As
I struggle with incurable multiple myeloma, chemo-for-life, and the
other afflictions of living into my 80s, I reflect on others in
those eight decades who have passed on before me, many forgotten now
except by their families. These are people, and places, who had some
impact on me, who sometimes changed my life, those who really
mattered even though they may never have known it. I often could not
acknowledge their contributions; indeed, during my drinking days I
cast a lot of them out of my life when they got too close to the
fraudulent Real Me.
But
now, sober over 30 years, I have a chance to relate what happened, to
set the record right, to express my gratitude, and to introduce you
to some extraordinary people. I’m not including immediate
family or most of the extended family, except when necessary to set
context. I’m doing it alphabetically, without ranking,
although some played a bigger role in shaping me than others.
Context:
I was born into a communist family; Dad, second-generation Italian
American and a former seaman, was a full-time Communist Party
official in charge of maritime work. His loyalty was less to
Marxism-Leninism or the CPUSA than it was to the Soviet Union, where
he, the seaman trying to drink himself to death, had been treated
with respect. Mom came from Finnish stock; her immigrant father, a
radical unionist, worked at Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore and had been
a copper miner during a failed IWW strike at Butte, Montana, years
before. Aiti and Isa spoke little English, but raised their children
in radical circles like the Red Sports International, where Mom won
awards.
I
have a sister six years younger, Karen, who has made her life and
family in The Netherlands, and whom I am grateful to have a good and
loving relationship today after the early years of resentment. I
married three times, divorced twice, with two children, my estranged
daughter Deirdre, and my loving son Erik. That I have a good
relationship with Erik today is testament to my recovery from
alcoholism and Erik’s huge capacity to forgive and forget, and
to love. I have three grandsons, Danny, Justin and Hart.
I
was a rebellious, fearful and angry child and, like Dad, often tried
to be redder than red, eventually moving on from the harsh realities
of True Believer politics. I quit high school to go to work
(cleaning rat cages!) and became a committed unionist, devoted to my
class roots, and believe that any self-appointed vanguard is just
another boss. I had a 21-year career in the West Coast International
Longshore and Warehouse Union, as organizer and Washington, DC,
representative, and then as elected business agent and president of
Warehouse Local 6. I lost that career and my marriage of 33 years
with Elaine to alcoholism, hit bottom and sobered up in 1988, and
became a labor studies teacher. I married another sober alcoholic,
Mary, and that lasted ten years, with many wonderful times together
until I had to move on.
Sober,
I obtained my high school GED and began taking classes at San
Francisco State University, knocking off a quick BA in Labor Studies
(1991) and then another BA in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts (1993). I
added a Masters in History in 1997 as backup to the
always-threatened Labor Studies programs I taught for, at SF State
and City College, and as tenured half-time department chair at
Oakland’s Laney College. I retired in 2001 and moved to Tucson,
having always loved the desert.
On
an earlier archaeology project I met Kaitlin Meadows when both of us
were married to other people and we became good friends. When the
day came that we were single, romance blossomed and we pooled
resources and live on a Sonoran Desert acre-and-one-quarter in a
double-wide manufactured home. We call it Wild Heart Ranch and Kait
has made the back half an oasis for wild things to make their home. She
is a retired nurse, and a poet and artist who teaches creativity
to her tribe of mostly-older women at Kaitlin’s Creative
Cottage in town. With her at Wild Heart Ranch is where I hope to
spend the last days of my life.
Here
goes:
Amazonia:
During the 1990s Mary and I did a lot of traveling, including
a
visit to the Galapagos Islands and then deep into the Ecuadorian
Amazon. It was off-season and we “camped” in the jungle
out of La Selva Lodge. Standing in the jungle, I felt that if I
stayed in one place for an hour, it would take me and have me
forever. Lemon ants protecting a small tree’s turf, jaguar
tracks, piranhas, howler monkeys screeching in the canopy, caimen on
the hunt at dusk, macaws perching on shoulders, 100-pound rodents
climbing out of the river to pee so not to attract parasites -- my
intellectual belief that “it’s all connected” was
made gut-real there.
Norman
Ambrosini: In the mid-1970s I was based in Salinas,
California,
working for the International Longshore & Warehouse Union’s
Local 6, servicing several plants and trying to organize new ones. One
of the factories was Nestlé Chocolate, where there was a
lot of distrust and apathy fostered by the Swiss-based World’s
Largest Food Company. We succeeded in several efforts to call the
company to account and as a result, the lab employees joined the
union. Skip Ambrosini became their Shop Steward, and he and I became
after-hours drinking buddies, often at his home over the hill in
Carmel Valley. He had a son, Tom, who did a wonderful caricature of
me on one of my annual hikes to fast and detox.
Fred
Andrews: Fred was the Local 6 Steward at Heath Ceramics, a
Sausalito company owned by two sort-of left-wing autocrats. The
workers, many of them still living the hippie lifestyle, chose the
union to temper Brian and Edith’s outbursts, and it seemed to
be working. I was assigned to service the facility, and it was a
good fit. Fred worked well together with me, and the job became a
little pleasanter for the employees. Fred owned a little old house
in the heart of the Mill Valley redwoods, refusing to sell as
multi-million-dollar “country” mansions rose around him. He bicycled to
work, and was a truly gentle soul, often using the
threat of me and my confrontational ways to extract concessions from
the owners.
Marie
Burke: I had a crush on my older cousin Marie Avellino from
the
time I was seven years old. We were living in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
in a big Vetere Family house with the Avellinos just a few blocks
away. Then we moved back to New York City, and we all grew up, and I
missed most of Marie’s life, her kids, her abusive first
husband, until, remarried to Mike Burke, they set up housekeeping in
Victorville, California. That was on the road to some of my
hike/detox desert destinations and I visited often. Marie had had a
stroke and was pretty much housebound, with younger husband Mike
taking wonderful care of her, and later of her disabled sister Kathy
as well, cooking and cleaning – made difficult by Marie’s
huge collection of porcelain figures covering just about every
surface. The Vetere Family, and Marie exemplified it, extended
unconditional love to all family members without reservation. You
might not see someone for 20 years and it will be like you were
hugging yesterday.
David
Castro: Poet, junkie, revolutionary, thief, ex-con, lover,
fugitive, explorer, best friend – I have written extensively
about Dave, who was shot and killed by allegedly crooked undercover
Drug Enforcement Agents in San Francisco in April, 1979. The story
was that Dave, a heroin addict, was dealing confiscated cocaine for
the DEA agents and skimming, so they set him up and blew him away. What
I learned from my years of friendship and subsequent research is
that we never really know someone, that there are many facets to all
of us and we rarely see them all. My records requests to the DEA and
San Francisco Police Department have, after months, still not been
answered.
Marian
Cuca: Marian died of polio in 1953 when she was 14 years old
at
the left-wing Camp Wyandot upstate New York. I worked as the
campcraft counselor there the following summer. We met from
time-to-time in left-wing youth circles and at Hootenanny concerts,
but were never close. Her parents published her diary in 1956, and I
was touched by her mention of me and my aspirations as a poet: At
our club meeting Albie read a poem he wrote about the spring. There
was one part in it where he states that animals get excited in the
spring. We were all in hysteria. He’s really a great kid.
It was my best review ever.
Joe
Duran: I worked as an apprentice painter when I was 18 at
the
Parkchester Apartments in the Bronx. Joe was, as I recall, of Native
American descent, and was the Hudson Painting and Decorating
Company’s sole paint mixer. He had been in the leftist
movement but had left it, and I was still at that time, with my
father just out of prison, a True Believer. We argued, but Joe never
attacked me, never wrote me off as hopeless. When I married he gave
me a handbook on paint mixing, inscribing it “Faith
is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen.” It took me a while to realize how right he was.
Keith
Eickman: Keith was probably the most important person in my
21-year career as a union official, and after. Advisor, protector,
surrogate father when needed, and friend, he advanced me from angry
young activist to seasoned leader. Keith had been a communist, but
was expelled during one of the party’s regular purges for
“white chauvinism.” His crime: disagreeing at a union
meeting with his best friend, Leroy King, who was black. He survived
that, successfully ran for Business Agent and then
Secretary-Treasurer and President of Local 6, and, with Leroy King,
successfully supported me as his successor to lead the local during
the challenging Reaganomics era. Never coming down on me for things
he considered out-of-line, like tossing a condom on the negotiating
table and telling an employer, “If you’re going to screw
us, at least practice safe sex,” he preferred gentle
persuasion.
Keith
was a true working class intellectual, with wide interests and a
fascinating parade of local people invited to dinners at his house at
the very top of Castro Street, often inviting me. That house had the
last dirt road in San Francisco.. Through some quirk in local law
that dirt road exempted him from some tax liability. He served for
years on the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission, doling out
tickets to Forty-Niner’s football games as a perk. When I left
my second marriage, Keith opened up his home to me and I lived there
for months before retiring to Tucson.
Nina
Eickman: Nina was Keith’s wife of many years, but never
lived in his shadow. A teacher and an awesome poet, she and Keith
complemented each other. They had two children, Kent and Robin. It
took a toll when Robin died of cancer at about age 50, and later Nina
was also struck with a terminal malignancy. I recall preparing an
eight-course Italian dinner for them during her illness, but the soup
was too spicy for Nina, undergoing chemotherapy. Nina decided to
make a final exit at the time of her choice, and with her loving
husband’s help and support, did so. That profoundly impressed
me and I am a believer in that right of choice. My ideal would be
that at a certain age, maybe 75, or with a terminal diagnosis, people
are automatically issued a prescription for a “peaceful exit
pill” that they can use, or not.
Gerhardt
& Hilde Eisler: Our East 12th
Street apartment in
Manhattan occupied the entire second floor, and Mom and Dad rented
out a room to help cover the rent. That room, later to become my
bedroom and snake den, was rented to a German couple, the Eislers,
for several years. Moscow-trained Gerhardt was alleged to be the
“number one Red Agent” by the media and had served as the
Communist International’s official representative to both the
Chinese and U.S. Communist Parties in the 1930s, leading purges. While
Hilde was something of an aloof clothes buff with more fancy
duds than the room’s sole closet could hold, Gerhardt always
had smiles and cookies for Karen and I. Gerhardt was arrested and
convicted of several Red-based immigration violations and on the eve
of imprisonment stowed away on a Polish ship, the Batory,
ending up in East Germany to run the state’s radio network. Hilde was
deported and joined her husband, working as editor of Das
Magazin, a popular monthly of news, fiction and photos. Das
Magazin published my first short stories and somehow found a
way
to pay me modestly despite The Berlin Wall and the Cold War.
I
was a rank-and-file Overseas Delegate for the ILWU in 1965; Leo
Labinsky from Canada, Shoji Okazaki, on his first trip away from
Hawaii, and I were supposed to go to the People’s Republic of
China to observe and report on workers and their unions, but ILWU
President Harry Bridges wrote a column in the union paper critical of
the Chinese CP and the invitation was withdrawn. We went to England
and Wales instead, and for a little over $100 I added trips to
Berlin, Prague, Paris and New York. Shoji travelled with me and then
went completely around the world. We thought we would stay in East
Berlin, but some big convocation was on and there were no rooms so we
lugged our bags back through Checkpoint Charlie and found a room. We
did visit with Gerhardt, still smiling and happy. He gave us some
currency, advising us to spend it before crossing back, and I bought,
for some dumb reason, a zither that I never learned how to play. That,
and a bottle of wine.
David
Gans: I met Dave when Elaine and I first moved from New York
to
San Francisco in 1960. He was a college pre-med student, and we ran
in similar left-wing youth circles. We, along with Erik and Lois
Weber, became fast friends, sharing wine and music, staying up late
at night drinking tequila to listen to new music like John Lewis’s
European Windows, jazz with an orchestra, and then
the Gil
Evans/Miles Davis amazing Sketches of Spain. Dave
married
several times, the first to a young woman, Shirley, whom I had a
secret crush on but who committed suicide by jumping out of a high
window. He became a doctor and treated my daughter after a bicycle
accident while an intern at San Francisco General.
Dave
went into private practice in Los Angeles, with a secret room where
he treated radicals on the run without charge. Dave popped a lot of
pills, smoked a lot of dope, and was often a bit manic. Once while
driving me someplace in LA, we came upon a scene of carnage where a
driver had crashed into a line of movie-goers. Without hesitation
Dave stopped the car, got out and rushed to treat the most severely
wounded before emergency crews arrived. He ended up married to Tara
and practicing in Arcata, where I visited a few times. He never lost
his capacity for outrage at politicians, and stockpiled drug samples
to give away free to those in need.
Lou
Goldblatt: Lou was Secretary-Treasurer of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union, with Harry Bridges as President, for
34 years. A young intellectual attracted to the workers’
movements of the 1930s, Lou provided much of the union’s
creative thinking while Harry had the ability to move the masses. They
were a brilliant team, but fell out in later years, diminishing
both of them. They would sometimes take deliberately opposing
positions just to piss each other off. While Harry remained close to
the Soviet Union’s brand of communism, Lou would find merit in
a critical Chinese position. Not exactly union business.
Lou
was responsible for Saint Francis Square, a low-to-moderate
integrated cooperative apartment complex in San Francisco’s
Western Addition whose seed money came from longshore pension funds.
Elaine and I lived there with our two children, as did Leroy King and
many other union members. Another idea Lou had came when Kaiser
Permanente, in his opinion, went off the tracks in its approach to
medical care. Lou’s plan was a state-wide network of
union-built and union-run clinics for union members. It attracted a
lot of interest, but ultimately the unions were too tied to Kaiser or
to insurance companies to actually work to make it happen.
Charles
(Brother) Hackett: Brother Hackett, his preferred moniker,
was a
Local 6 member and a working class intellectual who sort of adopted
me, watched out for me, advised me, and defended me from union
critics, asking nothing for himself. He often volunteered to work in
the Local 6 basement sorting old papers and organizing the chaotic
record of the union’s history. He fancied himself somewhere on
the left, and was quite hurt when his request for his FBI files
turned up empty.
Carl
Herrmann: I met Carl soon after moving to New York’s East
12th Street when I was 11. He was five years
older,
attending Stuyvesant High School. I had learned that I could get
attention, even if negative, by catching and keeping snakes, so I
bragged, “I’ve got a black racer.” Carl responded,
“I’ve got a baby boa constrictor.” A baby boa! This was someone I
needed to know! Carl became a serious
herpetologist and I followed in his shadow, imitating his mustache
(when I could), his pipe- and wooden-tipped cigar-smoking, his
corduroy jacket, his reading of Freud and Jung, his love of jazz,
going to Stuyvesant, everything I could. Carl introduced me and my
teen-age blood brotherJohnny-Boy DeMaria to
snake-hunting in
the Ramapo Mountains and the South Jersey Pine Barrens.
For
Johnny-Boy and I it was an escape from the fears of our daily lives,
Johnny from his alcoholic and abusive father, the last ice man on the
Lower East Side; me from my communist father and his comrades’
arrest, indictment, trial, conviction and imprisonment for violating
the Smith Act, “conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow
of the U.S. Government by force and violence.” They were
consumed with the Red Scare, with little time for me, and I feared
and resented the government for doing that to us, and Dad for putting
us in that position.
Carl
was our surrogate big brother, and at age 13 I accompanied him and
another neighbor boy on a snake-hunt to Okatee, South Carolina. Long
story short: In addition to dodging a Ku Klux Klan lynching while
trying to hitch-hike home with duffel bags full of reptiles, we had
captured an 8’6” Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake --
close to the record -- that earned Carl a job at the Staten Island
Zoo Reptile House. I spent my 13th summer there
as a
volunteer, after Dad’s arrest, cleaning cages and killing mice
for the Thursday big feed. Carl amassed what had to be the largest
private reptile collection in the city in the warm basement of his
mother’s rooming house, including things that should never have
been there – rattlers, cobras, kraits, mambas.
I
kept a small collection in my room across the street, admonished by
Mom to not have anything venomous, but they stayed out and never knew
about the Southern Copperhead or baby Prairie Rattler Carl gave me. And
things got away. Our block was a frequent item in the newspaper
when one (harmless, thank goodness!) escaped snake or another showed
up at a breakfast table. Carl had a big open-top packing crate with
several Gila Monsters and their also-venomous cousins, Mexican Beaded
Lizards, under a UV lamp. One of the beaded lizards disappeared.
Several months later Carl, Johnny-Boy and I were walking down 12th
Street and saw a small crowd by a police car. We investigated. The
beaded lizard had turned up in a second-floor apartment across the
street. Carl told the police it was an escaped baby alligator, and
got it back.
I
don’t remember what precipitated my break with Carl Herrmann,
but I had a way of pushing people out of my life if they got too
close, and Carl had gotten closer than anyone. He was also growing
up, with girlfriends, trips with zoo curator Karl Kauffeld, adult
stuff. So I didn’t know until years later that he had married,
had four children, ran a reptile-centered pet business, and died at
39 of a blood cancer that might have been the same thing I have. I
know that, in sobriety, I made an effort to track people down as part
of the amends process and posted something about Carl on a genealogy
website. I received a letter from his youngest son asking for
memories. Carl died when the son was just four, so he really had few
of his own. I recorded about 45 minutes of stories, and filled the
other side of the tape with Stan Kenton’s music, the first jazz
Carl introduced me to. I was thrilled to make my amends this way.
Homeland:
When I retired I received a large final paycheck I was not
expecting, and I thought, I can be prudent, or I can go to Africa and
visit Oldupai Gorge, homeland of the human race. Kenya and Tanzania
were amazing on a photo camping safari, charismatic megafauna closeup
everywhere, but it was elephants that captured my heart. Big, bold,
unlikely, improbable, elephants of all sizes, trunks and tusks and
log-legs and flappy ears; elephants grazing, elephants pooping –
177 pounds per day – elephants swiveling to trumpet a warning
that we were Too Close. Yeah, pachyderms push my pulse.
And
the children, everywhere the children: waving, shouting –
Heyyyyyyyy – running, laughing, cheerful joyous children. There are 12
million AIDS-orphaned kids in Africa. I cheer for the
elephants, and I cry for the children.
Kenny
Hyde: When Elaine and I married at age 19, I asked Kenny to
be
my Best Man. Kenny, a big African American – Negro was the word
then – was a friend, also of the left, and his presence would
likely piss off some of my relatives who came to the wedding. That
negative attention thing again. Kenny was happy to do it, so I was
too. Elaine’s cousin Eileen took the Bridesmaid spot. We had
also gone hunting together.
Once,
for a one-day doe season upstate New York, we took the last bus to
Wallkill and hitchhiked at midnight to what was still called Briehl’s
Farm, a retreat for leftists with rooms for rent in a country
setting. We didn’t have money for a room, but had dressed
really warmly. We caught a lift with some night-poachers, and
trudged down the dirt road to a meadow where we could watch for house
lights going on in the morning. We huddled in the snow and Kenny
suddenly muttered a curse and said, “We’re surrounded!” He was right.
In the moonlight we could see perhaps a dozen curious
skunks around us. We didn’t move, and eventually they faded
away. There was a lot of shooting that morning, but neither of us
scored, and Kenny came down with a bad toothache.
I
lost touch with him when Elaine and I followed my folks to San
Francisco in 1960, but tracked him down years later doing my amends
work. Kenny and his wife were in North Carolina, retired and happy. I
apologized for using him the way I felt I did at the wedding, but
he replied that he was really proud of being my Best Man, that there
was nothing to apologize for. He was a big man in many ways.
For
me, growing up on the left brought some positive results along with
the fear and anger. Karen and I were consciously raised without
racial bias, and African American and Latino comrades routinely sat
at our tables. But that, it seemed, did not apply across-the-board.
Once, at a “gathering” – party was too frivolous a
word for the perilous ‘50s – an argument began over using
the “n” and other racist hate words. Richie Perry, white
adopted son of Dad’s black codefendant Pettis Perry, stood up
against a dozen middle class Washington Heights young lefties, and I
joined him. To my amazement most of the young red diaper babies
defended their use of the forbidden words, and the gathering broke up
quickly. I know that Elaine, my Puerto Rican fiancé-to-be,
was crushed, believing that the young left was a place of refuge from
the everyday injuries of open racial prejudice she endured.
Philip
Jenkins: Phil was a plant biologist at the University of
Arizona, a big, shy, and retiring guy with a drinking problem. He
attended the same meetings I did in Picture Rocks trying to get
sober, and asked me to be his sponsor, to help him work through the
12 steps, and I agreed. He had a hard time, and secretly kept
drinking, hiding it from me but only fooling himself. His wife
kicked him out of their house, and his job forced him to retire, and
he descended into what looked like alcoholic dementia. He never did
complete the steps, but ended up in a string of assisted-living
housing situations, evicted from several for fighting and other
violations, before he died. I saw in Phil that alcoholism can bring
worse things than death, inflicting untold pain on those who tried to
love him.
Leroy
King: On May 31, 1967, my St. Francis Square neighbor and
ILWU
International Rep Leroy King, ,visited our apartment at 9 p.m. Would
I, he wanted to know, go to work for the union starting tomorrow? As
an active union member and shop steward, I quickly agreed, even
knowing that the warehouse master contract expired at midnight with a
strike looming. My job would be to take care of a number of office
worker contracts in units the ILWU had organized connected to Local 6
warehouses and factories. I would replace Dick Lynden, who had died
some time earlier. The office workers had not even met yet to draft
contract proposalsso it was on-the-job training with a vengeance,
launching a 21-year career for me.
Leroy
and his best friend, Keith Eickman, acted as my mentors and
protectors when I sometimes did rather provocative things that
angered the various left caucuses in the union. Both were ex-reds,
and Leroy had been a seaman on the Booker T. Washington.
Although not very verbally articulate, he had a capacity for
organizing people, especially his African American brothers and
sisters, and became a progressive force in San Francisco politics. He
was bereft when his white wife and biggest supporter, Judy, died
of cancer. I know that when I chose, after hitting my alcoholic
bottom in 1988, not to run for re-election as Local 6 president, in
effect conceding to the leftist’s choice, Jim Ryder, he was
disappointed, believing that it was better to lose than to quit. We
remained friends, however, and I’m glad I had a chance to visit
on a trip to San Francisco before he died. He and Keith were
tireless campaigners for me in my election contests, although in
those days I did not know how to show them my gratitude.
Fanny
Krall: Grandma Krall, Hungarian-born mother of Frank Pinter,
husband to my mother’s sister Ellen and father of my Baltimore
cousins Judy, Fran and Frank, lived to be over 100, taken care of by
a son himself in his 80s. During World War 2 the Communist Party
stationed Dad in Baltimore as the area rep and he was always under
attack both from the government and from ousted former CP leaders. It
was new territory for five-year-old me, more unknowns to fear, but
Grandma Krall’s basement was always a place of refuge, complete
with warm poppy seed rolls and a refrigerator full of Pepsi-Cola. She
was a safe haven in a scary world, especially when my sister was
born and it seemed that Dad did have time for kids...just not for me.
Bill
Krause: As a union leader based in San Francisco, I
understood
the value and need for coalition-building, and in Bagdad-by-the-Bay,
that meant reaching out to the Gay community. As a teenager I had
adopted my father’s homophobic attitudes and committed some
gay-bashing. My amends for that was to work with a local Lesbian-Gay
Labor Alliance for one of the annual Gay Pride parades, losing my
prejudice pretty quickly. People are people, and what they do in
private is their business.
Bill
Krause worked in the local office of Congressman Philip Burton and
conceived a coalition-building plan I liked. Democratic Central
Committee elections were coming up, and Bill wanted to run candidates
for all the slots in all the districts, drawing from all the various
constituencies to create a united coalition that could mount credible
challenges to old-line business-as-usual Dems in the Reaganomics era
of union-busting and gay-bashing. A hot-button issue in the Gay
community was the closing of bathhouses, used as casual sex meets by
many Gay men, due to the spread of AIDS. I was endorsed by Bill’s
Harvey Milk Democratic Club, but faced questions at a meeting of the
Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, headed by Hospital Workers President
Sal Roselli. What was my position on the bathhouses? I said if
closing bathhouses would prevent disease and dying, then they should
be closed. I didn’t get their support, and lost the election,
but that was secondary to the coalition-building we did. Bill later
died of AIDS.
Lucille
Labrizzi: Cousin Lulu was the oldest of our many Vetere Clan
cousins, with Marie next, and then me. Her mother, Elvira, was
Caterina and Luigi Vetere’s first-born; Dad was the second. Oh
– the names? Dad ran away from home at 16 and joined the Coast
Guard. Caught as underage and returned to the father that beat him,
when he next ran away he needed a new name, and took Lannon from a
cowboy story he had read. Despite his running away and his politics,
to the extended family Dad was always a Vetere, and always welcome.
Aunt Elvi taught my Finnish mother, and many others, how to cook
Italian, instilling in Mom a love of good cooking that she passed on
to Karen and me.
Cousin
Lulu was an attractive, at least in my eyes, working woman all her
life who never married, never seemed to have time for romance. Her
devotion to family was joyful and obvious, especially to her brother
Louis’s kids and grandkids after his early death from
testicular cancer. Actually, it was a bit of a family scandal that
I, the first-born male, hadn’t been named after Grandpa Louie,
so Elvi’s first son, next in line, got the name. Lulu was
always there to help family in need, to babysit, house-sit, whatever
needed doing. If she had any gripes she kept them to herself. When
I visited New Jersey every few years for the annual Vetere Family
Picnic her modest apartment was always available to me and we enjoyed
each other’s company.
Lulu
aged and became unable to care for herself, and cousins arranged for
her to go into assisted living. We talked on the phone regularly and
she always complained about the food, so I found GrubHub online and
arranged for Italian food to be delivered to her once a month –
lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, baked ziti, sausages, the works. She
still saw “the kids” regularly and thrilled to their
growth and intelligence. When she died in October, 2018, at 89 years
old, that made me the oldest cousin, the Elder. Only 98-year-old
Uncle Joe Vetere, the last of Dad’s 11 siblings, is older than
me. And in 1987, after a visit to Grandpa Louie’s stark
Calabrian home village of Zinga, I dropped my given middle name,
Francis, and replaced it with Vetere. It’s mia famiglia.
Norman
(Mick) Meader: Retired from the University of Arizona, Mick
put
his awesome research skills to work for the San Pedro River when
state and federal planners wanted to run an interstate highway
through the last free river in the state, a river that served as a
corridor for jaguars, jaguarundies, ocelots and other charismatic
megafauna coming north with climate change. He and I teamed up since
the backup plan – still in motion – was to build it in
the Avra Valley where I lived. His research and writing were hated
by the developers, but they could never challenge his facts, and I,
in my own research and writing, continue to use him as a role model
on how to shine a light on the things the Establishment doesn’t
want us to see.
Velia
Millán: Born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, Elaine’s
mother-to-be came to the states and married José –
Joseph – Millan, a macho working man and a serious drinker. She put up
with abuse to make a life for her daughter and son, Joe
Jr., and blossomed when, in later years, she found the courage to
strike out on her own. While Elaine may remember white-glove
inspections of her room by her mother, I knew her as an endlessly
kind and gentle woman, a sympathetic and supportive listener, whose
heart was always joyful and full of unconditional love, a love I
wasn’t able to give or receive until sobriety. I don’t
often attend funerals or memorials, but did for Billy, reading a poem
I wrote for her that began, She walked in beauty....
Joe
Muzio: When I went on union staff and entered my first-ever
contract negotiations in 1967, Joe was a Local 6 Business Agent, an
old-timer considered to be not too bright and even a bit lazy. But
when the San Francisco News Company refused to put its striking
warehouse workers back on the job until the office contract was also
settled, Joe came to my rescue. A three-week joint warehouse strike
with the Teamsters was settled, and 25,000 workers back on the
job—but not here. It was marathon, under-the-gun. deadline
bargaining, my first, with Joe sitting in a corner and quietly,
patiently, guiding me, letting me think I was calling the shots. We
settled that night, the office workers ratified the agreement in the
morning, and I had learned how to negotiate a union contract, thanks
to Joe Muzio.
Dick
Pabich: Dick was a tall, pale and willowy Gay man who ran
local
political campaigns, often working with Bill Krause. Having left my
teen homophobia behind, I could really appreciate his intelligence
and the work that he did...and his good looks. It was nothing
sexual, I am as straight as they come, but I was, in fact, attracted
to him. Go figure. Of course my changed attitudes towards Gays was
noticed by union antagonists.
At
an endorsements meeting of the San Francisco ILWU Joint Legislative
Committee, ex-seaman and ex-red Dave Jenkins, our political fixer,
recommended Terence “Kayo” Hallinan over incumbent Harry
Britt for a Board of Supervisors district seat. Kayo’s father,
attorney Vincent Hallinan, had a long history with the ILWU and it
looked like people were happy to endorse his left-wing son. I
objected. Britt was also an open lefty, the best labor vote on the
Board, and a leader in the Gay community which we needed as allies.
Dave muttered from the side, “Lannon must have got his
(expletive) (deleted).” The ILWU made a joint endorsement,
Britt was easily re-elected, and Dick Pabich later died of AIDS.
Bob
Patterson: Bobby was the Bad Boy of Local 6, a light-skinned
African American ex-boxer who still packed a punch with 300 pounds of
alcoholic bloat. Having relatives in the union – his sister,
Tillie Bertram, was the Local 6 office manager – gave him
leeway to roam, but he had been fired from pretty much every job he
had ever been dispatched to. Bobby survived with begging, borrowing
and stealing, and selling his body to sex-hungry men in the
South-of-Market area the union hiring hall was in. For some reason
he latched on to me as a target early on, and I, curiously, felt a
link between us, perhaps seeing in Bob that same “hole in the
soul” I had, which we both tried to fill with alcohol. While I
drank mostly red wine, Bob would knock down a bottle of Night Train
Express in one big gulp, followed with a big belch.
When
I returned from a three-year stint in Washington as the union’s
lobbyist I brought my family to a Bay Area Local 6 picnic. Bob was
there – free beer! – taking big gulps out of a can and
tossing the half-full cans onto the roof of the rest rooms. He
spotted me, yelling, There he is, the bureaucrat, come to mingle with
the masses! I told him to kiss my ass – and he did! Deirdre
and Erik looked on in wide-eyed amazement. Once Bob shared with me a
“letter” he had written to a secret love. It was
sensitive and sad beyond measure, and I turned it into a poem for a
members’creative works edition of the Local 6 monthly
newsletter I edited. And I read it to his sparsely-attended memorial
at the Local 6 hall: You are like a flower opening
up in the
sunlight, a song drifting on the wind....
Prague,
Czech Republic: A magic place I fell in love with when I
extended my ticket as an ILWU Overseas Delegate in 1965. I was
charmed by the old buildings, the deliberately overgrown park where
lovers could meet, the palpable sense of history, and yes, the beers.
Mostly it was the open people, the satires of their communist
leaders in a show, a sense of emerging freedom that was the goal of
“socialism with a human face.” When Soviet tanks
suppressed that in 1968 it broke any emotional ties I may have still
had to “the movement” I had been raised in.
Cynthia
Prescott: A young woman in recovery, Cynthia and I attended
some
of the same support meetings in the Inner Sunset when Mary and I were
first getting together. She was street-wise, tough, quick with a
quip, and worked a good program. She reminded me of a younger me. Then
she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and disappeared for a
while. She came back to meetings wasted, almost unrecognizable, but
still smart and savvy and quick with her sharp tongue. I liked her,
just liked her, but the cancer soon took her.
Dwight
Riggs: Dwight was one of the first people, along with his
East
Side neighbor Valerie Davison, that I hooked up with when I moved to
Tucson in 2001. We shared interests in archaeology, hiking the
desert, and joining the state’s site steward program with
Kaitlin to monitor sites. Dwight was overweight and always carried a
big pack, but never faltered on the trail, his white beard damp with
sweat. Val, now in a nursing home with dementia, remembered all the
best desert spots to visit, so we had many good times together. Dwight
had a mentally disabled daughter in a facility that he paid
for, trying to be the responsible father he wanted to be. He
remarried, but that didn’t work out, and – seeing signs
of his own mental deterioration – he bought a pistol, walked
out his favorite trail, and killed himself. It took a year to find
his body, but he left all his financial affairs, including his
daughter’s care, in order, wanting not to bother anyone.
Sidney
Roger: Sid was a blacklisted ex-red radio announcer whom the
ILWU rescued by making him editor of the union’s newspaper, The
Dispatcher. While his speaking voice was deep and flawless,
his
physical appearance was a bit gnomish, with a nervous tic that pulled
the skin of his forehead back considerably. I remember one member
declaring, Wow, look at that man think! Knowing
that I was an
aspiring writer, during an unemployed period Sid asked me to write
the story on the upcoming Local 6 annual convention. I did, and
brought it to him, and he spent the day teaching me Journalism 101 –
and even paid me for it! Harry Bridges fired Sid while I was in
Washington for some reason triggered by the union president’s
increasing age and isolation. I wrote my objection to Harry, and
turned out to be the only staff member to do so. There was no reply.
Marvin
Rogoff: I met Marvin at a Washington fundraising dinner and
we
had an immediate argument as to whether or not a certain union head
had the right to call himself a socialist. Marvin came from the
non-communist left, worked now for the Equal Opportunity Employment
Commission, and had been on the educational staff of the Ladies’
Garment Workers Union. We ran into each other often, leafleting for
the United Farmworkers’ grape boycott, on a support committee
for murdered Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign,
and in the newly-formed Washington Labor for Peace. Labor for Peace
announced itself against the Vietnam War with a full-page ad in the
Washington Post, topped with a photo of a US
soldier’s
haunted upper face and the words, A Rich Man’s War and a
Poor Man’s Fight. The Post didn’t quite
know
how to handle it and insisted on listing the signers’ addresses
with their names. That was no problem for me – my little
office – but caused problems for quite a few signers who worked
for AFL-CIO unions supporting the war. I know Marvin caught some
flack.
That
ad seemed to spark an upsurge in anti-war union activity, and our next
project was a labor primer on the war, with resolutions adopted by
various unions. That, in turn, led to calls to form a national Labor
For Peace organization from peacenik senators George McGovern and
Alan Cranston, and Marvin and I were called on to act as unpaid
staff. We worked together for months, learning to respect and even
admire each other. The AFL-CIO suffered a schism during this time,
with the liberal United Auto Workers leaving the federation to join
with the conservative Teamsters and a few other small unions in a
short-lived Alliance for Labor Action. It became clear to us that
the AFL-CIO was pressuring their members to stay away from us, and to
tag the upcoming founding conference as a fringe ALA operation, not
in the interests of the real labor movement.
Marvin
and I agreed that we couldn’t let that happen, and we contacted
UAW Secretary-Treasurer Emil Mazey to rescue the situation. Mazey
came to the founding meeting and successfully converted it into an
organizing committee for a national labor peace organization. That
came a couple of years later, broader than anyone thought it could
be, and – we would like to think – played a role in
finally ending that disastrous conflict. Marvin and I remained close
friends, taking pride in the work we did and finding that people of
good will can, and must, work together without letting political
labels get in the way.
Mario
Savio: I only met him once, at the Eickman’s, but I will
never forget his words from a 1964 rally at UC-Berkeley: There's
a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you
so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively
take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon
the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've
got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run
it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine
will be prevented from working at all !
In
1963 the Embarcadero Freeway was stopped when San Franciscans sat
down in front of the bulldozers to keep Golden Gate Park and the
Haight-Ashbury from being ruined. Later what had been built was torn
down. Although I’ll be gone, I hope my Tucson friends and
neighbors will take note when the bulldozers come to destroy our Avra
Valley homeland for a new Interstate 11.
Marcos
Simonides: Greek-bornMarcos was the
chocolate mixer and
Chief Steward at Nestlé when I arrived in Salinas in 1971. The union
was not respected by the workers, having failed to budge
The World’s Largest Food Company on most local issues. My job,
with Marcos’s help, was to demonstrate that the union could
take on the company and win concessions for the employees. And we
did. I had worked on the Occupational Safety and Health Act in
Washington, and knew that the threat of it scared employers even if
the actual result was minimal. They didn’t know that yet. I
was struck by the production line noise levels, and borrowed a sound
meter and took readings – in many places way above the limit
allowed by OSHA. I filed an official complaint and inspectors posted
notices of violation in a dozen locations and the company had to
start providing hearing protection. The workers took note: Nestlé
could, at last, be held visibly accountable. Marcos and I plotted
more campaigns.
A
long-time woman employee collapsed on a noisy production line one day
and was rushed to the hospital. When Dorothy was released two weeks
later the company nurse insisted she see the company’s doctor
before returning to work. That doctor said she could no longer work
there and Dorothy, a single mom, needed her job. Marcos and I
convinced the Local to take the case to a costly, but impartial,
medical arbitration. In the lengthy and quite technical arbitration,
the company doctor went so far as to say that Dorothy had been
stepped on by a horse when she was nine and that was the cause of her
collapse, not excessive noise nor line speed-up. We won, and Local 6
was solid with the workers now, and Marcos was happy, taking me out
for an abalone dinner to celebrate.
Many
of the younger male employees were returning Vietnam vets who now
wore beards and mustaches and their hair long. The company didn’t
like it, and invoked Food and Drug rules about hair contamination;
those men would have to wear hair nets “just like the girls.” They did
so without complaint. So the plant manager ordered his
plant nurse to sew together gag-like face masks for those refusing to
shave. They were uncomfortable, which was the manager’s
intent. The FDA gave no help in solving the problem, but we
discovered that the company’s largest plant, in Fulton, New
York, used light mesh beard nets and they sent us samples. The
employees said they’d do just fine.
The
plant manager rejected them, so Marcos and I conceived of a
first-ever Salinas job action, a lunchtime demonstration in front of
the plant with signs proclaiming Food and Drug Rules, Yes –
Nestlé Gag Rules, No! I would pretend ignorance and be
called in to mediate, and we notified the press, hoping for photos.
About a dozen men participated, with other employees in the lunchroom
declaring, They’re gonna get fired! No one was, but the plant
manager, despite his untenable position, held firm. I met him in the
hallway one day and said, Look, off-the-record, why don’t you
try the Fulton beard nets as an experiment, with the right to go back
to the gags? It was like a light bulb went off over his head, and
the issue was resolved, with faces, and beards, saved.
When
I left union office Marcos presented me with a little plaque “in
appreciation of his service to the membership.” I have a
number of those kind of awards, but his is the only one that really
matters.
Harry
Siitonen: Harry, or Harri if he was talking to fellow Finns,
was
a retired printer living in Berkeley, an old socialist and writer,
active in union and political affairs. He was working on an
autobiography which supporters posted online as it came from him. When
FinnFest, a moveable annual gathering of Finnish Americans and
friends, was being held in Tucson in 2012, I organized several panel
discussions and a trip to the Queen Copper Mine and to Bisbee’s
local museum. In July, 1917, some 1200 striking miners, led by the
anti-capitalist Industrial Workers of the World, were rounded up at
gunpoint and “deported” in cattle cars to the New Mexico
desert. Of the 35 ethnic groups working at the mine, Finns were the
fourth largest group of deportees. I recruited Harry, a FinnFest
regular, to come and talk about labor struggles, and we shared
experiences and ideas and liked each other. That tour turned out to
be the high point for many FinnFest participants whose relatives had
once worked in Bisbee.
Irving
Smith: Irving, never Irv, was an old and sober alcoholic
living
alone in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. We became friends at
meetings of the Mission Fellowship, and I often gave him a lift home.
He sold his home and moved to an assisted care facility in Florida,
near a family member. When Kaitlin and I bought our double-wide in
Picture Rocks we didn’t have much money to work with, and when
I mentioned that in a phone conversation with Irving he said he had
included me in his will, but could put the money up front. That
bought the chain link fence protecting the residents and visitors in
the back half of our acre-and-a-quarter oasis. Irv died after a
fall, and I will never forget his selfless generosity.
Mayme
Smith: The community Kaitlin and I live in, Picture Rocks,
came
to be because of Mayme. She was a realtor and when ranch lands went
on sale in the 1970s, she borrowed and bought and resold to those who
could not afford to buy homes in Tucson. Most of the houses in
Picture Rocks are manufactured homes. To create an actual community,
Mayme founded the Rancho del Conejo Community Water Co-op, providing
pure well water to a square mile of over 300 families. I became
active in the co-op and served at a sort of Chief Operating Officer
for several years, helping to dig trenches when needed, and giving
direction to a local Board of Directors. Mayme, facing her 90s, was
still sharp and a valuable resource for me when questions came up.
From very different worlds, our common cause brought us together with
respect and with affection.
Richie
Stein: Aka Richard Steinberg, son of Dad’s fellow Smith
Act defendant Sid Stein, aka Sidney Steinberg. We ran together for
awhile, often affecting hoodlum demeanor to offend our young comrades
on the left. We shared that need for attention, even if negative. We
fell out at Coney Island one summer day when he and several
friends tried to de-pants me on the beach. I resisted, kicking, and
chipped one of Richie’s teeth, and he was mad! He eventually
got over it and when Elaine and I got together Richie and his
Hungarian-born wife, Sonja, had dinner with us from time-to-time. After
the 1956 Hungarian Revolt was put down by Soviet tanks, we
argued. I, with Dad, had supported the Russian intervention against
an obvious CIA plot, while Richie was declaring his independence from
Soviet communism. Sonja still had relatives in Hungary and reported
brutality, dismissed by me as US propaganda. The argument ended when
we declared to each other that, if we had been there, we’d have
been shooting at each other!
It
took getting sober for me to realize that I owed Richie an amends for
my verbal assault and political stupidity, and I tried tracking him
down to find that he had passed on. I think I did locate Sonja, and
sent an amends letter. There was no response, but the amends were
for me; what the recipient does with them in none of my business.
Christine
Tamblyn: When I sobered up, my union career over, I went to
the
hiring hall and was dispatched to – of all places – Hiram
Walker Liquors. But there was another sober alcoholic there, Sonny,
and we supported each other. When the company announced it would be
closing in a year, I knew it was time for a change. I obtained my
high school GED and decided to go to school full-time. I had
guest-taught some Labor Studies classes for the programs at S.F. City
and State, and proposed a new class to the small Laney College
program in Oakland. They liked it and I would have enough night
classes between the three schools to live on while attending S.F.
State University full-time. But two weeks before the semester began
I received an urgent call from Laney’s Chancellor: the Dept.
Chair, half-time Labor Studies and half-time Business, had some kind
of breakdown and was out for the season. Could I step in? Of
course, I said, launching a new twelve-year career as a labor
educator.
I
knocked off a quick BA in Labor Studies at State in 1991 –
heck, I was already teaching the classes – mostly by writing
papers in lieu of attending labor studies classes, and then decided
to get educated about things I had never had the time to follow up
on. I applied for the Interdisciplinary Creative Arts Program. At
my interview the director asked what my final project would be? I
had no idea, but said I could write, and I took decent photographs.
Maybe words on pictures, he said, and let me in. And that began my
real education, led by performance artist Christine Tamblyn with
assistance from visual artist Lynn Hershman. Short and dumpy, with
wild red hair, Christine encouraged us, gave advice, pointed new
directions, and showed herself to be the major creative force she
was.
My
final project in 1993 was a one-show-only History of the
American
Labor Movement, Part One, with actors, projected videos, mock
work on stage, a protest against speedup, a police raid, and,
finally, enough noise to drive people out of the auditorium where
colleagues waited with flyers on current labor disputes in the Bay
Area. It was a success, Christine gave me an “A” and a
hug, and I had a second college diploma. And a calling I never knew
before as a performance poet. Christine was dead of cancer five
years later.
In
Tucson I immediately found a niche, the Exodus Open Mic at the Hazy
Dayz Café south of the university campus. Organized and
hosted by Dov Diamond, the Wednesday night coffee house-poetry scene
attracted students, but that soon changed, and older poets were
coming and we were friendly, resulting in our own performance group
organized by André (The FunKtional Addix) Gavino, Paris
Moves. Meanwhile I remained long-distance friends with
Kaitlin
and her husband, and decided to make a trip there just to see them,
not en route to somewhere else. A date was set, but when I arrived
Kait was not there. The story was that as a hospice nurse, she was
with clients, and there was no telling when or if she’d be home
soon. So Dean and I and Kait’s first husband, Alan, gabbed and
toured, and I went home without knowing that she had moved out of the
marriage and was living in a mobile home park down Banner Grade from
Julian.
Once
home, I emailed both Kaitlin and Dean to say, okay, now it’s
your turn to come to Tucson. I never heard from Dean ever again, but
Kaitlin responded and we set a date. I took her to Hazy Dayz for a
performance piece I had prepared called the Christine Tamblyn
Memorial Lecture, modeled on a video Christine had shown us
as
students of a lecture she once did, shedding her clothes as she
talked. Dov joined the conspiracy, did the set-up, and my topic was
how poetry can strip things down to naked truths. I undressed as I
spoke, the oldest person in the room, and I called it a success
afterward for the applause the students gave me. Re-dressed and
leaving with Kaitlin, without thinking I reached out and took her
hand, and that was the moment when friendship began moving towards
something more. Thank you, Christine Tamblyn, for more than you’ll
ever know.
Peggy
Terry: Born in 1922, Peggy was a poor
white Appalachian
mother from Kentucky, a World War 2 Rosie the Riveter, caught up in
the movements of the 1960s, and an immediate hit with student
leftists trying to identify with the working class. Joining Women
for Peace in Chicago, and overcoming the casual southern racism of
her youth, Peggy ended up running for Vice-President on the Peace and
Freedom Party’s first ticket with Eldridge Cleaver in 1968. I
met her soon afterward during the Poor People’s Campaign in
Washington, before federal troops razed Resurrection City on the
Mall. I had been in touch with her son in Chicago, poet and activist
Doug Youngblood.
Students
for a Democratic Society, in an effort to link up with the working
class, had formed JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) Community Union. It was
such a success that the poor whites asked the students to leave so
they could run it themselves, soon joining as the Young Patriots with
the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords in the first
Rainbow Coalition. That appealed to me, working class folks taking
over for themselves. Doug and I shared poems and stories, and
meeting Peggy was high on my personal agenda. Neither of us being
trapped in sectarian vanguard politics, we soon became friends.
Peggy
had a set pitch in her speeches that echoed my own, and my union’s
outlook, and I used it often. At a rally, holding up an
open-fingered hand, she, or I, would say: We --
white, black,
brown, yellow, men, women, straight, gay, young, old – we are
like the fingers of a hand, and each of us alone can be twisted, can
be bent and broken. Then we would make a
clenched fist,
the leftist workers’ salute, declaring, But
when we
come together we are a mighty fist. In unity we have strength!
Don
Wilson: Don was a smart guy with several doctoral degrees
working at the University of Arizona. But he had a drinking problem,
tried the meetings, but was too smart for that simple program. His
wife kicked him out and he was living in a second house they owned
south of the Avra Valley. She called me, saying no one had heard
from Don for several days. I said I was heading out that way the
next day for an errand and I’d check if she gave me directions. It was
a Tucson summer day when I got to the house and found Don
dead in the front yard surrounded by empty beer and iced tea cans.
Wearing only silk boxer shorts, his body was burnt and bloated by the
intense August sun. I called the Sheriff’s Department and a
deputy came to take over. I gave him what information I had and
left. They would notify his widow.
It
was a painful and all-too-graphic reminder of what I had heard, and
dismissed as hyperbole at early recovery meetings, that alcoholism is
a fatal disease. It’s not always liver failure or OD on the
death certificate. One member of our little Picture Rocks recovery
group, Gary, blew his brains out after shooting and wounding his
estranged wife. I am one of the lucky ones, so facing incurable
cancer in my 80s, well, the last three decades have brought me
gifts beyond measure and I am, and will be, forever grateful. R.I.P.
my friends, and know you are not forgotten. Thank you all for what
you gave me. Thank you.
