“That Red Button Girl”:

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

Billie Roberts Hendricks

Edited by Harvey Schwartz

I grew up on an Iowa farm. I’m 76 now. My mother was the only one of eight children not born in a log cabin near Prairie View. My grandmother rode to Iowa in a covered wagon and my grandfather went through the Civil War as a Yank with the Eighth Iowa Cavalry. We’ve got family trees until it comes out of your ears. Some of my relatives wanted to join the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), but I never joined. It’s so stuffy!

My parents were married in 1904. They weren’t rich, but they owned their farm, 80 acres of corn, oats and livestock in Van Buren County, Iowa. My folks raised me to be a little lady and marry a “professional man.” Well, by age 17 the farm was choking me. I would wake up and see the sun come in over the corn field and settle over the corn field. The world was my oyster, but there was nothing to do, just grow up and pick flowers in the summer. We were five miles out of any little town.

I’d read books where you get out and see the world. I wanted to leave the farm, be on my own and go to school. My father wanted me to stay home and raise chickens, but that didn’t appeal to me at all. So I went to Lawrence, Kansas where my Aunt Lucy took me in and I went to college. I wanted to be a school teacher. You didn’t have to have a college certificate to do that in those days. So I took a teaching job when I was 19 or 20.

For two years I taught grade school in the small Kansas towns of Bayshore and Heifer. I had to sign a paper that I’d go to church at least twice a month. Remember, this was rural America in the 1920s. I was supposed to stay in the village of Bayshore, and I couldn’t smoke, get married or go out with high school boys. After I won a $5 box of candy in a local lottery, the school board charged me with gambling. So, when I was invited to my uncle’s in Chicago, I went. I took a job there and stayed for 18 months.

In Chicago I met a man who was 20 years my senior. He’d been married several times, once to a silent movie star in Hollywood. He was selling and traveling from coast to coast when he wasn’t drinking. He said, “If you want to go to Los Angeles, I’ll get you a little house with red roses around it and you can pick oranges off the trees.” I quit my job in the middle of the day, got married and came to California!

That’s when the big 1929 crash came. The Great Depression shot my husband’s sales business. At first I couldn’t get a job. I’d go to those big all-night markets they had in Los Angeles, where vegetables were a penny a bunch, if you had the penny. I would go to Elysian Park and look under the trees where the lovers were, and pick around and maybe find a dime.

I finally got a job in a little scab restaurant. Everything in Los Angeles was scab then. Each time I called the order in, the short-order cook would give me a punch on the back side. That incensed me to death. Now, I’d curse him back, after all my years in the ILWU. Then I just went home and told my stuck-up college husband. He said, “You must have encouraged him.” Imagine!

We came up to San Francisco in 1932. A lady I knew said, “There’s jobs opening in this whiskey place.” That was around 1933. The first job I got, and it was before we were organized into the union, was at South End Warehouse. As soon as Prohibition was repealed in late ’33 the foreman opened his own place, Distillers Distributing. He asked several of us to go with him, including me, and I went. These were small businesses. It was before the big companies started, like Schenley’s and Hiram Walker’s.

At South End Warehouse I got 32 cents an hour for eight hours’ work, if I was lucky. If you were wanted for a second shift, it was eight hours more at 32 cents an hour. All we got between shifts was coffee, no meals. There was no such thing as hours-a-week or overtime. But mostly, we’d go in and work a few hours and then they’d say, “There are no more orders. Go home.” We’d work two hours, sit there and wait two more hours until the mail came, and then go home.

I worked on a line with a big machine, and it would drive you crazy. We pasted labels on whisky flasks and put the bottles in cases, 24 to a case. If you wasn’t careful, if the boys didn’t get it right, the glass would fly. The floors were wet. You had to wear certain shoes. You wore your own gloves. These were old warehouses. Sometimes they weren’t even heated. After they were union you had clean uniforms supplied and you bought your own shoes. They supplied gloves.

Before the union, the women that worked the fastest got to stay the longest. Then the boss would come along and say, “Fire all the old bags, and keep all the pretty ones with pretty legs.” Here the poor old gals were working their tails off and needed the money and was better workers. You never knew when you were going to be let out and when you weren’t.

When the three-day San Francisco general strike came along in July 1934 everybody was out. The town was ours. We were just on top of the world. Nobody dared tell us we were poor. We knew we were going to win. There was nobody quitting and saying, “We can’t make a living, we’ll go someplace else.” During the long maritime strike, before and after the general strike, I was working at South End Warehouse. When the National Guard patrolled the waterfront following the police killings on “Bloody Thursday,” the longshoremen gave me a pass to go through. The women weren’t organized yet, but they weren’t “anti.”

Actually it was our dream to be unionized. Imagine belonging to a group like the longshoremen that stuck up for your rights, saw that you had seniority, and saw that the boss couldn’t harrass you or sleep with you. Harry Ludden, the foreman at South End Warehouse, used to say, “Come out to my house tonight.” We didn’t dare say, “No.” We were tired, but when we were invited to the boss’ party, we went. Once he made us all get down on our hands and knees and bark like a dog for our plate of supper!

The first group of organized warehouses we heard about was the coffee houses. We went down to the hall to get in the union. But the work wasn’t too steady. We would go to the hall and be dispatched out to work.
During the years right after the 1934 strike people flocked to the warehouse local. All the Italian women from North Beach rushed down to join the union. Those were the years the longshoremen worked to start other unions going. They inspired everyone. The garment workers and the flour workers were organizing. Everybody wanted to get their home base, just like the longshoremen.

My first union meeting must have been about 1936. The women would just listen back then. We did think our organizers—Gene Paton, who became a wonderful Local 6 president in 1937, Lou Goldblatt, the Heide brothers, Bob Robertson—were “it.” And Lou knew how to get things rolling. He started our steward system. But we didn’t have much of a voice. The men would make all the rules. There was nothing we could do but be a rubber stamp for them.
Between 1937 and 1942 the women had their own separate meetings. Our male Local 6 leaders weren’t much interested in women’s problems in those early days. Neither was Harry, although we were thrilled when he came to meetings. The men thought “the girls” were only going to work until they got married or made some extra money. I was on the Women’s Division Executive Board, but we didn’t have much real power. We didn’t meet with the men until we bellowed. Then we got amalgamated with them. We wanted to be known as workers. I never knew about this Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) business. I always thought I was a worker.

Sometimes when we were dispatched out of the union hall for jobs we were sent to a place that wasn’t organized. We would talk union to the workers. Then we would vote to get the union in. We were called “Red Hots” because we organized. The bosses hated us. We had some pretty rough times. Whenever anybody struck, we were on that picket line. This little Judy Anderson always had a long sock with a Sweetheart Soap bar in it. If she was bothered by scabs, they’d get hit with a “sweetheart.”

My husband and I divorced before very long. Then I married a man named Roberts. While I was working at Distillers Distributors I became pregnant. When my daughter Sallie was 18 months old, Roberts left me to marry someone else. But by then I had a good Local 6 job and was determined to keep care of my little girl.

I became interested in a group called Working Mothers with Children. As my daughter grew up, for the next seven or eight years, I went to every meeting they had. There were several Local 6 people who were interested in child care, including Tillie Olsen, the famous author, and Hazel Drummond, who wrote a column for The Dispatcher in the mid-1940s. We’d meet with the Board of Education and rant and rave about getting a center for working mothers’ kids. All the unions sent delegates, including the longshoremen.

Right at the end of 1939 or in 1940 I went over to Schenley’s Liquors. It was just starting up. The union wanted volunteers to go in and help organize the place. One of the officers asked me to go. The company was avid to get workers. We just went down and asked for a job. We succeeded in organizing Schenley’s into Local 6, too. I’d been working at the MJB Coffee warehouse packing tea bags on a belt line. It was a wrench to give up your seniority in a house, but I did.

When the bosses figured out I was organizing, they called me “that red button girl” and gave me the dirtiest job there was. I was stuck off in this washroom, standing up all the time washing bales and bales of dirty rags with glue on them and then passing them along. When the other workers put the labels on the bottles they had nice clean cloths to wipe the extra glue off. In this job, though, I sometimes got to walk up and down the line and, when I wasn’t caught, talk union.

I also got on every Local 6 committee I could. We had a Publicity Committee that put out a little magazine on yellow sheets. We would send these yellow sheets around to everybody so they’d know what the other shops were doing. I was on our Uniform Committee, too. Each of us got a cap and a white, starched uniform for parades. On Labor Day we were out in force on Market Street. We’d pass the reviewing stand and then get a walk-away shrimp cocktail down at the beach. We were the proudest things you ever did see!

Usually when there was a committee meeting I’d take my daughter with me. The Local 6 hall was our second home. Everybody knew Sallie at the union. From nine to four, while I was working at Schenley’s, I could leave her at the St. Francis Day Home, which was close to where I lived. It only cost me 35 cents a day. Otherwise Sallie went everywhere with me. Of course, if there was a night meeting or a potentially dangerous situation, someone else would take care of her.

About 1940 there was a particularly rough strike at Euclid Candy Company. We had joined the picket line and were walking back and forth across the company’s door when the cops dove in. They weren’t nice cops and they were on horseback. We tried to put our arms together and keep walking. They kept pushing with their horses. A horse’s hoof almost stepped on my foot. One of our boys had a pocket knife and he gave the horse a jab to make it move away.
The Local 10 longshoremen showed up to reinforce the Euclid picket line. They were all in their white hats, work shirts and black jeans. That was kind of an ILWU uniform. The cops saw this one longshoreman I recognized who was always an organizer. They said, “All right, Hendricks, step back.” That was the first time I ever heard the name of Hendricks. I thought, “That guy’s for me.” He wasn’t afraid of the devil. At Easter, anybody else would bring his sweetheart an Easter lily. Not Frank Hendricks! He brought an Easter basket with a bunny in it for my baby. We were married in 1943.

When the United States got into World War II in the early 1940s and most of the men went into the service, I took what had been considered a “man’s job.” I got a marvelous wage and I was now called a receiving clerk. This was at Schenley’s. The boss said, “Are you afraid to go downstairs to shipping and receiving, you and Alice Moore?” We weren’t. Alice became a shipping clerk. We each got our own little office.

I used to get this solution that came in five gallon cans. It went over the top of the liquor to keep the government stamps intact. I took in supplies for the machine shop, too. All the boys were helpful, although there was one old man who used to say, “Why don’t you girls go home and raise your family? Why do you want to do men’s work?” What an old son-of-a-gun he was. We had to live, you know?

I was also quite into the blood donor scene during World War II. This was around 1944-1945. They needed blood for the wounded. I represented Schenley’s, Local 6, and the San Francisco Industrial Union Council, CIO, in this big contest to elect Queens of the Purple Hearts. When you gave a pint of blood you cast a vote for queen. I got 400 votes for 400 pints donated. We had it so well organized in warehouse. There were big signs that said, “Vote for Billie Roberts.” I gave a lot of blood myself, too. You’d think I was a mainliner. But I had lots of blood. I was a strong person.

When Schenley’s and all the other liquor houses closed down in 1951, I went to work in a top grade restaurant at the Clift Hotel and became a member of the AFL Waitresses Union. They were a very so-so outfit. You didn’t have to go to union meetings. In early Local 6 days we couldn’t wait for our two meetings a month. But in the Waitresses Union, if you didn’t want to go, you just had to pay your month’s dues.

They thought I was the craziest thing they ever saw because instead of paying for someone to picket one of the restaurants, I went and picketed after my job. They never heard of anyone getting out and walking again after she’d walked all day.

Of course, I was always in political action as a good Democrat. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for president, Sylvia Maker from Local 6 and I took pamphlets around. We walked for blocks to put fliers in front windows. It didn’t occur to us to charge. The waitresses didn’t care who was running. They didn’t care if they voted or not. It was very different.

The waitresses, too, always worked for tips and were jealous of each other. There wasn’t that comradeship like we had in the ILWU, where you knew that you belonged. You weren’t fighting alone. All of my life, for the last 30 or 40 years, I’ve remembered those Local 6 kids. They were like the buddies, I guess, in a war. We were together against the enemy every day.

I love the ILWU. I’m so proud of it. I don’t know what life would have been for me without the union. It was certainly a wonderful way of life. When you were a school teacher you had to get out and wrestle your own job, or go in all dressed up to see the boss, with him looking you up and down wondering what kind of a lay you were. But it was nothing seeing the boss after there was a union and we got our dispatch hall.

I never got into anything before where I thought the workers would get their just desserts. When I was in college, they used to say, “What good are unions? They’re only for stupid people. Anybody with any ingenuity can get their own job.” You know, stuff like that. But when I found out these workers were organizing, I thought it was beautiful.