Wobblies

"The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.” Helen Keller, IWW member, 1911

Wobblies was a nickname for members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union founded in Chicago in 1905 whose leaders included Eugene Victor Debs and Big Bill Haywood.  Believing in “One Big Union” and organizing industry-wide rather than by trades or crafts, the IWW had considerable success in western states, signing up farmworkers, lumberjacks, miners, and unskilled workers ignored, for the most part, by the cautious American Federation of Labor. The Wobblies used songs (“Solidarity Forever”) and colorful slogans (“Get the Bosses Off Your Backs”) to spread their mass appeal.  It had an estimated 150,000 members in 1917 before its members were persecuted and its leaders jailed, deported or murdered during World War I and the Red Scare. Its spirit lived on, inspiring many New Leftists during the 1970s including David Ranney, who belonged to the socialist groups New American Movement and the Sojourner Truth Organization.

In 1976 David Ranney hired in at FAROC, a small job shop in East Chicago, Indiana, that rebuilt centrifuge machines, used in rendering plants processing carcasses of pigs, cows, and horses into solids and liquids converted to other uses. Ranney found the listing in the Daily Calumet and drove to the plant from South Chicago via the Chicago Skyway.  In “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor” Ranney recorded his first impressions:

    From the Skyway I can see miles of bungalow homes, smaller and larger factories, and two steel mills, all going full tilt. As I get near East Chicago the acrid smell of steel production gets even stronger than it is in South Chicago.  Smoke fills the air and visibility is limited.  Massive integrated steel mills, including Inland Steel and U.S. Steel Gary Works, run around the clock. One of the operations in these mills is burning coal to make a product called coke that burns hot enough to combine limestone and iron into steel.  There are also huge mills that use the raw steel to produce sheets, beams, tubes, and rails. Other factories nearby use steel to make blast furnaces and giant ladles that are needed for the steelmaking process. At one point, five steel mills in the area employed over one hundred thousand workers.

At FAROC, which employed between 15 and 20 workers, there were many hazards, caused in part by the fact that there never seemed to be adequate time to clean up after a job was finished. Ranney wrote: “There are pallets of parts and motors lying in the aisleways.  Tools are sitting around everywhere, and the place is filthy.”  Ranney is injured twice in five months, once in the hand while using a drill bit and then when he tripped over a small ball bearing on the slippery floor, opening a large gash in his head when he fell into a piece of metal on a pallet and necessitating a trip to the ER.  The following Monday the boss fired him. Ranney objected saying, “That’s illegal, you know – to fire a guy because he is hurt on the job?”  The boss responded, “I’m firing you because you are not worth a shit.  Sue me!”

Seeking work, Ranney learned that Inland Steel was hiring. Arriving at the plant, he joined a line estimated to be a mile long only to be told that the positions had been filled. Over the next six years he worked at another half-dozen small plants, sometimes terminated when companies learned of his leftist background, other times penalized for trying to bring together white, Latino, and black workers.  He discovered that in most cases the unions supposedly representing the labor force seemed in cahoots with management and a common theme at all the plants was, in his words, “exploitation of backbreaking and dangerous labor and the often unhealthy and unsafe working conditions.” In a concluding chapter Ranney reflected on lessons learned and beliefs reinforced by his years working as an industrial worker. Labor in a capitalist society, he believed, is reduced to a commodity, and progress for workers is the result of militant labor struggle.  The precipitous decline in American manufacturing job was the result of a corporate strategy to relocate overseas and to replace its work force with robots and computers who don’t demand decent wages or complain about health and safety concerns.

While at the University of Maryland, I played on a softball team composed of History grad students; we called ourselves the Wobblies in honor of our kindred labor activists.

During my three-year career as pitcher (it wasn’t slow pitch but no windmill deliveries were permitted) we were one of the best teams, the others being Physical Plant and Upward Bound, the latter composed of incoming African-American students.  One year I took teammates to Boys Village of Maryland, where I worked teaching kids ages 13-15 who were either delinquents or foster children who had run away from where they’d been sent.  Most weren’t bad kids, and they were impressed that my teammates had come to play ball with them and quite good at hitting up my friends for money and in one case his glove.

Soon after I started teaching at IUN, several students (Ivan Jasper, Dave Serynek, Tom Orr) asked me to pitch for their softball team, Porter Acres, named for a former motel where many of them lived, enjoying a counter-culture lifestyle that my family became part of, at least on weekends and after games. We weren’t very good at first but enjoyed one glorious championship season where we even won a tournament against more highly ranked A and B division squads.  The team disbanded after Ivan Jasper and Tom Wade moved to the Bahamas, but I still get together a least once a year with several old teammates and reminisce.  Phil and Dave were bat boys for Porter Acres, and a decade later while they were IU students Dave and his friend Kevin Horn started a team (it had various names depending on who’d sponsor us and pay for our shirts) and needed a reliable pitcher. In slow pitch softball control is the chief requisite and I hardly ever issued walks. One game I hit a line drive down the first base line.  The rightfielder dove for the ball but missed and it kept rolling and rolling.  I was chugging into third base intending to stop, but Dave, coaching third, waved me in.  A good throw would have nailed me, but the surprised second baseman who took the cutoff, heaved the ball over the catcher’s head. Voila, my lone career home run.

Our team often finished first during the regular season but faltered in post-season tournaments when rival teams often brought in ringers. In 1996, however, we won it all. In the semi-final we were clinging to a one-run lead in the bottom of the seventh when a batter hit a little nubber in front of the plate.  I was known for making throws to first underhand because I had a sore shoulder and better control than if I threw overhand.  Knowing that I’d have no chance to beat the runner underhand, I whipped the ball overhand and nailed the guy by a half-step.  My teammates couldn’t believe what I’d done.  In the final game we had a five-run lead after our final at-bats, but our opponents got four runs and had men on first and second with two out and a feared home run hitter, Jim Wilkie, at the plate (a ringer whom I knew from coaching Little League). Pitching him inside, I gave up two colossal foul balls, then pitched one with at least a 12-inch arc. Had he hot swung, it would have been called an illegal pitch, but Wilkie, fearful of taking strike 3, hit the highest fly ball I’d ever seen to short leftfield.  Kevin Horn camped under it, squeezed his glove around it, and we were champs.  I still have the t-shirt from Portage Park Department, inscribed in letters now fading, 1996 Imagination Glen Men’s Champions.

During this time former student and Porter Acres teammate Terry Hunt, a Vietnam vet, asked me and son Dave to play for a Glen Park Eagles team. Terry and I shared pitching duties and normally one of us would play second base when the other pitched.  One evening in the last inning Terry asked me to play first base, which I’d never done before.  I objected, and he insisted, claiming it was as easy as sitting in a rocking chair. With darkness fast approaching and two outs he fielded a grounder and threw to me.  I muffed the throw, putting the winning run on.  The next batter hit a grounder to our shortstop, who had a rifle of an arm.  His throw to me seemed like a speeding bullet, but miraculously it landed in my glove; otherwise it could have done serious harm to me.  Game over.  I told Terry never to ask me to play that position again. My teammates loved to party, but I rarely visited their clubhouse (“Aerie”) because so members smoked and it had a low roof. I occasionally still wear my “uniform,” a shirt with my nickname “Doc” on the back and the number 55, my age at the time.  Two years later, I retired after getting hit by two balls, a line drive at my ankle and a grounder that took a bad hop and got me in the face. With the mound just 15 yards from home plate and realizing my reaction time may have slowed down, I reluctantly gave up the sport that had given me so many cherished memories.