I wasn’t kidding Jim Peneff. I may have been a union member (The Newspaper Guild represented newsroom employees of the Sun-Times), but I didn’t know the first thing about them—their histories, their governance, their people, their goals or their foibles. One of the first calls I got was from a business agent for a Service Employees International Union local that represented Chicago area hospital workers. Irving Kurash invited me to lunch, where I learned two things. One was that when eating fiery-hot Chinese food, use rice rather than cold water to quell the heat; I’ve near forgotten that. Irv also said that Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago was about to offer an eight-week night course on how labor unions function. I immediately enrolled. Irv became a good friend and a valuable source (his calls often beginning, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but . . .”).
Next I visited bookstores and made a pleasant discovery. Historian Irving Bernstein had recently written a pair of books chronicling the struggles of the American labor movement: The Lean Years, focused on the 1920s, and The Turbulent Years, about the birth of industrial unions during the 1930s. Bernstein had a way of writing that made the pages come alive. Reading late at night of the conflicts of the 1930s, I realized the bravery of men and women who put their desire for a living wage above their own safety and immediate security. I thought, who do I know in my own life with this courage? Nobody. Their sons and daughters probably attended college with me because they fought so hard, when it wasn’t easy, for the right to collective bargaining. It began to dawn on me I would be writing about (and sometimes criticizing) an institution and the people within it that had profoundly changed our nation. The people are not politicians or captains of industry, but at heart, ordinary people. Thank you, Irving Bernstein. I still own both books.
For the most part, I enjoyed being around union people. Few were college graduates, and most got where they were by seeking and winning elections for union office. They were people persons, in other words—easy to talk to, respectful of the fact there would be no union workers without union employers, and usually at least a wee bit idealistic. There were bad apples, too. I’d hear that this person or that was mobbed up, and invariably they were the ones who would never return my phone calls.
In the late 1960s unions were at the peak of their power. About one in every four non-management workers carried a union card. In Chicago, the ratio was probably one in three, or even one in two. When George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO spoke, people listened. Today I dare you to name the president of the AFL-CIO. This was before Japanese and German and Korean automobiles flooded our shores, before apparel makers moved their manufacturing to Asia, before nonunion mini-mills hollowed-out the big steel companies, before the nation’s manufacturing sector withered. I quickly realized the importance of the beat I’d just been assigned to. It almost guaranteed me daily bylines.
My first big assignment was a convention of the Illinois AFL-CIO in Springfield, at the end of September 1968. At either the state or national level, the AFL-CIO is a sort of trade association of labor unions. A lot of good stories came out of those three days. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for president that fall, cancelled his keynote address to the group at the last minute. Humphrey made no friends when it was learned he stiffed the Illinois unions to address the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention instead.
I got to observe the state AFL-CIO president, Reuben Soderstrom, then a young 80 years of age. I felt a bit of kinship with Soderstrom, because he too was a newspaperman—by training, a Linotype operator for the daily newspaper in Streator, a county seat not too far from Springfield. Of course, he had forsaken that job to be a union politician. A motion at the convention to forcibly retire the fellow in 1972 when his term ended (and he would be age 84) was narrowly defeated. Asked if he had any plan to retire then anyway, Soderstrom told me, “Unfortunately not.” The secretary-treasurer of the Illinois AFL-CIO and heir apparent was himself 68 years old.
I could tell already I was going to like the labor beat.
I also got to know three other people who would figure large in my life in years to come: the labor writers for the other three Chicago newspapers. Robert Lewin of the Chicago Daily News, the afternoon sister of the morning Sun-Times, was the dean of this trio, having covered labor since the founding of the city, or so it seemed. Slender and with wispy white hair, wire-rim glasses and a bent-over way of walking, he looked at least a dozen years older than his actual age, whatever it was. But don’t be deceived. Maybe Bob’s writing was flat and dull, but he regularly landed on the front page of his paper with news of strikes that none of his competitors knew were coming. One Lewin story: I got word one day that Bob had been struck by a car while crossing a street and tossed into the air. Knowing how frail he looked, I told folks he might never work again. A day later, there was Bob Lewin at a news conference, not a bandage in sight. “I don’t give up easily,” he told me with a smile.
Don Harris covered the beat for Chicago’s American, the afternoon paper owned by the Chicago Tribune. Don, who replaced Marty O’Connor, was comparatively new to the beat. He remembers watching Lewin compose a story by writing longhand in a notebook, and then phoning it to his office—this was decades before iPads and laptops. “We were on deadline, and that’s when I decided I had to learn how to write a story in longhand,” Don later said. He would stick it out until just before his newspaper went out of business in 1974, landing the same job in Phoenix with the Arizona Republic. There, surrounded in a pitched battle between striking copper miners and the Arizona state police, Don heard rubber bullets whiz by and dodged flying rocks, wondering all the time why he wasn’t in another line of work. We corresponded recently, and way past everyone else’s retirement age, Don Harris remains a newspaperman, editing stories part time for a Phoenix publication.
The competitor I came to know best was James Strong of the mighty Tribune. I called him Jimmy, as in Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters Union. Jimmy was then in his 30s, of medium build and a shiny bald head. His gift was his ebullient personality. He could talk to a lamppost and get it to respond. In other words, he was a fearsome fellow to compete against, especially if you are an introvert like me, because he cultivated sources easily.
Of all the reporters and writers I’ve worked side by side with and against, I like and respect Jim Strong above all. This is how tight we quickly became, even as rivals, each working for competing morning newspapers: Our first edition deadlines were both at 3:30 p.m., with presses starting 90 minutes later. I mention this because if one of us scooped the other, by the time the loser realized his predicament, it would be after business hours, and sources would be hard to find. So we came to an agreement. If I scooped him, I’d call him from my desk at 3:35 p.m. and give him the gist of what the first edition of the Sun-Times would say. Far more often, I would be the one getting that 3:35 p.m. call. I’d answer and hear him say in a whisper, “This is Jimmy Hoffa.” After the call, I’d walk to the city desk. “Jim,” I’d tell Peneff, “I just learned that such-and-such is happening. I’ll jump right on it and write something for the home edition before I go home,” and my boss would nod his assent. Then I’d add, “Oh, my source also said he told the Trib about this, and it may be in their first press run.” Our One-Star edition was a short run, for local newsstands.
I guess the term for this arrangement is honor among thieves.