. dusted with talc to keep them from sticking together could fall back 60 feet as they were netted out of the hatch of 30-foot-high bulkheads of bagged cargo meant to contain the rest stowed behind them could instantly shift and collapse under the gang atop it -- and did, as on the Indian vessel Jaladuta. This despite the good-luck sun symbol that adorned many such Indians that caused local consternation by apparently duplicating the Nazi swastika [see Jalajyoti, above]. But these accidents -- longshoring competes with mining and construction for most hazardous industry -- and many more caused no special outcry over safety concerns. In any case they aren't considered unusual in the workplace, as many factory workers can tell you. Indeed, Taylor was chided by a Journal reviewer for ending his poem on a nonchalant note, rather than quaking over his brush with death, but that was the point: If you aren't killed, you shrug it off and go back to work. When nauseating insecticide and fungicide lingered -- despite a cursory airing of the hatch -- with the pallets of baler twine from Brazil to be discharged for area farmers, who usually chartered such a vessel each fall, we plodded on, despite the evidence of comatose cockroaches scattered around like little brown baby shoes that the stuff was fatal. If CO2 accumulated in a busy hold from forklift exhaust, displacing the oxygen until two drivers toppled from their vehicles to the deck, the hatch was simply pumped out while loading was shifted elsewhere, and if you tried one of the pitiful little cotton masks issued for breathing protection in the flour dust you soon found it clogged from the sweat that saturated and stiffened all fabric, such as the usual flannel shirt, with library paste, and flung it aside. [At least once, asbestos particles from bags of the stuff punctured by the forklift floated around us, captured in sunbeams as we worked. This did not merit the extra 50˘ per hour "hazardous pay," though the rare cases of live ammunition did.] We took it all in stride, and measured it against those placid, sunny days with a slight tingling breeze, on the upper deck of a small container ship with a sweeping view of the serrated inland skyline, while guiding the 40-footers into their slots. Or -- if you were really lucky -- watching the silhouette ![]() early morning or thickening fog of night of a huge merchantman nudged in to tie up in the softly lapping waters of the slip, where as a linesman you caught the lines tossed overboard to shore, getting overtime pay to boot. Or stretching and moving but still chatting with your partner as a hookup man next to one of the brick terminals under the arching harbor bridge, wearing a T-shirt on a delightfully warm day, rhythmically swinging the pipes under the pallets of food for starving nations and sending them skyward while sailboats spanked by under the glittering sun. And occasionally the hold men got a respite from the loose bags by the loads stacked in slings, sometimes further expedited by bringing them in on platforms called stone boats after the similar frames used by farmers to drag around their fields to collect obstructive rocks. Or a collective glee in pulling off a raunchy prank could trump the usual desire to conserve energy by working as efficiently as possible, building loose bags up for landing spots in the open hatch where the bulk of the loads could then be distributed by sliding and dropping the sacks down. Let gravity do the work. But when word got around that a local TV crew was going to film after supper, shooting from the top deck the view of an expansive open hatch worked by two gangs, the usual plan was scrapped. Instead, making things incredibly harder -- and only possible because the ship had cranes to spot the cargo instead of winches -- we walked all over the hatch to leave giant trenches that spelled out FUCK U. (Unfortunately, the rare easy days -- and it was still demanding work -- kept alive the false hope of what life could be like with an upturn in business long after you had paid your dues as a canyon rat.) And just as hazards and miserable conditions aren't the whole picture, a few boorish longshoremen aren't an indictment of a whole trade, regardless of how grimy and sweaty we may get on the job. After work we bathe and wear appropriate clothes and blend into the population. Having been a cab driver and American Can Co. lineworker, I found myself in a field manned by, among others, former philosophy and English majors, a theater arts student, farmers, a fish peddler, a licensed airplane pilot and real estate salesman, a wine maker, several bikers [including motorcycle artist Joe Smith], a nurse, and a biker studying to become a nurse. These were workers, like Marc Olsen, who could tell you what D.H. Lawrence meant by widdershins; and if someone were bold enough to quote Emerson to the effect that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds he would be swiftly reminded that the correct phrase was A foolish consistency. . . . All those on the back three-fourths of the list relied on their other skills to eke out a living, even if unemployment compensation after a good year made possible -- as in my case -- those winters in San Diego. Eventually, you knew your co-workers' life stories and heard things you would never know otherwise, such as who had served time (more than a few, it must be admitted), cut sugar cane in Cuba (Tom Reitzner), or baked a cherry pie for a State Fair competition (Dan Holland). With these diverse backgrounds, the conversation covered every possible subject, from football to poetry. Just one example: As the hold filled with bags nearly to the upper deck, the talk turned to the recently-released film Gandhi, as one of us -- the avowed Stalinist, Reitzner -- had asked whether it was possible for a human being to be truly altruistic. As a former conscientious objector still troubled by the practicality of absolute non-violence, I put in my two-cents-worth, something about Gandhi's humanizing profile in The New Yorker, his suppressed lust as shown by his habit of sleeping chastely with young women. Reitzner [now union president], in turn, brought up his investigations into American Indian culture and its spirit of cooperation, and on we all went. Somehow, the discussion turned to Yiddish slang and its terms for various sexual activities and organs, though none of us was Jewish. Just as the usage of shlong, shtup and shmuey and their English equivalents was explored in a rather academic way, we looked up to the bridge, now well within earshot of our language, if not its nuances, to see a family on a tour of the ship, young children in tow. No doubt, they were taking it all in. Extremely embarrassing, as I imagined them cringing in disgust. But then, what do you expect from longshoremen? [Not much, apparently, according to an Aug.5, 2002 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about unprincipled Internet spammers touting products like "pornography videos sold by pitches that would make a stevedore blush." So I guess we do have standards, if low ones. In fairness, I have to concede that the longshoremen I knew were not even likely to be found blushing at sexual explicitness where it is customarily found. As with most things, context is important.] As Wilkerson wrote, the legend was that we were "gutter living, foul mouthed, baling hook brawlers," and offered a tour of a seedy area with "16 bars within a one block radius of their Milwaukee headquarters" as if to prove the point, though admitting this had no relevance, since only one -- the now-defunct Seaway Tap, [owned by a retired winchman] next to the union hall, also now sold off -- "made the list of favorite haunts." [And certainly Wilkerson realized the South Side -- then the recent scene of tumultuous open housing marches led by Fr. James Groppi -- was not very welcoming of blacks -- the majority of dockworkers -- in the past and to some extent even today.] Over time, though, as the port's business dwindled, most left to become teachers, truck drivers, bartenders,factory employees, a motorcycle cop, office workers, presumably no different in manners and deportment. After all, that was the background of many, as Wilkerson noted in an attempt to counter some myths: "husbands, fathers . . . better educated, deeply rooted in the community and keenly aware of the value of a good reputation." His "image shattering" portraits included, in addition to Mosby, former interior decorator Hildene Callies, 28, with an "attractive German face" and "the firm handshake and the biceps of a laborer;" and "Jack Dussault [later to become union vice-president], French, 30. . . . University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate with a degree in geology and one year's experience as a teacher. Married, father of two." Of course, there were brawls on the job. In 21 years I witnessed exactly three fights, and heard about only a few more, though oral harassment and intimidation were about as common as on any playground [and in fact were a way of life, in an atmosphere where motherfucker was almost a term of endearment and the smallest unit of measurement was a cunt hair]. Two fights involved my friend Danny Holland, who quit to become a college admissions counselor at MIAD. Another happened when a former housemate of mine, an immigrant from Bremen, Germany named container hookup man who spat in his face after Heiko forced him to walk around the 40-foot container by grabbing the closest hooks first. For that, he received a three-day layoff, which is the point: The employers punished physical confrontations,and they were not a way of life. Heiko himself -- now a family man [though divorced and struggling to be an observant Mormon] and owner of a large house on the fashionable East Side -- remains on the docks and hasn't punched anyone in years. Adversaries could arrange for fights outside the gates, of course, but after a long day energies and hostilities could be pretty well drained. Despite an occasional threat to go home and get a shotgun, nothing seemed to happen. Vocal conflicts and insults were another matter, though, and to be labeled a stick was to feel contempt for not pulling your weight, while a frustrated leadman suspecting someone of deliberately misunderstanding instructions to gain a little rest time could accuse him of playing crazy -- often correctly. On the lighter side, it was Heiko who volunteered for the hold one slow day, despite his seniority, to end up working next to me on a USDA bulgur gang. There he passed slippery 50-lb. bags up to me standing on a tier of bags above him with his head almost squashed to my Levi'd butt in the dim, filled-in space. "Just don't fart," he requested. Quite unnecessarily, I thought. "Hell, it's the Germans that like to gas people," I observed. But he had been used to being called "Heinie," a term that didn't carry much freight in Germanic Milwaukee anyway, and so the day wore on. And the hard-core fighters, like the City Open Dock worker we called Dum-Dum -- who eventually went to jail for cutting the throat of a cop who supposedly came on to his wife at a dance -- were balanced by the smattering of religious fanatics. One of these was a reformed carouser named Eaton, built like a tree stump with scar tissue, who often worked next to me. Once a gallon-a-day wine drinker, Ike's sensitivities grew until he refused to work on Sundays and finally quit because of the foul language around him, going on to study welding at MATC. It was Ike -- in his less truculent phase -- who voiced our beef with a winchman named Paczkowski high above us over the landing of a pallet of bags and Patch who came back with the challenge to the "mammyfucker" to climb the ladder and repeat his complaint, adding, "See, I'm not afraid to call you that." (In contrast, a perfectly placed load -- as far under the coaming as the winch cables would permit, maybe -- was praised as being just like Downtown.) Patch didn't know about the new, milder Ike, of course, but then he was a really large man from the recalcitrant Polish South Side to whom it probably wouldn't matter. The only shock was the breaking of the code that made overt racial references so unusual, though the groups didn't socialize together much, either. It was a pattern I had encountered even back in high school -- about 50-50 black and white but socially segregated -- though white academic types I met at UWM who concerned themselves with racial equality found such calm unlikely. But Ike just muttered to himself, and we all plodded along. And it hadn't been lost on anybody that it was always joked that anyone climbing the ladder to face off with a winchman would have been too winded to fight.
hook-wielding duels of the movies. The hooks, at any warehouse, mostly unused since they became unsuitable for modern-day cargo. Short-pronged bag hooks, used in pairs, though common in the South, were unknown here until brought back by traveling union officers very late in the game. It was the early '90s when we finally learned there was an easier way than clutching and tossing the sacks to avoid puncturing them. If fights were rare, what passed for humor was a staple. Long before TV's The Office could have been conceived, that's what she said comebacks were heard all the time, simply because the nature of the tasks involved situations where "I think it's going to be tight," or "I need a couple more inches," for example, were so common. And a long-time running joke started when someone stumbled over a depression or something in the surface of the bags glimmering like endless fish scales in the moonlight of the open hold. Reflexively, a cohort called out, "Watch yourself." It was pointed out by the tripper that, logically, it did no good to warn about a hazard after it did its harm. From then on, it was standard whenever a man had a mis-step for him to hear, "Watch yourself" from anyone nearby that noticed. This was considered as droll as correcting the winchmen when they snatched a load up a bit instead of reacting to the yells of down! for the few remaining inches as it was held in place by the straining bunch: "the other down!" My own more elaborate attempt at humor was probably not as clever as I thought it was, but I had to try it out after an incident with hold boss Jerry Brazil when he wanted to continue work in the rain. Some cargo permitted this, being impervious wood crates or steel machinery -- at least until the light rain turned to heavier downpours and portended lightning that could be drawn by the masts -- and in fact we had all been issued yellow rubber raingear, including pants, coats and gloves. Awkward and uncomfortable -- oppressive in warm weather -- but the contract mandated we continue work while so encumbered, as long as we could go to our cars, or wherever, to get the protection. Of course, if you rode with someone else and didn't have a handy trunk, or even walked from the distant bus stop in Bay View, you were out of luck. So in a slight mist the gang got the idea to invoke the contract and get our gear, and I came back after the short break in only the jacket, hood down. Brazil understandably was irked at my not really taking the option for protection seriously, saying I apparently didn't know the meaning of raingear. This led to my later evolving the story of Red Rudi -- Rudi Dutschke of Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang -- who, though it was little-known, was a longshoreman. Named Rudolf, as I (incorrectly) supposed, he had a similar encounter with a hold boss who called him on not getting the proper equipment, and replied, in perfect English: "Hey, Rudolf the Red knows raingear." (Groan if you wish.) Besides humor -- ideal in short
bursts, given that |
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