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.

Herstory

“I crossed all the lines and I broke all the rules

But baby I broke them all for you,”

    “The Story,” Brandi Carlile

Herstory was a word coined in the 1960s to refer to narratives about the past written from a woman’s perspective, as opposed to the conventional, male-dominated His-Story).  Robin Morgan used the term in “Sisterhood Is Powerful” (1970), but it had fallen somewhat out of style among Gender Studies academicians as being too ideological charged.  Folk rock singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile’s “The Story,” recorded in 2007, contains the line, “All of my friends who think I’m blessed, they don’t know my head is a mess.”  Last year Brandi came out and married Catherine Shepherd.  She told a reporter, “I don’t have to have a lot of formality around it, there were people before me who paved the way.”  When Anne Balay first told me she liked Brandi’s music, I thought she was referring to Belinda Carlisle, former Go-Gos singer.

Jerry Davich, calling Chuck Gallmeier his favorite sociologist, had him on his radio show and quoted him in an article about a type of conduct in public places such as grocery lines or elevators called civil inattention (the unobtrusive scanning of others through brief eye contact to acknowledge their presence but discourage further personal contact).  Said Gallmeier: “Civil inattention is a fascinating phenomenon and, when I discuss this in my class, students just love it.  We all practice it, especially in public bathrooms.”  I emailed Chuck: “I suspect in women's bathrooms, things are more social since there is more privacy as opposed to standing next to somebody at a urinal.  In fact, my guess is that women in general are more social in elevators, food store lines, etc.  Age may also be a factor.  Now that I am in my seventies people seem more friendly, perhaps because I'm less threatening, maybe because I've changed. IUN elevators generally are friendly places, especially in situations where there are people of different races or Muslims - where to ignore them could be interpreted as an act of hostility.  Part of the reaction to Davich may come from his being a celebrity, with some people half-recognizing him without knowing exactly from what.  When I see checkout ladies at Town and Country shopping, for example, my first reaction often is, ‘I know her’ but ‘from where?’  Cheers from (I hope) Davich's favorite historian.”

Terry Hunt, wearing one of his trademark marine t-shirts (he also has a variety of NY Yankee garb) sent along a family photo of “The Hunt Club” entitled “4 on the 4^th Happie Independence Day.”  Referring to the pairs of fingers behind Terry and Kim, I replied: “I see you guys have raised a couple of wise asses.  Good for you.”  We spent the Fourth at Angie and Dave’s for Becca’s birthday (number 11).  Food was plentiful, including ribs, hot dogs, burgers, chicken, and steak tacos.  After Dave won two coquet games (I salvaged the other), he orchestrated a two-hour fireworks display.  Sky lanterns were the new rage, but with open flames they looked dangerous and, in fact, have been banned in some localities.

Hollis Donald from Physical Plant gave me a copy of a poetic piece he wrote entitled, “A Vacation Worth Having.”  He praised Garrett Cope for having devoted his life to helping others get educated and Chancellor Lowe for helping out a janitorial worker who was in danger.  Arriving early to work one morning, a custodian encountered a man in the vending machine area who was naked and demanding sex; she screamed, and the Chancellor, who had arrived at work earlier than usual, came out, held the man at bay, and called the campus police.  Hollis urged readers to put their troubles behind them and strive for a carefree life, which truly would be “a vacation worth having!”

 Jacks McNamara

Anne Baley’s Gender Studies readings included Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and poems by Jacks McNamara from “Inbetweenland,” published by Deviant Type Press.  Defining herself as a queer writer, artist, designer, educator, and mental health activist,” McNamara wrote: “We need to stop saying, ‘You are crazy, stop being crazy.’”  In one poem she wishes she were Brandi Carlile and references Harry Potter, who tellingly escaped from a broom closet.  In “Diaspora” she writes that her family kicked her out for being queer and crazy (“I never could tell which or the difference”) and adds: “I wish I could go home.”  Don’t we all have a nostalgic streak?  “So Many Ways to be Beautiful” is about learning to be comfortable fixing brakes, driving a stick shift, wearing a cock, and using “the heel of your boots to bring her home.”  “Mornings After” describes someone wearing a red dress and glitter, “36 going on 13.”  It reminded me both of 12 year old trying to grow up too fast and 36 year-olds who had an awakening about their sexuality 13 years before.  I’m not entirely clear about transgendered people, but Jacks seems to have been born female, attracted to females, but felt trapped in a woman’s body.   In “Lung Seed” she described how she changed her name to Jacks:

“It referenced flapjacks

Famous hitchhikers

Wikipedia’s take on third gender

And a dog named Jack

From young adult science fiction

Who is immune to psychotic outbreak syndrome

As I one day hope to be.”

In class Anne asked students to identify ways people are categorized; the list included, among others, age, sex, race, class, religion, and mobility.  While discussing ways these limited people, Riva Lehrer mentioned that people in wheelchairs must constantly face obstacles most people needn’t think about, from boarding public transportation to being unable to reach things in grocery stores.  Doctor’s offices often have no provisions for the handicapped, and the death rates for those caught in floods, power failures, and other disasters are without fail higher.

above, Riva; below, Megan (l) and Shannon

At a family picnic with Nancy’s relatives Ron Cohen ran into IUN gallery director Ann Fritz and my favorite student of all time, Shannon Pontney.  Ann’s daughter and Shannon’s sister are both going with nephews of Nancy.  Ron reports that his “Pete Seeger Reader” will be out before the end of the year.