LOGS, LUMBER AND LONGSHORING: OREGON 1920-40

The Dispatcher, April 1995
Edited by Harvey Schwartz

HENRY HANSEN

“The ‘good citizens’ of the community deported everyone who was an IWW member. If they’d had their way, they’d have put them on a barge and sunk ’em.

I’m the son of a Coos Bay longshoremen. Dad would allow me to work with him sometimes when I was going to high school in the mid-1920s.Then the port of Coos Bay was serviced mainly from San Francisco for groceries, building materials, and machinery. It all came up by steam schooners—small, maybe 150-foot crafts. The trucking industry put the steam schooners out of business; the last ones to go were a couple of package loading operations that existed for a few years until World War II.

In 1920 an important phenomenon took place on the West Coast: the beginning of the export of raw logs and timbers in large quantities to Asia. Everything was loaded piece by piece, by hand. We used a special instrument for loading logs. It had a wooden handle, steel point, and a small hook you could use to roll timber or logs, or you could spike and pry.

When we loaded lumber in the hatches, which were usually small, half the time it would come down in slings using the ship’s gear; you’d have to stow that cargo floor by floor, 12 inches to a floor—12 inches because that was the dimension you could usually work out with lumber. To maintain that floor and handle the cargo with the speed the shipowner demanded took a hell of a lot of skill and hard work.

In the early days logs were worked from the offshore side, the water side. Logs were rafted and floated down to the ship. You wore cork shoes—that kept you from slipping, usually. Bark would break off and you’d go in the water, occasionally, but there’d be months you wouldn’t fall overboard; you learned that. The boom stick that surrounded the raft of logs had no bark at all. So you learned to walk on that or you didn’t work on the waterfront. In later years, with the advent of the truck, they had sorting yards and they’d bring the logs out to the ship’s side loading from the dock side rather than from the water side.

There was no limit on hours before ’34. Say it’s going to take three days, like a steam schooner—the first day you might work from seven in the morning until 12 that night. Then you’d be back at seven or eight the next day. You’d go back, too, or there’d be a man in your place. The longest I ever worked was 27 hours without a break.

In the early days I was fired lots of times. Maybe somebody’s brother-in-law or some outstanding athlete wanted a job. That’s the way it went. Or you might want better wire put in the winches, or you might think a boom was too rotten. You could object, all right, but you usually went off the ship—your job was done. Hell, Frank Shaw, who ran the Independent Stevedore Company—the only stevedoring outfit in Coos Bay—could put you on the beach for six months or a year or forever if he wanted to, because there was no union. All your work and your livelihood was always in jeopardy.

In the 1920s there was no longshore union because the old organization had been broken in 1919. You got your employment from the employers directly. That filtered down through the walking bosses and finally they developed the system of gang bosses. You had that one, two, three step of hiring. It was the same thing as the shape-up.

But the old-timers knew what unions were, you bet. There’d been a strong labor movement known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) before World War I. They stayed until the early ’20s, when they were broken up. Few Coos Bay longshoremen carried IWW red cards, though, because at one lime the “good citizens” of the community had deported everyone who was a member of the IWW or was suspected of being an IWW. They’d moved them out to the beach, and if they’d had their way, they’d have put them on a barge and sunk ’em.

The waterfront got organized again in 1933, and in 1934 the people in the longshore union knew what the story was—they knew what was coming. Job security—that was why the ’34 strike was supported. There were a couple of ships the employers tried to load. One thing here—we stayed away, at least openly, from any vicious attack on strikebreakers. We turned over one bus of strikebreakers in a little town down near Empire, and after dark there was lots of things, but on the picket line it was pretty well controlled. We didn’t let it get to where the state could come in with the national guard.

There were people—longshoremen too—that thought we were going a little too far in demanding a union-controlled hiring hall in 1934. But after the strike they set up the hiring hall right now. The way the hiring hall was set up, we had a neutral person under the terms of the·’34 strike arbitration agreement. He was an old fella. Our guy did most of the work. Everybody—all the longshoremen—liked it fine.

After ‘34 a few of us went out on committees to organize. We got the woodworkers started. We talked to them, visited them, went out to their camps. We recognized the importance of surrounding ourselves with friendly people, people we could depend on, people who would recognize an obligation. If you don’t better that guy’s condition and bring it up to your level, he’ll tear yours down, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

DON BROWN

“They wanted us to scab. I went down and joined the picket line instead. I was a casual longshoreman, but to me it was just instinct.”

Times was bad in the depression. I’ll tell you that. Once I left Florence, Oregon, where my parents were, looking for a job. I thought I’d go down to California riding the freight cars. I just got “vagged,” thrown in jail for looking for work. Later I got a call to go to Reedsport, Oregon, north of Coos Bay, to play minor league baseball. I ended up playing ball and longshoring on weekends. Then the ‘34 strike came up.

They wanted us to scab. I went down and joined the picket line instead. I was a casual longshoreman, but to me it was just instinct. These people were down there trying to get some improvement on their way of life, which was horrible. I didn’t like the way they could fire people, and I didn’t like the dangerous, unsafe attitude of the mates on the steam schooners. On the second ship I ever worked they were loading big sling loads of random lumber, and not too good gear, into the hold. You’d be working away and all of a sudden they’d holler, “Heads up,” and here’d go a load of lumber over your head if you didn’t run the hell out of the way.

Not long after the strike we got equalization of earnings, which became a principle—and everybody watched it like a hawk. Gangs went out by gang earnings. Another struggle was getting the size of sling loads down. We never did get it down like they did in some ports, where it was a standard sling load. But we got ’em reduced. Shaw would say no reduction, so we’d pick certain gangs and put a slow down on. Everybody would be workin’, but they wouldn’t seem to get anything done. Naturally, he got the message.

In 1936 there was another strike. I was in Coos Bay by that time. The shipowners was depending on being able to starve the longshoremen out. I survived by hunting and fishing, and in ’36 I paid $9 a month for our little apartment. Barb, my wife, had a job in a restaurant. The longshoremen helped one another; we had work parties. And it wasn’t only during troubles. If a guy wanted to build a home, there’d be 18, 20, maybe 25 people; all would pitch in, help lay a foundation, and throw up a house in nothin’ flat.

I was still a rank and filer in 1940. I sat through the whole ILWU International Convention they had in North Bend that year. It was quite evident there was a split between various factions. There was Bridges on one philosophical side of what trade unions should be and what could be done, and there was a conservative element of good, honest trade unionists working within the framework of what their thinking was. There was another faction which was out just to disrupt. But I was terribly impressed at how it was run. It was sure as hell democratic.

VALERIE TAYLOR

“I first met Harry Bridges in 1931. He was a real hero to us. That’s where our heroes were—those who were leaders of the working people.”

I was born Valerie Wyatt in Morton, Washington in 1913. My father had to work out as a logger to keep our ranch going. He knew about the exploitation of the loggers and the conditions in the logging camps. So I was exposed at a pretty young age to the problems of working people. Our sympathies were with the IWW.

We moved to North Bend in 1923. I got out of high school in 1934, the year the big strike was on. I thought the longshoremen’s conditions were a lot like what my father had seen. I read many books about that time, too; Jack London’s Iron Heel, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and a few books like that got me thinking for myself. We were hearing about Harry Bridges every day. Seemed like the more they yacked about it, the closer we were getting to these people.

I first met Harry Bridges in 1937. He’d come to North Bend. I thought, “I want to go meet that guy, shake hands with him.” Sure enough, I had the chance. He was a real hero to us. That’s where our heroes were—those who were leaders of the working people.

My family, friends, some wood worker unionists, and a lady minister organized a scrap iron picket line in 1939. I knew the ship was going to load scrap iron for Japan’s war against China. Some of us thought, once they got the Chinese subdued, they might try it here. You knew the job had to be done, so you were there; you did it because you thought it was right. And the longshoremen supported us, too.