Fighting for the Union:

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

MARVIN RICKS

Edited by Harvey Schwartz

I was born Oct. 22, 1911, in Newberg, Oregon. When I was four, my parents moved to north central Washington, where my father had been a wheat farmer. In the spring of 1929 we moved to Ethel, Washington, 10 miles out of Centralia. We were going to start a dairy farm. Dad bought a bunch of cows. I bought a bunch of heifer calves. I figured I would have to milk for 10 years—then I could hire the work done.

The Crash and the Depression came in the fall of ’29. Milk that had sold for $2.20 for X amount dropped to $ 1.10. So in 1931 we sold the cattle. We got just half of what we paid for them two years before. Next we moved to Portland, although I would go back to north central Washington and work in the apples, picking and spraying.

Over the Winter of ’31-32, I cut cord wood in the Portland area. I was getting $1 a cord, all split and piled four-foot wood. On a good day I could make two cords. That gave me $2 a day. I had to take my saw over to the neighbor’s to file and set it—he had a vise. His name was Neal Dagen. He also happened to be a longshoreman.

Dagen was working steadily, as much work as there was in those days. When I turned 21, he says, “Hey, kid, be over at the house in the morning and I’ll take you down to the hiring hall and get you a day or two’s work.” We didn’t have a union-controlled hall then. The hall was run by the employers. The first day I was there, Dagen got me a job. We worked from eight in the morning until midnight. Basic pay was 75 cents an hour, no overtime. I still made more in one long day than I made in any week cutting cord wood.

Neal Dagen introduced me to a man who had a gang that worked shoveling sulphur two days a month. Nobody making any money at all wanted to shovel sulphur, but there were two days every month that I did it. Another man had a gang that loaded green hides once in a while. I got a day or two’s work there.

A green hide was a complete cow hide that made a bundle two feet long, a foot-and-a-half wide, and six or eight inches high. In August, if those uncured hides had sat for a month, you can imagine the smell. They would keep the doors on the docks open about six or eight inches so the air could blow through a little, but it didn’t do much. If you got on a streetcar after work, everybody got as far away from you as they could.

Hides paid a 10 cent penalty, so you made 85 cents an hour. Making any money when I first started was good. I have sat in the employer-controlled hiring hall for 14 days and gotten two hours’ work, what we called “noon relief.” They would hire a complete gang of men for 11 o’clock and have them relieve one hatch between 11 and 12 while that gang went to dinner. Then you relieved the second hatch between 12 and one. At 75 cents an hour, you made $1.50.

I was also introduced to a fellow who occasionally ran a job lining a ship, which meant building a wood centerline down the middle of the vessel so that bulk wheat would not roll when the ship rolled. You didn’t want all the wheat to get on one side and capsize the ship. So sometimes I got a job doing that.

After we got a union and won the ’34 strike, of course, the work was evenly divided. We used the same hall. We just had different people running it, and we moved the loan shark and beer joint out of there. But before the union we had 55 gangs working out of the employer-run hiring hall, 13 men to a gang. Usually those gangs were full. All the other workers, myself included, were called “extra men.” They did the less organized jobs, like lining ships for bulk grain and working on the docks where there were no regular gangs.

I always refused to pay for a job, which back then kept me from getting a certain amount of work. One fellow said, “My brother is taking out an extra gang this afternoon, do you want to work?” I says, “Certainly.” In an hour, he came back and said, “I need $1.” I says, “Certainly, I’ll loan you $1.” Come payday, he didn’t pay me. The second payday, I said, “Hey, where’s my $1?” He says, “Didn’t you work for my brother?” I said, “I still want my $1.” I got my $1 back, but I never worked for his brother again.

There was one gang boss who raffled off a radio. He had 12 men in his gang. Every week, everybody in the gang bought a chance on the radio for a $1. I don’t know how many years this went on, but there was never a drawing. If you’re only making $25 or $30 a week, $12 is quite a little addition. In other cases—remember, under Prohibition liquor was illegal until 1933—a bottle of moonshine whiskey passed to a gang boss bought a job.

The employers cared little about safety then. If it slowed the work down, to hell with safety. We killed five or six men a year in Portland from waterfront accidents. Any way you could think of to kill a man, we managed to do it. My friend, Dagen, who took me down to the waterfront, was killed just a few years afterwards. They dropped a load of scrap iron that hit a piece of pipe laying in the shelter deck with one end sticking out over the open hatch. Dagen was tending that hatch 10 feet above and 25 feet across. The pipe hit him in the head and killed him.

You didn’t have safety nets or anything. Fellas would slip off the dock and fall into the river. In those days, you had a log around the dock to keep the ship from rubbing the piling. If you fell in, you landed on top of a log 25 or 30 feet down, and that was the end.

One day Howard Bodine came around when I was at the hall and says, “Hey, Marvin, you wanna join the union?” I said, “What’s a union?” I was from inland, I’d never heard of one. I’d heard of Communists, but I’d never heard of a union. He started explaining and I told him, “Can I wait ’til tomorrow to give you an answer? I’ll talk to a couple of my good friends.”

Well, Degan and his best friend both says, “Yes, we plan on joining, and we think you should, too. We don’t think the union will last over a year before they break us, but it’ll give you a chance to get better acquainted.” I forget whether it was $1 or $2—some outrageous sum—to join. Dues were $1 a month.

We all got a button when we joined the union, but nobody dared to wear one before the strike. Your gang boss might have joined the union too, but if he showed up with a bunch of men with buttons on their hats, the walking boss, if he was a good company man, was not going to hire that gang. So there was kind of a blacklisting, but not as such.

Several ships were still working the morning the ’34 strike started. One of my first jobs was to go around with a bunch of men to every ship in the harbor that was working and tell the gangs that everybody was out and they’d better get off the ship right now. We talked most of them into leaving. Some gangs didn’t quit, but we did nothing at the time because we were just four men per group making the rounds. As the strike got going, the things we did were considerably different.

When we got organized, then those guys who were working the ships had been warned. That’s why the employers kept the strikebreakers on board ship, or on the grain docks, or out at Terminal 4. That way, those men didn’t have to come back-and-forth, because they had a little problem getting back-and-forth.

One night the phone rang. It was the fellow that ran the beer joint up on 23rd and Burnside. He says, “Hey, I’ve got two guys in here that sound like scabs.” We said, “Okay, we’ll be there.” We walked in. Here are two fellas sitting down, drinking. We knew them both.

We said, “Well, hi fellas. We know you’re too drunk to drive home. We’ll see you get home safe.” Meanwhile, you have a wrist-lock on each one, so if they make a sound you could break their arm. We led ’em out. You go as good pals, you’re helping the two drunks. We got ’em outside, talked to’ m by hand a little while, and turned ’em loose.

You might say I was in a flying squad—we called it a “riot squad.” These were squads made up of football players, boxers or wrestlers, the single men that didn’t have much to lose. There were four squads of us on the shift I was on. If there was trouble at a dock, they called for us and here come 40 men down there in a hurry. Throughout the strike, we kept 10 pickets at every gate, at every dock on the waterfront. We kept them 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Well then, we had these 40 men that could go anywhere at any time to reinforce. And we did make a difference.

They did capture our navy though. One of our fellas had a fishing boat that we used for a patrol boat. At Terminal 4, these scabs were working a ship. We made slingshots and pulled up to the ship and started shooting at the winch driver and hatch bosses. They were throwing shackles at us, or whatever they could find. I don’t think anybody hit anybody. But they swore out John Doe warrants for the four or six of us in the boat. Then the Harbor Patrol confiscated our navy—they took our boat away and tied it up.

When the strike started, nearly all the regular police were our friends. They were working men. Then, pretty soon, you found all the good guys uptown, directing traffic, and you had every bad one on the waterfront, plus a bunch of special police they stationed at Terminal 4. The July 11 tragedy, when the police opened up shooting near Terminal 4, was completely unnecessary. They claimed they only used riot guns, but Elmus “Buster” Beatty had a .45 slug in his neck and was off for a year. Four pickets were shot that day, two critically.

We did have someone in the police department who sent us a list every week of all the special police that were hired, including addresses. So there were specials who happened to run into unfriendly people in the streets. Then we had this detective who used to tell us this and that. Once he says, “They’re moving a bunch of scabs in the morning. We have orders to take them to point X. At point Y, the Harbor Patrol is to pick them up and guard them the rest of the way. Somebody forgot there was one block in between those two points.”

“I will see to it that we protect them only to the point that we were told,” the detective said, “and that none of the Harbor Patrol go beyond that point.” So there was quite a bit of monkey business out in the street that morning in that one block. There were police on both ends, but none made a move because they hadn’t any orders. That is what you call having friends.

We had other friends, too. The local prostitutes made us sandwiches, which were wrapped up real nicely with the girls’ cards inside. Broadway Cab delivered the sandwiches for free. One night a week everybody on the picket line, two or three hundred men, got sandwiches. Another thing, being times were tough, the madams donated rooms. They would put four to six men in a room for the duration of the strike. A lot of the area farmers were liberal, too, and donated produce to us.

I was on the soup bumming detail for a while. One of my duties was to go up to the Good Eats Cafe on Burnside at 10 o’clock at night when they closed. They gave us whatever coffee and soup they had left over. We had bumming committees for rooms, food, produce and everything because you couldn’t get much help from other unions. In ’34 what unions you had were very weak. We were what got unions going.

After the strike, the work paid 95 cents an hour. I made $210 the first 21 days. That’s $10 a day. I was working pretty steady. I remember 21 days because on the 22nd day I got arrested. What happened was that a bunch of our men who were provoked by an employer agent raided this company union scab hall. A shot was fired and a scab named James Conner was killed.

When I got arrested I said, “What for?” They says, “Murder.” I thought, “Ah, what a relief.” This might have been for assault and batter, kidnapping or sabotage, but when they said murder, I knew I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there. I’d gone to the dentist that day. He was late and I was waiting alone at his office when the shooting took place. But I couldn’t prove it. He had no secretary. In the ’30s, you did well to support yourself let alone a secretary. Anyway, they picked up everybody that any of the scabs saw or thought they saw.

I was taken to jail. You weren’t allowed to call out for 24 hours. I disappear, wiped off the face of the earth. When they questioned me, there was the assistant district attorney, “Big Bill” Browne, the head of the police Red Squad, two policemen and two detectives. You’re this scared 22-year old kid with six people throwing questions at ya and you haven’t even been allowed to call out. Well, one thing, being as I hadn’t been there, I could tell the truth. I didn’t get confused in my story.

They took us down to the City Jail and threw us into the bull pen where the drunks had been heaving their guts out. It was horrible. They were picking up two, three, four longshoremen a day. We got watery mush for breakfast with two slices of moldy bread and a little thin soup at lunch and dinner. The only thing you could buy was Milky Way candy bars. It took me 20 years before I could eat another one. After a week they moved us to the County Jail, where the food was good and they let the union or your wives or friends bring food in to you.

There were 28 of us charged. A quirk in the law let them charge us all. Once there were 32, but we proved that four of us weren’t there. When we started having our preliminary hearings at City Hall, they hauled us down and back in the Black Maria. They’d take us out ten at a time on a chain. We only shaved on shave day, so the public got to see these ten unshaven, rough-looking characters on the chain.

In a while some kid that had scabbed broke down and told the police he’d seen another scab, Carl Grammer, shoot Conner. The cops found the gun, too. It matched and they had proof that Grammer did it. So we finally got turned loose.

After the strike we had our names in rotation on the dispatch board. We had to take in some scabs, including “Big Nose” Riley, who was right next to me on the list. So I got him often. I managed to work with that man for over two years, not steadily, but quite a bit, without ever speaking to him. And neither, as far as I know, did anybody else in the gangs.

When the strike was over I was happy to have a little money to spend, which before I didn’t have. I owed the kid at the service station $2 and I could pay that off. Today, The Oregonian says we are upper middle class on account of our good wages. Years ago we were looked down upon and called Communistic bums. I do recall that Matt Meehan, one of our ’34 leaders, was a Wobbly (a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW). I used to be against the idea of Wobblies, and against Communism, but now I think they did more for the union and getting organized than anyone.

You have to have a radical. The rest of you may hate your conditions, but you go along, whereas you need some no-good so-and-so to stir it up and get you going. I think nearly all of our early top leadership was a little bit on the Wobbly side, whether you could prove it or not. Now I don’t know about Harry Bridges, but it takes someone like him to get out and do the job.

I also feel we have to organize to stay alive. You just can’t stand alone. You need people to back you when you have trouble. Taking in the sales people at Powell’s Books, which we did recently in the new Local 5, hits my sense of humor as a good thing. It was getting two completely opposite types of workers together.