by Mick Lowe
As usual, the trip out the Kingsway, a dreary, congested four-lane strip of roadway blasted out of solid rock lined with used car lots and fast food joints, was trying to Molly—patience had never been her long suit—but at last she pulled into the short gravel driveway outside Jake’s and Jo Ann’s home, an unassuming semi-sided in dark brown aluminum, the somber colour being the only feature that distinguished the place in a street full of otherwise identical and nondescript semi-detached duplexes. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but from the moment she stepped inside the front door Molly was hooked.
Jo Ann Winter-McCool greeted Molly warmly, and the women already present, after joining in on the greeting, returned to their conversation, a buzzing flutter alert to the promise—and the peril—of new times ahead. Molly had never met Jo Ann, a tall, attractive brunette possessed of a pert, lively intelligence that was soon much in evidence as she quietly called the informal gathering to order. Aware that many of her guests had never met, Jo Ann began with a round of introductions, an astute move in Molly’s eyes, as it afforded even the most retiring woman in the circle an opportunity to contribute to the discussion.
They were a diverse group that included a professor from Laurentian University, a well-known community organizer, and even Jo Ann’s mother-in-law, Alice McCool, who was the matriarch of the group. As they went around the circle and introduced themselves, each woman had been urged by Jo Ann to also explain her interest in building solidarity with the strikers. The university professor expounded briefly on how she’d been drawn to the city to make an academic study of Sudbury’s long history in the Canadian labour movement, the community organizer told of the tactics of popular organizing to foster broad public resistance to power in whatever form—she referred in passing to someone named Saul Alinsky—but it was Alice McCool who stole the show that first meeting.
At least a generation older than most of them, she spoke with a quiet authority that was greeted by silent, rapt attention. “I’m here because I’ve been here once before—in the winter of ’58—and that’s a place I never, ever want to be at ever again,” Alice McCool declared. “It may be the men out there walking that picket line, but don’t kid yourselves, it’s the women, and especially the wives, who’ll make or break this strike!”
She paused to gather her thoughts. Twenty years, almost to the day. And how much had changed! And yet so little. Superficially, at least, the standard of living was now much higher in Sudbury than at the start of the disastrous strike of ’58. Everyone had colour televisions, and even two-car families were becoming common. But Alice and her husband Bill saw this new apparent affluence as a house of cards—built on the credit cards that had fueled so much of this abundance. And that was a very real worry now, with this strike upon them. If it wasn’t easy credit for consumer goods then it was mortgage-lending policies that encouraged workers to buy ever larger homes and carry ever larger mortgage debt. Thanks to the city’s high rate of industrial unionism wages were relatively high—catnip to the big banks and the fly-by-night “finance companies” anxious to induce families to get in over their heads. Late model cars and trucks and larger, glitzier homes were tantalizing, but how tolerant would these lenders be once the steady pay cheques—and the steady payments—stopped? Alice and Bill sensed a terrible vulnerability that might well nip this strike in the bud even before it had truly gained traction. The impulse to live from paycheque-to-paycheque on borrowed money was irresistible. How many of the women in this room hadn’t a clue where their next mortgage payment was coming from?
As these thoughts raced through her mind Alice McCool closed her eyes, and memories flashed across her darkened vision. A series of ghostly images—Bill and his brothers Walt and Bud as she’d first met them so many years ago, handsome strong young men, cocky, truculent to a fault, ready to fight at the drop of a hat, their youth tempered now by years spent underground, the fighting spirit they’d channeled into union militancy blunted by the terrible strike of ’58 whose loss had ultimately led to the defeat of their beloved Mine Mill; the loss of her son Ben in a bizarre back alley attack which, Alice was still convinced, was somehow political in nature, but a crime that had still never been solved. Ben’s death at the hands of an anonymous but lethal attacker in a darkened alley behind the Coulson Hotel had become a deeper mystery, for Alice at least, with every passing year. The tragedy had also embroiled Jake, her youngest boy. He’d been with Ben that night, fighting to protect his brother, but Jake, usually as indomitable with his fists as his father and uncles, had more than met his match at the hands of the mysterious stranger, who put the boots to Ben. Alice had sorrowed deeply for both her sons. Jake, she knew, had blamed himself for Ben’s murder—and for a time had withdrawn into some dark place, losing weight, and even his relationship with his girlfriend and high school sweetheart Jo Ann in the process. The swift, at best bittersweet, onrush of memories of her life in this hard rock mining town was nearly vertiginous, and the unexpected jumble of them left Alice almost breathless, and in a swoon. And now here they were, and it was fall, and they were beginning another seemingly hopeless battle against apparently insurmountable odds, and these young, beautiful women, so sweet and fierce in their naiveté were looking up at her for—suddenly Alice McCool, her head beginning to sway alarmingly, came to, opened her eyes, and regained her senses, to the relief of her listeners, who were becoming alarmed at their would-be mentor’s insensible silence. Jo Ann was about to scramble to the kitchen to draw her mother-in-law a glass of tap water when she finally came to, and it was true, Alice McCool’s mouth was dry, her voice a rasp, when at last she finally spoke a single word.
“Christmas.”
“It was Christmas finally broke us. There was no more strike pay, and we’d nothing, nothing don’t you see, no turkey dinner, no presents for the kids and we were done, just done for, and the mayor called this meeting of the wives, called us all into the big new arena downtown, and thousands did go, herded in there like cattle …”
“Did you go, Alice?” queried Jo Ann softly, knowing full well the answer, having heard this story around the McCool supper table at least a thousand times.
“Me? Hell no, I was always a proud member in good standing of the Local 598 Women’s Auxiliary and we fought like the dickens against the back-to-work movement—for that’s all it was, don’t you see? The bosses, the company, oh, they knew all right, how we were suffering for our children, and that was the end of it. The boys went right back to the table, settled for a quickie sell-out agreement which was the very offer the company’d made before we were out for four months—a total defeat—and that was the end. The end of the strike, even the end of the Mine Mill Union, I believe.
“It was Christmas.”
A brief silence descended over the room as the women digested Alice’s cautionary tale. It was the community organizer who spoke first. “All right, thank you, Mrs. McCool … Well, I think it’s obvious none of us wants to see history repeat itself here, so—any ideas what we should be doing to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen to us?”
The university professor was the first to answer. “I think we need to get ourselves organized—mobilize all the wives who support the strike, and support them to support their husbands to keep the strike strong.”
Most of the women shared this assessment, as Molly could see.
“Oh, and one other thing,” the professor concluded. “We should be especially careful to organize some way to avoid another Christmas let-down … I know it seems a long way off now, but …”
“If we even make it that far,” one of the younger women reflected soberly.
“Oh, we’ll make it,” Molly reassured the gathering. “So how about we throw a big Christmas Party for the kids? Every member’d be welcome to bring out all their kids, we’d use the big hall, organize a toy drive first, make a big splash in the media, anybody’s thinking of another back-to-work movement because of the
holidays we head ’em off at the pass!”
“It could work,” the community organizer promptly agreed. “But it’s a big job. How we gonna organize this?
I’d be willing to help with this, if anybody else is, but we’d need some standing, some kind of formal recognition, from the union … Molly, could you help us out with this, act as a go-between for us with the union?”
“A liaison, you mean? Sure, why not? And I’d be happy to let youse know what’s happening at meetings, give a woman’s point of view …”
Molly’s head was swimming as she made the short drive home from the McCools’. What all had she just agreed to undertake on this first day of the strike? There was finding someone to get the Drug Committee going, she was definitely interested in this new Road Trip Committee, and then everything from the women’s meeting—the Christmas Party, playing go-between between the wives and the union. Good thing she was on strike! It was beginning to dawn on her, as it would occur to many, that walking the bricks for a pittance on Pittsburgh strike pay was more work than actually working for wages at Inco. But the time was a gift, and it was about to become the time of her life.
5
Off the Chain
It was baffling, even befuddling, at first: the time.
The sudden sheer enormity of the free time that now loomed before them for—how long?—no one knew. Suddenly the men were home all the time, underfoot now during the day, which strained many marriages, especially if the man was unable or unwilling to share in the housework, and take care of the kids. Many a woman began to nag her husband about this, while in other families the men willingly pitched in with the unfamiliar domestic tasks they had heretofore considered beneath them, and the marriages thrived, and even blossomed.
Many men simply fled to that handiest of male preserves—the garage. At least a large block Chevy V8 358 didn’t talk back, and there was a sane, predictable logic to the world of socket wrenches, grease, and WD40.
Still other men found solace in the bush—the vast, mainly trackless Boreal forest that surrounded Sudbury on every side for miles upon empty miles. Some quantum of Indian blood, heretofore ignored, whispered down through the generations and the shiftworker, liberated from the stomach-shredding vagaries of the three-shift schedule, picked up his hunting rifle and repaired to the bush. The snow came early that year, favouring the tracker in pursuit of the biggest game around—moose. A freezer full of moose meat was reproof against the hunger that now lurked at the back of every cabin door, insurance that his family would not go hungry even if they really were “out ’til the grass was green.”
Other strikers returned to the trap lines they had inherited from their forebears. Prices for beaver peltries, always cyclical, happened to be especially high that year, one more fallback for the resourceful striker.
Oh, it was a life they loved and had acquired considerable skill at over the years—how to move swiftly and silently over the rugged terrain of the Canadian Shield, how to think like a moose—it would all get easier come freeze-up, when the waterlogged muskeg froze solid, creating a safe, reliable flat path over the boggy swamps that covered every basin and lowland and that were impassable for much of the year. Then, too, the plummeting temperatures would create ideal conditions for ice fishing, with the lakes covered with solid ice several feet deep.
The men of the outlying communities were favoured here—the wilderness was literally in their backyard. Places like Capreol, Levack and St. Charles were located deep in the Northern Ontario bush that was a paradise for anglers and hunters. Americans and outdoorsmen from southern Ontario would drive many miles to reach the abundant, teeming wilderness that was at the strikers’ fingertips, and now, for once, there was the time to enjoy it all. Besides, you could eat or sell whatever you shot, caught, snared or trapped. To the resourceful, the strike began as a welcome opportunity to pursue a much-loved, though physically demanding, avocation. The Indian blood whispered, and they were fain to listen.
6
Southern Swing
It came sledding in suddenly, unbelievably early, on an Arctic high-pressure system, and the mercury fell, and kept on falling. The days were noticeably shorter now, and the long dark night of another Northern winter was upon them in earnest.
As it always did, the first true cold snap of winter caught them off guard that year. The sudden surge of savage cold was unbelievable, absolute in its utter indifference, even hostility, to any form of life. How could anyone possibly survive such a thing? And for the many months that stretched endlessly before them now! It hardly seemed possible that only weeks before they’d been “at camp,” enjoying languorous long summer days beside cerulean, pure, northern lakes where they’d saunaed before skinny dipping, bodies still steaming, off the end of the dock. Those same lakes were ice-skimmed in the mornings now, and the birch, poplar and cedar that lined the shores gave off loud, sudden reports, like the shot of a high-powered rifle, as the terrible frost entered their bare limbs and trunks, freezing them solid in a trice.
Now, suddenly, the exertion of every living thing was manifest in steamy, billowing exhalations of white clouds that were a stark contrast to the startling deep blue sky. Such clouds puffed out of every head frame, car exhaust, manhole cover and chimney as if in puny earnest that life continued, even in this universe of perishing cold.
At least the first road trip on behalf of the strike was to the south where it was bound to be warmer, Molly reflected as she boarded the rickety old school bus the Local had chartered to transport them to Oshawa and then on to Toronto on a combined fundraising-consciousness raising swing through southern Ontario.
The bus wasn’t quite full as it pulled away from the Steel Hall that early morning in November, with thirty or so parka-clad activist members of Local 6500. Molly quickly occupied a window seat so she could enjoy the view as the bus roared south along Highway 69. Jordan Nelson had done the same, but somewhere near Point-Au-Baril the Local Union President was joined by Jake McCool, who slid into the vacant seat beside him.
“Hey, Jake, how’s it going?” Nelson greeted his Vice President.
“Not bad, okay, Jordy,” Jake replied offhandedly, before lowering his voice. “Can we talk about a few things?”
The union president cast a quick, furtive glance around them before replying in an equally lowered voice. “Sure, Jake, what’s on your mind?”
“Well, the women, for one thing …”
Nelson nodded. “It’s tricky, but I think it’s a good thing, them getting organized … I’d a helluva lot rather have ’em inside the tent pissing out, instead of outside pissing in … Anyway, Carruth is in there, keeping an eye on things …”
Jake grunted. “I hear that. My wife and mum are both involved, and they’re taking it pretty serious …”
“I know. I heard.” Nelson grinned at Jake. “Sounds like you’re pretty well surrounded, brother.”
Both men fell silent as the bus passed through Point-au-Baril, a strip of non-descript gas stations, hamburger stands, bait shops, and even a one-lung grocery that seemed to double as a liquor store. It wasn’t much to look at, but after travelling for an hour-and-a-half through miles and miles of Northern Ontario bush, rivers, lakes, moose pasture, and sheer, steeply-sided rock cuts carved through the Cambrian Shield outcrop that was the understory of all their lives, even this random cluster of buildings was a welcome sight.
At last, Jake resumed his sotto voce conversation with Nelson. “So you’re thinking of supporting them, then?”
It took the union president an instant to regain the thread of his dialogue with Jake. “Oh. The women, you mean? Hell yeah, I support ’em, but the rest of the Board—I dunno. And that could be a real problem.”
Jake nodded. He understood Jordan’s worry. Apart from Jake’s own vote, the newly elected union president was often outnumbered when it came to crucial matters before the Local Union’s full E
xecutive Board, which was comprised mostly of older Steelworker loyalists whose tenure dated back to the days of the Mine Mill-Steel raids. They were by nature a crusty, conservative bunch, suspicious of any new, fresh initiative that lay outside their narrow view of bread-and-butter trade unionism.
“Yeah, well, so far’s my mum’s concerned it’s important. She’s anxious to avoid any repeat of ’58.”
“Sure,” Nelson agreed. “But I’m afraid the old guys on the Board will see the exact opposite. They’re worried the wives’ll get organized and pull a ’58 on us all over again.”
Jake shook his head in disbelief. “They don’t know my mother, then! They have no idea …”
“No, and do you see anyone budging Carruth over there? Hell, she’s more solid than half the guys in this Local—it’s some of them who worry me the most.”
“Oh yeah? How so?”
Nelson shook his head in worry. The President of Local 6500 wore aviator glasses that somehow magnified his eyes and that, so it seemed to Jake, sometimes gave him a mournful, hang-dog look.
“I was on the lines out at Frood, and what I heard out there freaked me right out.”
“What happened?”
“Had all kinds of guys, old guys, mainly coming up and telling me it’s already a lost cause, that we’ll never outlast the company, that we’re heading for a repeat of ’58 …” Nelson’s voice trailed off.
“Jesus! Where’s all that high morale Molly was talking about?”
Nelson gave off a weary sigh. “Beats me. Not on the line at Frood, that’s for sure. Some of ’em even wanted me to cancel this trip! Said we’re not gonna raise enough money at the gates to even pay for the gas because nobody’ll wanna give to support a lost cause …”
