Big Man, A Fast Man

by Appel, Benjamin

  The luck was with me. I calmed them down and got them to laughing. Then I led them from the tinhouse out through the gates to the pickets. Our pickets. Not the scabs at the strip mill. Those pickets were in the thousands. The whole God damn plant was on that picket line. Cold rollers and hot rollers, locomotive engineers from the yard, blast men and openhearth men, black picklers and white picklers, and they were all yelling, “C-I-O … C-I-O …” And Christ, I felt so good I’d done such a good job. That whole plant dead, the cranes quiet, the flat cars stopped, those mills all black and deserted. I felt so good that all that yelling was like it was coming out of my own throat.

  Aw, give me another drink for a reward. For a reward I got kicked upstairs. I’d expected an officer’s job in the new local we set up after we won the strike. But Hank Sievert straightened me out on that pipedream. He said I was a born organizer and ought to work out in the field. I listened to him. I even smiled. As an organizer I’d learned that a smile is as good as a five-dollar bill besides being a lot cheaper. I said, “Hank, this is a surprise. I was one of the first to sign up. This is my town.” I said, “Hank, I don’t want the field. I’m thinking of marrying and settling down.” He couldn’t look at me. We were up at our new headquarters. It wasn’t much to look at. Nothing like the million-dollar buildings the unions own now. In fact, it was a dump. Up one flight of stairs, the paint peeling, and the only thing bright the pictures on the walls. Roosevelt and John L. Lewis. Those two were the new saints in every steel town. Just the same that dump was the first steel union office in McKeesport that spoke for every last man in every damn mill. It was a dump maybe but it was history. And the boys up there knew I was a part of it. I was the guy who’d backtalked Halloway. And walked up to a couple of jittery cops with drawn guns. I’d proved my guts. Proved I had brains, too. I hadn’t fallen into the company’s traps. The boys up there knew all that. Christ, when they saw me and called out, “Hello, brother,” it sounded like they meant it. “Hank,” I said, “tell me the truth. Walt Marik don’t want me around.”

  He admitted it, some of it. But he said he really thought, speaking as a friend, that I had a big future in the field. He said we’d just begun to organize steel. The giants still wouldn’t talk to us. I said, “Hank, I was thinking of marrying and settling down.” He said, “How old are you, Billy?” — “Twenty-six,” I said. He shook his head and swore that to anybody else he’d say get married but me I was different. I could win a name for myself in the field. “Get married,” he said, “but you’re needed in the field, Billy.” Me, I listened to him, thinking, I could buck him and Walt. I could even get an officer’s job. I was that popular. And I could also make enemies for life. You keep a friend even if he gets a little moldy around the edges. That was a lesson I didn’t learn in Hank’s pamphlets preaching one big family of steel workers. I learned it like you learn this life where nobody’s perfect. Hell, but it hurt anyway. I wanted to believe he was still a real friend giving me real advice. He’d been like a father to me. It’s hard to lose your father a second time. That’s what Hank Sievert was to me.

  That next year I got to know the whole steel country. All those mills on the rivers. The Monongahela, the Allegheny, the Ohio. I organized in Duquesne where before the CIO people used to say that even if Jesus Christ came there he couldn’t hold a meeting. I held meetings. I organized in Homestead, in Pittsburgh. I told those workers who their friends were, and how the union was backed by the coal miners. I told them, “In the mines the company mined the miners. The steel companies steal them.” I told them I was a coal miner’s son and proud of it. In Aliquippa I knocked on the doors of the company houses on the company hills. The Italians on their hill, the Serbs on their hill. “Company, company,” I said, “all you hear in Aliquippa. Company mill, company house, wipe your ass on company paper.” That’s how I did it. Speaking rough and tough with the rough-and-toughs. Speaking facts to the quiet boys. I spoke nineteen different languages and they were all Organize. It was me the union sent into Johnstown. I remember walking down Front Street, my suitcase in my hand. Over near the Cambria plant, a cop stopped me. Real polite that cop. He said, “You a stranger in town?” I said, “I’m a lingerie salesman and I’d appreciate it if you gave me the name of a good rooming house.” He only half-believed me so I lifted up my suitcase and said, “Ladies’ drawers are my specialty, officer.” The picket line at that Cambria plant of Bethlehem Steel was eight miles long. The cops they had the guns and the tear gas. But when they tried to herd the strikebreakers through the gates we met them with a shower of nails. That picket line was eight miles. Big as Bethlehem was, it wasn’t big enough. U.S. Steel wasn’t big enough. A new power was in the country as big as any of them. Those steel men had been like kings but no king rules forever. That’s history.

  Billy, let’s get back to some personal history. Who was that girl you wanted to marry in McKeesport?

  You make me laugh the way you keep harping on that angle. I’ll tell you the next time. Can’t disappoint the public, no, sir.

  CONFIDENTIAL MEMO 1/8

  To: G.D.

  From: P.

  B. L. remarkably full about early days in McKeesport, More reticent about career with USTW and Harry Holmgren. Closemouthed, too, on women that meant something to him. Must get him talking about girl in McKeesport he wanted to marry/ also wife Edith Kincell/ also Annabelle.

  Want to hear more about the southern organizing campaign that laid an egg.

  Had a report yesterday that he didn’t throw rifle to ground up in Alaska. The guide could be mistaken/ doubt it. Did the ham in B. L. invent that detail for the sake of drama? Admit perplexity. After all no need for him to confess temptation to kill Jim Tooker on hunting trip. Jim Tooker was killed in his home/ Art Kincell a suicide in his office. Suicide note implicates B. L. Certainly he feels tremendous guilt for the web of events etc. that gave him the presidency of USTW. Perhaps the bit about the rifle thrown to the ground not so hammy/ a symbol.

  THE TAPES: 5

  Bill, here we are again. How about some personal history?

  No.

  Do you want to add anything on McKeesport? Although I think we have enough.

  Too much maybe, huh? I can see it in your eye. Billy Lloyd, the big steel organizer. Know why? Those were the big days in more ways than one. I was young back then. When you get to be my age, when you’ll never see fifty again. Sixty up ahead like a hang rope, well. You’ll find out for yourself. Anyway, I didn’t stick with steel like I’ve told you. I was the best organizer Harry Holmgren ever had and I’m not bragging. He sent me all over his territory. St. Louis, Omaha, Chicago. Wherever there was a depot or terminal. If the company hired strikebreakers, I hired goons. If they started a company union I gave them the stinkpot treatment. The main thing was to organize the unorganized. That I done. I did such a crack job Harry lost me. This was at the convention in Atlantic City around 1939. When the convention ended, Harry and me went for a walk on the boardwalk. He was sorry as hell but he said, “If Art wants you for one of his assistants who am I to stand in the way?” He got going on the future of the union and how I’d fit in. You see back then we were having a lot of jurisdictional fights with the teamsters. They were out to organize every guy with four wheels under him. That’s all right but where do you stop? Those wheels could roll right into a warehouse or depot which was our territory. He said that Art figured I’d be a good man to work with the teamster big brass. I tell you it gave me a kick. I was moving up just as Hank Sievert’d seen in the crystal ball. We walked past the shops all lit up, the piers sticking out into the black water. And I looked out at all that black water and I knew I was going to be a big shot. That’s Atlantic City for you. All those convention towns’re the same. You go there one guy and leave another. That is if you’re a comer.

  Art took me back to Washington with him and I got to know all the big men in the international. The big four as they were called. Harry Holmgren I knew. But there was Roy McHarnish and
Jim Tooker. And old Art. They sure were a dish of mixed pickles. It took Art to keep them together. He could do it because he’d been president of the USTW when it was no bigger than a matchbox. He had it by seniority. He was the king and they were the three little Caesars.

  Let me change that. Jim Tooker was no Caesar. I met him for the first time at the convention. I liked him but I never imagined we’d be close friends in a couple of months or that I’d be going fishing with him. There were too many differences between us even though we were both strong New Dealers. He was older by about ten years. A married man with a couple kids. I was a bachelor. I’d never gone fishing in my life. My exercise I took in the bedroom. The bar on the corner was my sporting palace. Well, we got to be friends. Let me change this. I’m not being straight with you and I said I was. It was Art who got us to be friends. He said, “Jim Tooker’s your kind of guy.” “What’s my kind of guy?” I said and he grinned at me with that fishy grin of his and said, “You both think Roosevelt’s the greatest thing on earth.” And like the bag of wind he was, he got spieling to me how the union had a right wing and a left wing. Just like Roosevelt with the Democratic party. And that my job as assistant was to keep us one big happy family. I said Harry’d told me I was going to work on the jurisdictional stuff with the teamsters. He said, “That, too, but your main job right now is harmony in the union.”

  That sounded okay to me. But the more I saw of Jim Tooker, the more that guy got under my skin. He was like Hank Sievert only stronger. Hank had let himself be pushed around by union politics, but there was nothing and nobody who could push Jim. You could see it in his eyes, those shiny brown eyes. It was all in his eyes. He was a self-educated guy and smart when it came to the connivers and chiselers. You see, he’d been born in Albany, worked around the race track at Saratoga Springs where he’d seen all those gamblers and fixers in action. Then he’d gone to New York. Had all kinds of jobs. And the Big Town wised him up some more. He was always a book reader. And in the depression he began reading a lot of stuff about politics, socialism, communism. He even went to some kind of a socialist school for a while. Yes, sir, you don’t get to be a Jim Tooker out of an empty head. And like I said, he got under my skin. I couldn’t keep a damn thing from him. Even what my job was as Art’s assistant.

  I had to tell him. It was burning me up. About this time we went on a fishing trip on this Reservoir Lake in the Catskills. They had opened the dam and no one had fished there all summer. We got oars from a farmer with water rights. He was an old man and almost deaf. But I waved some bills at him and he heard that. We got us a boat and went down to the lake. I remember everything because that was another important day for me. I mean I’d made up my mind to tell Jim about Art Kincell and me. It was one of those beautiful days in September. The wind in the grass, the whole sky flying, and me wondering how the hell I was telling him. And feeling good because I was.

  There was nothing much left of that lake. Most of the boats beached in the mud, and a little brook winding between the bushes. We got one of the boats up on its side, poured out the rain water and dragged it to the brook. Jim, he was all smiles. He was that happy to be on a lake nobody’d fished all summer. He kidded me when we were dragging the boat. Where was that steelworker’s muscle? Things an older guy’ll say to a younger guy. He was forty-one or two then and I was ten years younger and twice as heavy. He was a beanpole if there ever was one. We dumped the boat into the brook and climbed in. The wind pushed us out between the bushes and the brambles. Red-colored they were, on fire. What a day. We went around the curves and it was like going into a whole bunch of rooms on a moving floor made of pure glass, and the leaves moving too over our heads. A million colored leaves. What was left of the lake was a sight. Big muddy stretches in the middle and deep pools. The lake bottom showing up, covered with stumps and trees of an old drowned forest. Like islands the plague had got or something. Far away you could see the dam where the water’d gone out. And everywhere there were birds. All kinds of birds. Starlings, hawks, crows, all come to feed on the fish stranded in the shallows. It was murder. The murder of a lake.

  The wind was too strong to cast right. Our boat just roared along like we had an outboard attached. Before we knew it we were around a bend where there was a deserted farmhouse up on a slope. And a chopped-down apple orchard. That deserted house and those stumps all fresh and white, it was spooky. Like every living person had gone except the two of us. Jim, he’d been trolling. And all of a sudden he hooked into a big one. I reeled in my lure, dropped my rod and grabbed the net. Out in the water the fish broke. A slab-sided pickerel, a huge one, greener than green. Jim couldn’t play him on account of those sunken logs. So he horsed the fish to the boat. I got him in the net but that God damn pickerel bounced out. He hit the cross seat and bounced back into the water. All in a second. Jim, he should have done the yelling, not me. But all he said was it was no day for fishing. I bawled him out for being such a God damn sportsman. He only smiled and I had such a feeling for that guy I had to curse him all over again.

  We let the wind push us into the shore. It was all deer-tracked. It wasn’t lake bottom and it wasn’t earth. It was something in between. We went up to that farmhouse and I made up my mind I was telling him in there. But that damn house was too empty. It smelled empty. Not a stick of furniture left. I couldn’t say a thing. We went back to the boat and I was so worked up I had the crazy idea Art was sitting in it watching. That did it. I told him how Art wanted me to go fishing with him. “It’s part of my job being your pal, Jim,” I said, “Art wants one big happy family.” He listened and he said I shouldn’t let it worry me. He said, “I think it’s a good thing you’re in Washington.” — “Yeh,” I said, “I’ll be a good influence on Art Kincell.” He laughed and said that wasn’t as impossible as I thought. The wind was all labor, he said. And Art had always traveled with the wind. He said, “Billy, we need every good union man we can get in Washington.” That was too much for me. I asked him what would he think of a guy who’d paid out good USTW money to a strikebreaking agency. He said he’d have to know more details before knowing what to think. I told him all about the Albrand strike in Duluth and Harry Holmgren’s strategy and the deal we made with the finks. He only shook his head. “It’s the old story,” he said. I asked him what he meant and he said, “The old story of the means and the end. Harry figures he has to win by hook or crook.” — “Would you have done it, Jim?” I asked him and he said, “No.” He said he was the kind of fool who believed the means had to match the end.

  For God’s sake, I see now why I’ve gone into all this God damn detail about that fishing trip. It’s the same thing. The same thing as that hunting trip. The same God damn thing. Means and end. He wouldn’t take a million-dollar southern campaign because it was wrapped up with Art Kincell. But okay to be a friendly witness. To work with labor-haters and headline-hunters. Aw, why should I knock him. Who am I to knock him? Who’s perfect? Nobody, not even a Jim Tooker. Poor Jim, he should’ve gone along with Art. Poor Jim, he paid with his life.

  That trip, that fishing trip. With the birds screeching and feeding on the fish in that dying lake. Even when we returned the oars, you could still feel it. The loneliness of it, the deserted farmhouse with the chopped-down apple trees. That was a day for opening my heart. I told him about Annabelle. The first time I’d ever mentioned her to anybody. I had to tell him. All that loneliness and darkness got me down. There’s only one life we’ve got and too many kinds of dying. Turn that recorder off. I’ve said enough. Stop. Turn it back on. I’ll have a drink. The hell with what’s past.

  Billy, why don’t you give me something on Annabelle? What was her second name?

  Annabelle in the past. That’s her second name. Get me?

  All right, all right. Do you want to talk about that southern campaign after the war?

  That’s dead stuff. How about the war? Got to have something about my war record. There was a war, remember? I was over-age but they took me. I
wasn’t married. I was in it. Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines. Buck private, private first class, corporal, sergeant. But I don’t want no crap about being a war hero. I was never in battle except the battle for pom-pom in Manila and in case you don’t know what pom-pom is, go outside this office and look at that secretary of yours. Rear view.

  Billy, you seem irritated with me today.

  You know why? You know too much about me and you want to know more. Everything. If I was a Roman Catholic, you’d be my confessor.

  I’m your public relations confessor, Billy. Do you remember our first conversation? You said you didn’t want a sugar-coated job. You said you wanted the truth about your life and career. It’s the only sound approach for our eventual goals. Certainly, an autobiography and a series of articles in a magazine of national circulation. Perhaps a TV series, too.

  Okay, okay, I’m with you. The straight truth it is but I’ll have to go over all this stuff or it’ll hang me. After the war —

  Some details, please.

  I gave you the detail. The battle for pom-pom. The other battle I was in was the battle of the black market. This was 1946 when a pack of American butts was selling for two bucks. You don’t want that stuff, do you?

  Yes, for my own information. We’ll have to have a chapter on your war record, remember.

  Okay, what I did in the Army was run a sawmill. I ran a sawmill in Manila. A city where half the people were living like rats in refugee huts. Scavenging old burned boards and pieces of tin to build themselves a place to sleep. That sawmill was a gold mine. What I did was supply a bunch of Filipino lumber dealers with lumber. I had a second looey on my tail out on Cavite. That’s where the sawmill was. But he liked the mestizas. No cheap pom-pom for him. My dealers supplied the mestizas. We did a swell business. Cut three days for the army, four days for the black market. My operation got so big I had to pay off the brass. Some were crooks. Some were crooks with a little conscience. Them, I had to give a line how Manila had to be rebuilt. The Paris of the Pacific, all that crap. Red lauan, white lauan, apitong. I remember the Filipino names of the lumber we cut on Cavite. It was all first-class building lumber, and every G.I. working for me making his honest black market buck.