“And just when your Yankees were looking pretty good,” he said. “Poor bastard, Mattingly, I actually feel sorry for him. He’ll never make the Series.”
Ryan had resigned his post as the head of the printers’ union in 1989. He needed the distraction after the death of the only woman he said he could love. Annie Ryan, an Irish immigrant and artist, had coaxed him into the Union Square area of Manhattan after they’d raised five children in a Long Island middle-class suburb. She died six months later.
Odd that Ryan was calling, Morris thought. When he relinquished his union post at age sixty-six, he declared himself utterly spent, eternally retired. He was determined to devote his remaining years to his children and grandchildren and surprising eclectic interests. Classic literature, for one—or so Morris recalled reading in a New York Magazine profile that circulated at the Trib on the morning after Ryan was feted by the city’s labor establishment.
The bash was thrown at a posh center for artists in Manhattan in a Fifth Avenue brownstone. Delighted by the invitation that reached him at the Trib by messenger, Morris attended but felt underdressed and out of place. He left early, soon after the toast, and hadn’t seen or spoken with Ryan since.
Incongruously upscale as the midtown setting was for a champion of the workingman, Morris had to admit that Ryan was no conventional union power broker. He was part street fighter, part Renaissance man, tall and slender with an oval-shaped face and elegantly groomed goatee. Ryan was a child of the depression who had beaten the demographic odds. His family had depended on assorted handouts after his father lost his factory job. His mother died two years later. Morris believed that only a man who had experienced such a life had the capacity to usher Local 11 through its cataclysmic upheaval. Only he who realized that change was inevitable could envision and prepare for what awaited the printers.
“Listen, Mo, I’d like you to come see me at my place in the city,” Ryan said. “But only if you can work it into your schedule, of course.”
Morris was curious but at the same time gratefully distracted. He woke early the next morning and left Molly sleeping and still seething, judging from how she was curled up at the far edge of the bed. An hour and fifteen minutes later, he disembarked the bus at Fourteenth and Broadway, across the street from Union Square. He began the four-block walk to a ten-story brick-faced building with a green canopy.
Morris hit the sixth-floor button, his stomach queasy as the slow-moving elevator squealed and shivered to a halt. Ryan greeted him at the apartment door with a cordless telephone pressed to his ear. His left arm hung limp at his side, as it had since he was sixteen—the result of being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. There was always pain on that side, he told Morris once. “It only doesn’t hurt when I get the contract I want.”
He appeared older than Morris remembered—more lined around the eyes, though still fit and alert.
“I can’t fly out until Sunday,” he said into the receiver. He head-motioned Morris inside the apartment and pointed him toward the living room through the entryway hall.
Ryan disappeared into the narrow kitchen, continuing with his travel plans. Morris stepped into a room teeming with bookcases, including one entire wall of built-in shelves. The furniture was old but preserved. An L-shaped couch in the middle was set around a glass top coffee table littered with newspapers, magazines, a couple of coffee mugs and a brown paper bag.
The sea blue blinds were nearly shut. The light in the room was dim, the air a bit stale. A widower lives here, Morris thought. He could almost smell the solitude.
Morris walked to the window to peek at the view but noticed a magazine cover, framed, lacquered and mounted on the nearby wall.
He couldn’t help but feel a spasm of delight at the sight of the younger and already graying legend, “Labor Boss Jackie Ryan.” All these years later it sounded too simple, a gross understatement, to call him that. Against a black backdrop was a long and slender work tool, resembling a machine gun at first glance. Upon closer inspection you saw it was a wrench that was wedged between the rolls of paper on a printing press. The headline ran across the top of the magazine cover, just below the white lettering that spelled out TIME.
POWER OF THE PRINTERS
“You remember that one, Mo?” Ryan said. He startled Morris, who had become engrossed with the artifact. “Annie had it framed.”
“March 1, 1963,” Morris said, reading the fine print. “The big one.”
“First walkout in eighty years, a hundred and thirty-four goddamned days on the street,” Ryan said. He was alongside Morris, patting his back with his good hand.
He chuckled and said, “The damn photographer bitched during the entire shoot. ‘Did you have to shut down all seven goddamned papers? I got nothing to read on the subway.’ ”
“Seven dailies, can you imagine?” Morris said.
“We were the bad guys, of course,” Ryan said. “They basically used this article to question our right to go out. The reporter threw that damn JFK quote right in my face. Said to me, ‘How do you defend the strike when the President says it’s gone on for too long and the unions have to understand the damage they are doing to the fabric of the city?’ Imagine that, a good Irish Catholic boy from Boston, and that’s what he had to say about the American labor movement. So I said, and the guy quoted me in the story, ‘It pains me to say this but the President doesn’t have all the facts.’ I said, ‘Would he ask that we throw ourselves and our modest middle-class lives at the mercy of the wealthy publishers who forced us into the street in the first place?’”
He might have been reciting a prayer from his days as an altar boy, given his clarity and certainty. But not for a moment did Morris doubt Ryan’s recall or conviction. He too remembered how the Kennedy rebuke had stung the rank-and-file. It was JFK, for crying out loud.
“The reporter asked if I was using the strike as a springboard to get the national presidency of the ITU,” Ryan said. “I laughed and said, ‘Schmuck, I make twenty grand a year running the Ones. You know what I’d make by going national? Maybe twenty-five if I held my breath.’ Who knows? Maybe I insulted the guy. He wrote the story and said that we were hurting the movement. He made a big deal of the fact that we had put ten unions and twenty thousand people on the street and only fifteen or twenty percent of them were ours, as if publishers weren’t trying to screw the other unions too. And then they blamed us when those four papers closed over the next few years, said we killed them with the strike. Bullshit. Television was already eating away at us. Everything was changing. We found work for a lot of the guys who lost their jobs when those papers went down.”
“I just remember that winter, it seemed like it would go on forever,” Morris said. “We had people in and out of our living room, rolled up on the floor in blankets because they had to put everything they had to the rent and then their electric would get turned off…”
“There was a guy who called me about eight or ten years later, told me he wanted to write a book on that strike,” Ryan said. “He showed me this list he had compiled of all the news that occurred, day-by-day, while we were out. Most of it, you know, was Cold War stuff—Khrushchev threatening one thing, Kennedy another. But I also remember some of the other big stories—Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle both signing contracts that winter for a hundred grand. Can you imagine, with the coin these guys pull today?
“And the other thing—and you could look this up—is that the day we resumed publishing was April 1. April Fools’ Day. I’ll always remember that because in the middle of all the craziness, I was making the rounds to the plants, and someone at one of them says to me, ‘Ayy, can you believe it, the Mets just got Duke Snider.’ And I said, ‘Get the fuck out. What is that, an April Fools’ joke?’ But the Mets actually did get Duke Snider on that day.”
Morris was reminded how skillfully, how effortlessly, Ryan could steer the direction of a conversation. Jocularity aside, he was still dying to know why the hell he was standing in his
apartment.
“Jackie, what is it you wanted to talk to me about?” But before Ryan could answer they were distracted by the flushing of a nearby toilet. Puzzled, Morris looked at Ryan, who smiled and said, “Mo, why don’t you just sit down here and relax? I apologize for the mystery, pulling you away from the line and all. And please don’t think that I’m trying to meddle. But there’s someone here who needs to speak with you.”
Morris sank into the sofa’s soft cushions. Ryan, still standing, asked if he wanted something to drink. Morris shook his head just as a door closed in the back hall.
Footsteps moved closer. Morris really wanted it to be Colangelo, ready to reveal whatever he was hiding at Kelly’s the previous day. Instead it was Sean Cox, one of his own Trib printers—grim-faced and disinclined to make eye contact. Cox greeted him with a nod of the head and a mumble.
Cox was average size, slender except for a small pot belly, with hooded eyes and craggy cheeks and peach-fuzz remnants of hair. His hands remained deep in the pockets of baggy blue jeans. He kept his distance, glancing nervously at Ryan.
“Mo,” Ryan said, “before we start, I want you to know that this was my idea, not Sean’s.”
Ryan extended a hand for Sean to sit, following alongside, on the longer section of the L. Morris leaned forward, hands on his knees, still trying, unsuccessfully, to make eye contact with Sean.
“Mo, you know, Sean here and I go back a ways,” Ryan said. Sean nodded, finally cracking a brief smile.
Actually, Morris didn’t know. He certainly was curious how one of the rank-and-filers came to have a relationship with the big guy.
“He knew Annie in the old country,” Ryan said. “They grew up together, same grade school and everything, in the south. Kilkenny City. When Sean came to New York—what was it, about the mid-60s?”
He patted Sean’s knee and again Sean nodded, not bothering to provide the exact year. He was clearly comfortable with letting Ryan emcee.
“He came here with a travel card, you know?” Ryan said. “You could do that back then. They’d give you a card and you could go look for work abroad, anywhere you could get hired. Sean came to see me, waited for a couple of hours, at least, because I didn’t know who the hell he was. You know, those days, everybody and his uncle thought I could put them to work, get them into a shop. Anyway, my secretary comes in and says, ‘There’s this nice man who’s been waiting very patiently. He says he knows your wife. I invite Sean in and he tells me, yes, he knew Mrs. Ryan in Kilkenny, and he’s here looking for work, preferably at one of the papers. Said he worked as a monotype operator in Ireland. I told him, ‘That’s a whole different ballgame from the newspaper business, my friend.’ But I sent him downtown to a small shop on Varick Street. The next thing I know, he calls me and says he got on as a proofreader at the old Daily Mirror. He’s got three shifts a week and within a couple of months it’ll be five. He and his wife would like to take the Mrs. and me out to dinner as a thank-you. Annie was thrilled to see him again. So that’s how Seanie and Marlene became our friends, and they even were part of a group tour we took to Ireland. Must’ve been in the early 80s, right?”
“About then, Jackie,” Sean said.
“Have you ever been to Ireland, Mo?” Ryan said.
Not unless there was a town of the same name in the Catskills with a bungalow colony, Morris thought. That’s where the Jews from the city went. That was the only vacation spot he had known as a child and later when Becky and Jamie were young.
In fact, the only plane ride he’d ever taken had landed him in Fort Lauderdale for the funeral of a favorite uncle, who a couple of times had rescued him as a teenager from striking range of his father’s non-negotiable temper.
Taking Morris’ silence for a no, Ryan continued. “You can imagine how many times I was there over the years, family and all. And where Sean here is from—it’s a wonderland, just magnificent, right on the River Nore. You’ve got all the great old architecture and this incredible castle that was built on a bend in the river that gives you a view of what looks like the whole goddamn world on a clear day. It was built in like…”
Ryan cued Sean, who responded in his still formidable brogue: “I think it was early in the 13th century, Jackie.”
Even if their relationship was primarily based on family ties, ancestral commonality, Sean had never spoken of it to Morris. The truth was that Morris had never mingled breezily with the printers. He never wanted to get too close, to owe them anything more than the pragmatism that best served their ability to earn. He’d always had Louie to network for him.
“Well, anyway, Mo, you know Sean, he’s a good union man, always has been,” Ryan said. “But he’s got a personal problem that’s pretty damned urgent, and I think it may also speak to a larger issue, the situation you’re looking at with management right now.”
Ryan placed a hand on Sean’s shoulder, which prompted Cox to edge forward.
“It’s Marlene, Mo. She’s got breast cancer and it’s pretty advanced. We just got the report back the end of last week. They said she needs a double mastectomy. They want her in the hospital right away. But we’re on strike and in violation of our contract, which means the health insurance company could challenge the claim. I put her in now and they could hand me back the card and say, ‘Sorry, how you going to pay for this?’ I can’t pay. I don’t have that kind of money. But Marlene can’t wait. So what do I do?”
Sean was looking directly at him now, no way for Morris to avoid seeing the tears. He felt like crying himself.
“Why didn’t you just call me?” Morris said, realizing too late how that might have sounded to Ryan.
“I talked to Lou,” Sean said. “He told me he would take care of it with you. But then the thing happened yesterday with your boy. Lou called me last night. He said, ‘Sean, I tried to talk to Mo but you saw what happened today. Now’s not the best time to deal with it. ‘Give it a few days,’ he said. ‘Mo will deal with this.’ But I’m telling you, the doctors are saying Marlene can’t wait to have the surgery. The cancer could spread. Maybe it already has.”
In the ensuing silence, Morris was instinctively wary of sounding insensitive. He waited, wondering if Ryan would intervene, but Ryan was holding back, content for the moment to play mediator in this hastily arranged bargaining session.
Did Ryan believe his job was to bring the sides together, let them negotiate terms and subtly lead them to the possibility of an agreement? Probably not, Morris thought. The Jackie Ryan he knew had to have something more substantial in mind because, ultimately, he was not one to conduct caucuses in pursuit of consensus.
“Are you saying that you want to go back in, Sean?” Morris said. He spoke softly, almost encouragingly.
“I never crossed a damned line in my life,” Sean said defensively.
“I didn’t say anything about crossing a picket line or our picket line,” Morris said. “I’m just agreeing that the only way you and Marlene will be guaranteed your benefits is if we’re—you’re—back on the job.”
Sean frowned. “I’m just saying that I don’t know what to do, Mo. I thought Jackie might be able to make a suggestion. That’s why I called him.”
Morris took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. He said nothing because he knew Ryan was waiting for the most opportune moment.
“Tell me, Mo, where are you right now?” Ryan said. “Where do you see this one going?”
“You mean, with us or with everyone?” Morris said.
“Let’s start with you and then we’ll talk about, you know, the drivers,” Ryan said.
Morris fidgeted. He noticed Sean dabbing at his eyes.
“Funny you should mention the drivers,” Morris said more casually, regaining his composure. “I happened to run into Gerry Colangelo just yesterday at Kelly’s. It was right after the thing with Jamie…my son.”
“I’ll bet he was thrilled to see you,” Ryan said.
Morris harrumphed. “My brother and I wa
lked in. He was at the bar. Louie goes to the bathroom and I sit down next to him and, granted, after what happened on the line, I probably didn’t look like I was in the friendliest mood. But I said hello nicely. He nodded. I said, ‘Gerry, just us talking. What’s the latest? There any movement?’
“Now, I know he couldn’t be too happy because they’d gotten the paper out for—what—the second day in a row. But the guy looked straight at me for fifteen seconds. He stared at me like I was a total stranger. He checked his watch, finished his drink in one gulp and said, ‘Excuse me.’ Then he got up and walked out.”
“That was it?” Ryan said.
“Not even, I’ll call you. And that’s after I had left a message for him the day before.”
“So you think he’s up to something?”
“No idea,” Morris said. “But I can tell you, Jackie, I never really trusted this guy in the first place.”
Ryan gave him an affirmative nod. He leaned forward and lowered his voice, as if to take Morris into his confidence, as if Sean couldn’t hear.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about Colangelo and the drivers in this situation, Mo.”
“But how is that possible? It’s their strike, their lead in negotiations.”
“I know that,” Ryan said. “I know. But it looks to me like they’ve already lost control of it. They took everyone out, and now the paper’s getting to the stands without them. They miscalculated what this guy Brady was willing to do and the cover he had from City Hall. In the process, they’ve given the prick—and I’m sorry to say he’s from the same beautiful country as my wife, God rest her soul—a golden opportunity to do much more damage to the unions, even the ones that have contracts, like…”
“Us?”
“Especially you, Mo. And because you, my friend, have the most to lose here.”
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