April in Milwaukee brings ocean-going
freighters churning into the harbor to meet their tugs
to dock on Jones Island shortly after another shipping
season begins for the struggling St. Lawrence Seaway.
                                  [Play Seaway video here]
Shouts of "Heads up!" -- the job of vigilant signalmen
on deck -- will again warn an ever-diminishing number
of longshoremen in the holds of danger, of steel or
containers or heavy machinery passing overhead.
     Ironically, even as overseas shipping here dies
and dockworkers pass from the urban mixture, their
presence was never noticed by many. 
   
     As a rookie in 1971 I quickly found out in this
age of truck and air freight -- even in a Great Lakes
Port -- that when I said I was a longshoreman I was
liable to be asked, "What's that?"
     Or at least, "Do they have those here?" or "Where
at?"
     (Another common response:  "They have machines to
do all the work now, don't they?" This can be annoying
to laborers who have spent 15 or 20 years basically
picking things up and carrying them for 12 or more
hours a day, getting tenosynovitis, bad backs or carpal
tunnel syndrome in the process.  That many more
permanent injuries weren't suffered is the one brighter
side to to the decline of steady work, as shown by the
drop in the number of dockworkers here from over 500 in
the '70s to today's 70 [now about 40] or so.)
     Still, many of us worked our occupation into the
conversation, figuring to evoke such romantic
associations as Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront,
or perhaps the heroic struggles of labor on the San
Francisco piers, as led by Harry Bridges in that city's
1934 general strike, precipitated by the killing of two
workers. This story was retold in a sympathetic 1993
profile narrated by Studs Terkel on WMVS-TV (Channel
10).
     (Of course, Brando's portrayal of Terry Malloy was
meant to capture a thuggish milieu and a failed life -- as 
well as to redeem director Elia Kazan's image as an 
informer -- but Brando's own mystique has overshadowed 
those interpretations.)
     Then there was Walter Matthau as the venal
waterfront boss in the 1957 film Slaughter on Tenth
Avenue, stalking the piers and sheds in his long
camel's-hair coat. To me, at least, he was an eerie 
foreshadowing in appearance of the well-bred --
Irish-American gentry, King's Point Merchant Marine
Academy -- but tantrum-throwing Meehan Seaway 
President Dan Meehan, who blustered and threatened 
the union for givebacks throughout the years of the
Port's decline.
     Who wouldn't thrill to the sight of the finally
rebellious rank-and-file tossing Matthau into the
water?  Perhaps the closest local equivalent
dramatically was the October 1971 wildcat strike over
irregularities in the posting for key positions (the 
union having temporarily given up the hiring
operation), in violation of seniority rules.  Then a
raw beginner on my way to the hiring hall to report as
a non-union extra man, for some reason late and
therefore certain to be dropped to the end of the list,
I was saved as work was prevented by an irate throng.
     Though Business Agent John Brzek was certainly in
control behind the scenes, President Peter (Pete the 
Greek) Kalil, one of the most colorful among a 
collection of characters, did most of the talking.
     Not Greek at all, but Lebanese with a Turkish
father who eventually took the family to Uruguay (but
not before, he told some ILA members one night, Kalil 
fathered a child himself, at age 12, with an Arab girl), 
he had migrated to the Brooklyn docks.  There, he said, 
he had worked as an extra man in On the Waterfront 
(actually filmed in New Jersey, so who knows?), and 
had been thrown in the brig in Portsmouth, N. H. for 
resisting the US draft as a non-citizen.
     Having come here in 1959 as a winchman, and
working up to top hold boss, (overheard early on
"talking Greek" to a foreign crew by 400-lb. dockman
Tucker Oglesby), the rangy, leathery Kalil (he bragged
he never drank water, and certainly looked desiccated)
-- fond of the horse track and gold adornmeents -- was
soon to take over as business agent himself.  That gray
autumn morning he exhorted the crowd in his unique
brand of English, standing on the hood of a car alongside
a choppy Lake Michigan:  "You mens got balls, stand 
behind them," adding, "I'll shoot the first 
motherfucker between the eyes that cross the picket
line."
     According to the longshore division vice-president
at the time (the union then included Grain, Cement and
Warehouse Divisions as well), Fred Krause, the day was
capped with a near-riot at a meeting at the union hall
on S. 2nd St. and W. National Ave.
     Many squads of police arrived within minutes, said
Krause, to back up two detectives who had responded to
reports of a minor disturbance, only to encounter 300
longshoremen who'd had all day to get tanked up and
were ready for a fight.  In the tradition of picturesque 
names on the docks, the center of the ruckus was an
otherwise nondescript black man [named for a TV 
cartoon character] called Touché Turtle, who had 
stumbled out onto the sidewalk in front of the hall,
apparently on his way to find "Deepwater Dan"
Meehan -- his own favored nickname, which nobody
else used -- himself,  alarming the neighborhood  
when his buddies followed.  Kalil, however, who had 
spent a good part of a career bailing longshoremen out 
of jail -- as well as feeding them and making the 
occasional loan -- was well-known to the cops, and a 
melee was averted.
     But certainly a positive image was that of the late 
longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer, author of
The True Believer, a study of mass movements, and
writer of several collections of essays and aphorisms
and a diary of his life on the San Francisco waterfront, 
and subject of a PBS series on television [and a great 
New Yorker magazine profile some years back].
     But I soon learned how popular culture and general
attitudes reflect stereotypes, misinformation and a
generally unflattering perception of those of us also
known as stevedores.  (This term was originally used
for riverfront and non-overseas trade workers, then
applied to contracting firms. Locally, these included
Hansen -- subsequently Meehan -- Seaway 
Service, Ltd.; Stearns Marine Co.; Pier, Inc.; and 
P&V Atlas.)
     For example, shortly after starting on the docks,
I read an article about singles bars in The Milwaukee
Journal.
     It portrayed a typical encounter after office hours:  
     A young woman at John Byron's lounge Downtown
and a man strike up a conversation over drinks. Hoping
to meet a lawyer or doctor, she finds to her horror he
is merely a longshoreman, wearing a suit for the
occasion.
     Or, as a young woman woman just back from
university in France once told me on a date:  "If I
thought you looked like a longshoreman, I wouldn't go
out with you."
     Then there were all those references over the
years to "swearing like a dockworker," "eating like a
hungry longshoreman," "drunk as a stevedore," "sweating
like stevedores," and so on.
     Typical was a Journal sports page report on the
death of Boston radio announcer Johnny Most, as he
described a Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers playoff game
during the 1980s:
     "Kurt Rambis is a stevedore!  He's out there
banging people around!  That's his whole purpose in
life! . . .
     "[Coach] Pat Riley wants people hurt out there,
and I blame him for this whole dirty scene!  All the
tinsel-and-plastic people are cheering this stevedore
here in Make-Believe Land."
     [Or this recent quote from the Journal Sentinel's Bob 
Wolfley about Marquette basketball coach Mike Deane 
and his "dazzlingly profane invective," comparing him
to new coach Tom Crean, whom he calls ". . . more 
choir boy than he is longshoreman in this regard."]
     In this age of rampant political correctness (PC),
shouldn't even humble longshoremen -- former, active
and retired -- object to such blatant bigotry?
     Of course, this prejudice has deep roots in
American culture.  As Charles B. Barnes writes in his
1915 study, The Longshoremen, before offering other
views: "This is the worker whom public opinion has
branded, without discrimination, as a loafer, a drinker
a brawler."
     And in an unpublished paper in the Marine
Historical Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library,
Eugene Vrana notes that "Popular images of 
longshoremen as burly and brutish characters, 
performing backbreaking unskilled work, draw heavily 
from cinematic portraits. . . ," such as "A View From 
the Bridge," based on the Arthur Miller play.

   Well then, what is -- or was -- the truth about
local dockworkers?
     True, if hard work alone made one a ruffian, we
would have filled the jail and detox centers.  With
12-hour days the norm in the spring or fall rush, or
whenever captains were in a hurry to make the
turnaround, 50- or 100- or 110-lb. bags of swirling,
choking flour or similar commodities to be unloaded
from boxcars and stacked on pallets and unstacked by
hand overhead to the tops of the hold -- the lower deck
of the hold above, and so on for maybe 10,000 tons --
the job could fairly be called grueling.
     Given the weather I encountered myself, I would
even call it torturous:  from seven below zero on a
December morning when a biting wind turned the flesh
gelid under layers of clothing while standing on the
unsheltered stringpiece as the arriving ship's hawsers
were slipped over the yellow bollards by the linesmen,
to leveling off an open upper deck in the full noon sun
as the temperature baked at 101 degrees.  (The summer
of 1988 had more than 30 days in the 90s, and six days at
or above 100 degrees.)
    When we unloaded a steel ship straight through
until after 5 o'clock the next morning -- not that
unusual during a rush -- it demanded more stamina than
I thought I had, deserving of the triple-time rate; and
slinging green, salted hides by their tie strings
merited more than the extra so-called "obnoxious pay"
of 15½¢ an hour.  So did graphite, saturating you with
black powder that meant you had to scrub even your
leather boots afterwards and clean the rims of your
eyelids with cotton swabs.
     As a measure of how much cargo a man lifted in
one day, consider that in 1971, four men unloaded in a
day three boxcars, usually carrying 2,000 50-lb. bags
each, or 37.5 tons per man.  By the '80s, in an
indication of how the production was driven up to keep
the port competitive, two men were doing two boxcars,
or 50 tons apiece in an eight-hour day.  By comparison,
Arnold Schwartzenegger remarked on the 
"Tonight Show" that in his workouts at their extreme 
he moved some 40 tons.
     But bodybuilders generally schedule a day or two
between sessions, while longshoremen are posted to work
day after day until the job is finished; on a ship this
ordeal, though output varied more than in the
warehouse, averaged about 42 tons an hour for an
eight-man gang, or 63 tons each in 12 hours.
     And this was not an air-conditioned facility or
the breezy beach of Gold's Gym, but in heavy work
clothes and safety shoes and hard-hat in a humid, airless
hold or on a freezing steel deck under a wintry
midnight moon, while bulky with thick clothing.
     The bitterest fact of all for anyone hired after
1967 was that as the pie kept shrinking, from 34 gangs
[usually made up of eight men in the hold, four on 
the inshore side and four offshore, along with the 
complement of hold boss, winchmen, dock men and 
several forklift drivers as needed] to a handful,  the 
same men kept their coveted spots on the deck or the 
dock while the rest aged 25 years doing young men's 
work, throwing bags in the hold 90% of the time.  
     I myself finally trained for the winch at age 49,
retiring  two years later [when an early pension buyout 
was offered us as the major employer, Meehan Seaway, 
switched to a defined contribution plan, as many 
companies have, to reduce future obligations and facilitate 
its eventual sale to Federal Marine Terminals] without 
ever being posted to that job, after 21 years.
     [And even the training and tours as a relief man, 
with hand-on-the lever responsibility on the inshore
(dockside) or offshore (above the hatch) winch with tons
of cargo swaying on the hook as it traveled over the 
gang -- with very little to stop a load once it was on its 
way but the finesse of the two operators calculating the 
speed of their opposing, married lines or an ignominious
crash against the hold's bulkhead and a dumped load -- 
was a terrific experience, completely absorbing to a 
rookie.
     [Interestingly enough, the nature of winches is that 
your first impulse when a load seems out of control as 
both winchmen try to feed their lines down together to 
land it, is to yank back on the lever like a brake if the 
load starts to overshoot its mark. This is the worst thing 
you can do, since the momentum keeps the top of the 
payload going while the hook above it jerks to a halt, 
most likely spilling everything.
     [Actually, following the law of conservation of 
angular momentum, a load moving to the offshore 
too fast has to be given more slack in the line, dropping 
it even faster, but reducing its sideways motion. Scary 
stuff for a beginner.]
   But of course, the pay was good [even after accepting 
substantial  cuts], when there was work -- today [1994]
over $17 an hour plus benefits -- so we could afford to 
relax in hungry, thirsty clusters at noon or after work at 
5 or 10 p.m. in Bay View taverns such as Marino's on 
E. Superior and S. Russell streets, a block from 
Groppi's grocery store, or the Club Carneval and 
Americana, or Inner City bars like Kern's 
Penthouse and the Midnighter's.
     But the married men usually left early in the
evening, if not always when we were rained out of the
job earlier in the day, and most of us turned up for
work the next morning.
     At least this was true of the Marino's bunch,
mostly aging white hippies and leftists and native
South Siders who found it a hospitable place to eat
soup and a sandwich and run a tab, even if, like 
myself, they drank only soda at noon while closely 
watching the weather reports on TV.
     And if there were no ships scheduled, or we were
too exhausted or hungover to answer the bell the next
shift, and notified the hiring hall accordingly 
(called "checking out"), that was the joy of  
longshoring -- the freedom to show up or not, or
chase extra work if the opportunity was there, trying
for a spot at noon or even 6 p.m. as a replacement 
[which is how I got one nickname, "Mr. Six O'clock,"
mostly from not showing up during the day, from 
hookup man Dick Schiller].
     (That rain, which meant the hatches had to be
closed to keep the grain products from getting wet and
moldy, even had a name, it was so welcome.  Though in
the song they may call the wind Mariah, on the docks,
yells of "C'mon, Raymond" rang out in threatening
weather.)
     The truth is, most worked far beyond normal
endurance: loading freezer cargo such as tongues and
sweetbreads in boxes up to 100 lbs.; running dunnage
between the crane and the forklift to chock skewed 
logs like giant pick-up sticks which could rumble 
across the hatch at any moment; rolling and upending 
400-lb. barrels, from soy oil to olives for the Sentry 
Supermarket chain.
     Or manipulating newsprint rolls destined for the 
Journal [where I had once been a library clerk], 
weighing many tons, with curved staves (spinners) 
and padded mats to topple them onto, working 
overtime simply because the work might not be there 
the next day. And in the end, of course, it wasn't.
     They did it because they had families, and bills
and mortgages and car payments and even boats to pay
for, and would send their kids to college like proper
Americans.  Some owned their own small businesses --
restaurants and taverns -- or would even send
themselves to college.
     No, hard work merely meant that most of us, from
the naturally brawny to those who, like myself, spent a
lot of time in the gym in the off-season to keep in
shape, had nothing in common but pain.
     And the early Milwaukeeans who built the port --
Irish and Scandinavians, then Poles (first used as
strikebreakers, becoming the majority by 1921) -- were
no doubt individuals.  (In Hoffer's widely reprinted
phrase, "the people I work and live with are lumpy with
talents.")  As, too, were the blacks, beginning with
the northward migration of the 1920s and taking over as
the majority by 1945.  According to then-Port Director
John A. Seefeldt, the local was "90% black" in 1971.
     Finally came the Hispanics, whose participation
was successfully opposed by Business Agent Brzek as
late as the 1950s, according to Vrana, because they
turned the otherwise amicable blacks and whites into an
"explosive mixture."
     But every influx probably had table manners as
good as the radicalized sons (and tiny number of
daughters) of the middle class who began turning to
physical labor in the late '60s after it had become
unfashionable for most whites except those with a
strong blue collar heritage, or the hippies.
     At any rate, every group showed its desire for
stable employment and respectability through
involvement in the union, Local 815 of the
International Longshoremen's Association (ILA),
resulting in its first black president -- later ejected
for alleged "communistic activities" -- Aaron Toliver,
in 1934.
     It was an amalgam of five shippers, the Great
Lakes Transit Corporation (GLTC ) -- which threatened
to move its operations to Chicago because of a
perceived militancy on the part of the union -- that
pressured the rank-and-file to oust Toliver in a
referendum in 1939. Ironically, it was after 1941, when
the purge of "the Left" was completed, according to
Vrana, that the GLTC moved anyway, in a lesson that 
should not have been -- but was -- lost on succeeding 
union leadership.
     Despite the fact that Milwaukee's first recorded
strike, in 1848, involved longshoremen (and it was a
port before it was a city), local unions could never
afford to aggressively resist the pressures on all
workingmen since before the organizing days of the
Knights of Labor, which culminated in the largely
unsuccessful -- for longshoremen -- "Big Strike" of
1887, begun by dockworkers in the Port of New York 
and spreading through sympathy strikes to an estimated
50,000 men.
     Vrana speculates that local longshoremen who
worked winters in San Francisco with its more
radicalized International Warehousemen's and
Longshoremen's Union (ILWU) under Harry Bridges, 
kept the progressive spirit alive here.  Nevertheless, the
anti-Communist and anti-CIO faction was in power by 
the '50s, and when the ILA was expelled from the AFL 
for racketeering in 1953, re-formed Local 815 as part of
the Great Lakes-based International Brotherhood of
Longshoremen (IBL), rejoining the AFL in 1960 when 
the ILA was reinstated.
     Perhaps the peak of cold war Red-scare activity
was reached when Brzek, a union member since the '30s
and first elected president in 1942, testified against
Illinois Communist Party leader Claude Lightfoot (a
high school classmate of dockman Oglesby's), convicted
under the Smith Act of conspiracy to advocate
overthrow of the government.
     (The US Supreme Court reversed the decision).
     Still, with the changes in society, hippies and
radicals (often, but not always, the same) eventually
found a refuge on the docks, freedom to come and go
while following other pursuits, after overcoming an
initial hostility to what was first seen everywhere as
bizarre appearance and unpatriotic talk.
     With the longshoremen's traditional acceptance of
mavericks and misfits -- no doubt because employers
held down wages by drawing on an available pool of new
arrivals to the country, the unemployed from all walks
of life, and casual laborers who couldn't -- or didn't
care to -- meet the scrutiny demanded of full-time
employees elsewhere, pony-tails like my own became
common on the whites in the 1970s, and a longshoreman
without facial hair was rare.
     The freaks were joined by East Side denizen Annie
Holzhauer -- a waitress at the Granfalloon coffeehouse
(one of the underground newspaper Kaleidoscope's 
peripheral businesses under publisher and editor John 
Kois) and daughter of the chairman of the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Social Welfare, whose
mother, Jean Dorheim, was an educator and writer -- as
the first woman to perform the work, in 1971. The first
female to actually break into the union, with President Bill
Mosby's backing, was Amy Kirkland (now
chairperson of the Milwaukee District Nurses
Association Board of Directors), in 1976.
                [Joanne Yuenger, Hildene Callies, Amy Kirkland, Rt.]
     (Mosby, who went from cotton picker to entertainer
and restaurateur, was described by the Journal's Jerry
Wilkerson in a 1977 series as "one of the leaders of
the old longshore school."
     (The grizzled Mosby was "an articulate Tennessean
who has talked with US presidents about port business,"
whose "brawn fits the old longshore image -- 240
pounds, 6 feet 2 inches and still as firm as a burlap
bag of pinto beans."  Milwaukee Magazine readers may
recall him from the story on the Bronzeville jazz and
blues clubs of the 1940s as the owner of the old
Chateau Lounge on Third Street.)
     As Andi McKenna, now secretary-treasurer of the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local
715, recalls about her hiring in 1976, attitudes
towards her as a woman were "pretty good.  I've been
harassed more in other places, believe me."  Writing in
the alternative newspaper Bugle American at the time,
the modestly lower-case judy Jacobi quoted McKenna 
as feeling ". . . men on the docks are eight times more
respectful than men working in the (counterculture)
community. Some of my negative opinions about men
changed from working at the docks."
     As Jacobi noted, the equality extended to the co-ed 
bathroom, a lavatory with stalls and urinals
connected to the lunchroom by an open doorway:  "'It
doesn't bother the men or us,' according to Amy," now
a nurse living in Mequon.  "'We work together and piss
together.'"
     [The unisex policy did create problems for the men 
in the hold, since traditionally no one took a break just 
to leave the ship to urinate;  one usually went to a 
corner at the sweat boards under the wings, as far away as
seemed appropriate.  But the presence of women seemed 
to raise the level of discretion needed, and sometimes 
there were no dark or obscured corners in the more open 
hatches, especially during the day.  I'm sure all the women
waited for their break times, but I remember the 
embarrassment while working a hatch with a busty female
union member named Joanne -- whose nipples made dark
sweaty circles on her T-shirt, creating a nice diversion
of their own -- when I returned from a quick trip to the 
shadows to see a yellow stream following me back down 
the pitched deck.]
     But if the men were tolerant, the employers
weren't. Two women fired in 1972 before attaining the
30 days required for union membership alleged sex
discrimination in suits before the State Department of
Industry, Labor and Human Relations.  One, Sarah Casey,
did cite the lack of separate bathroom facilities. The
other, Maxine Griffin, would have been the first woman
into the union, but was discharged by Stearns Marine
for "leaving assigned post for unusual duration."
     Though Jacobi terms Griffin's firing by Hansen
Seaway on her 29th day as "suspect," she adds that
Mosby "said 'she was taking too many breaks,'" and
"Veteran black longshoremen say she screwed it up
herself."
     But though both women lost, Casey -- fired by
Hansen Seaway for "Not being physically able to perform
the job" -- had more support.  A white supervisor, 
Bill Harris, was the only one to testify against her, stating 
that she was not unloading a boxcar as as fast as the
others, but her crew "testified that she was a capable,
even spunky worker and was able to do the job."
     It is also suspicious, says former Vice-President
Rad Keener, that as women began applying for work the
standard was raised from 50-lb. bags to 100 lbs. and 50
kilos (110 lbs.).  Even with the lighter bags the norm,
except for the occasional birdseed (millet) or tannic
acid shipment, "Of about 50 women that have tried
longshore work in the past five years, about half made
it through one day before quitting," Jacobi wrote.
     And as the newcomers became active in union
affairs, Krause -- "Big Hippie" -- who was the
underground newspaper Kaleidoscope's distributor 
[before I took over those duties] was elected to the 
executive board, and a 29-year-old Mao-style 
revolutionary named Pat Huck ran for president.
     As Huck -- not a big man but an enthusiastic
worker who had nevertheless earlier served a 20-day
suspension by Hansen Seaway because he "encouraged" 
a one-day wildcat by warehousemen -- told me, he
considered the flamboyant Mosby a glib "showboat" who
didn't regard employers as the workers' adversaries, and
overly PR-minded as well.
     These newcomers -- as well as uncontrollable
blacks, according to researcher Vrana -- sent Brzek
into rages, as anyone who attended a union meeting
where he officiated can attest.  It is not surprising
that Brzek, a force in the earlier movement to purge
the ILA of Communists, identified in the Journal as "an
undercover agent for the FBI in the 1940s [who] joined 
the American Communist Party to spy. . . ." retired at
age 56 in 1973 to take over at the all-white local in
Green Bay.  (What is puzzling to this union member, who
often witnessed Brzek's ferocious outbreaks, is why the
Journal's Leon Hughes, generally perceptive, referred
to him as "soft-voiced" and "a peacekeeper."
     Still, Hughes recognized the cliché problem when
he wrote that Brzek "never lived up to the movie image
of a brawling, fast dealing longshore boss."
     The departing top union officer did acknowledge to
Hughes that "he thinks his brand of leadership does not
fit the changing work force."
     And if there was now a certain amount of pot-smoking 
in the shadowed corners of the holds, the work got done.  
Any substance abuse was most prevalent among the 
old-timers with enough seniority to be hold bosses who 
could sleep it off (in one case, to discover he had been 
sealed in with a wall of corn-soya mix bags by his crew), 
or hungover winchmen who occasionally sent the gang 
working below them scattering in terror, or even to the 
hospital, when they were hit with dumped loads. 
     [A 50-lb. bag falling on my foot as I sat in the open
square of the hold, dislodged from a load brought in 
without warning too soon after lunch, sent me to the 
clinic with a twisted ankle and a mass of broken blood 
vessels, though presumably the signalman was sober.]
     For most, if they drank during the work day at all
-- and the majority didn't -- a few bottless of beer at
lunch time was the norm, with an occasional half-pint
smuggled on board after 6 p.m. for a long, freezing
night ahead. The point is, an excessive amount of
drinking is common among many American workers, and
professional types too, as a visit to any Downtown fern
bar will show.  But gluttony and profanity?  About the
same as at any college hangout.
     And the rough stuff?  Yes, I can recall a 1970s
casual worker named Lepak who was blown away by the
cops in a shotgun holdup of the Blust drugstore on the
East Side; forklift driver Fred Adams killed in a North
Side tavern shootout; hold boss Lee Witherspoon, shot by
his wife in retaliation for a reported history of abuse; the
hold man (Bobby Sanford) who never returned, whom
we heard was ambushed by the FBI on a visit back
home in the South [another version,
as recounted by Harvey Taylor [left]
years later, is that he was killed
in a squabble over a pool game,
involving a trivial amount of money,
maybe 50¢].  And not too long ago,
feisty hold man Floyd Raymond -- still 
energetic despite the gray in his wiry black hair -- was murdered
near his home in the inner city as, according to newspaper reports,
he objected when drugs were offered to a young relative.
     But does this show, statistically, any more
belligerence than the average paper mill worker, say,
or postal employee?  Given the number of personnel
involved -- including several professed Christians and
sometime preachers, inevitably called "Rev" --
probably not. [OK, I stacked the deck on that one.]
     (One such peace-loving "Rev," Henry Grant, who
sold bulk peanuts from the trunk of his car, was
wounded in a holdup in the grocery store he owned, but
certainly not because he was a longshoreman.)
     And if any shared experience, besides hard work,
could be said to shape the longshoreman's attitude, it
should be the presence of danger.
     Local poet, songwriter and performer   Harvey
Taylor, a winchman with over 25 years seniority, writes
about number-two Hold Boss Jesse Boatman:

          . . . . Goose, who laughs completely,
          climbs on board the Amazonia,
          gold tooth flashing &
          down the ladder into the hold,
          where a monstrous crate of machinery parts
          crushes his life away
          against the sweatboards of the ship.

     Hookup man Marshall Wingo lost half his face when
an improperly placed hook slipped from a huge metal
piece being picked up by the crane  -- never returning
to work and recently dying at an early age -- and
candidate Pat Huck, shortly before the 1976 elections,
was found dead in Kenosha after falling through a hatch
cover the crew of the Yugoslavian ship Makarska had
opened the previous night while berthed in Milwaukee,
apparently to save a little time.
     Though Milwaukee has a reputation as a relatively
pilferage-free port, nothing can stop some minor
"breakage" of crates in the hold, not even crew members
sent down to watch over more attractive cargo, such as 
bottled beer, during unloading.  But it is ironic that the 
zealous Huck, as I heard from workers in his gang that 
day, realized he had been seen hiding a bottle of Greek 
Roditis wine in the hatch and rushed out at noon to 
change his clothes to confuse the spotters from the 
ship's crew.
     Evidently, he started back in the dark at quitting
time to retrieve the bottle from the area where he had
stashed it, but never made it.  He bled to death 
overnight after falling and breaking his neck.
     Of course, because Huck was a militant who wrote
for the Revolutionary Communist Party newspaper The
Worker ("I don't consider myself a Marxist," he told
me), who died on a state-Communist regime ship, some
friends, like Marc Olsen, suspected internecine foul
play.  But this seems like fantasy, and the FBI --
though perhaps favoring Marshal Tito's rule -- agreed.
Still, Huck was no dilettante, and could have won office 
in another ten years or so, becoming his generation's
white Aaron Toliver.
     But if all this seems like significant lawbreaking, it 
should be pointed out that Charles A. Krause, president 
of Milwaukee's Krause Milling Co.-- original formulator 
and supplier of many soy-fortified relief products -- was 
sentenced to six months in jail and fined $25,000 in 1978 
on charges of price-fixing in the biggest recent scandal 
involving the port.
     Krause was estimated by the Justice Department to
have helped rig bids with Lauhoff Grain Co. of
Danville, Ill., and ADM Milling Co. of Shawnee, Kan.,
on $313 million in US Department of Agriculture
purchases donated to overseas, resulting in an overcharge
to taxpayers of $19 million.
     "It was a classic white collar crime, conceived by
grain milling executives over drinks and lunch at a
private Chicago club in early 1970," wrote the
Minneapolis Tribune's Eric Pian in articles condensed
in The Milwaukee Journal.  "The object: to agree in advance 
on bidding practices for a highly visible foreign aid
program -- Food for Peace."
     But the danger of the job is shown by union
brother Ed Manske's orange hardhat, to this day a
cautionary exhibit in the hiring hall, marked with a
black outline around the crater left by a turnbuckle --
used to help lash down cargo -- that was dropped from
several decks above him. Never the same again, Manske 
[now deceased] retired to the Riverview senior high rise 
housing project [where I live now] and is now active 
as vice president of their Citywide Residents Organization.
     Once, the Goat and I were unloading a pallet when
a rib that had worked loose from the ship smashed down
between us, missing our heads by inches; what could we
do but move it and keep on working?  Another co-worker
tripped and fell through an open hatch and broke his 
back, while yet another broke both thumbs when a loaded 
pallet was let down unexpectedly by the winchmen. Several 
simply collapsed on the job and died of stressed hearts, 
such as one who was found after lunch at the bottom of 
the many rungs to be climbed straight up from the depths 
of the hold several times each day.  (And if amphetamine 
use contributed to at least one warehouseman's death, this 
says something about the demands of the job).
     In Kenosha, two linesmen were killed tying up a
ship when a line snapped and swept them into the water.
     In Milwaukee, a poorly secured gangplank flipped
and sent two workers overboard and then to the
hospital.  And poet Taylor also was a near fatality:

          . . . .the machine started shaking like a
                              bucking horse's hoof,
          the boom crashed down through the warehouse
                                                roof,
          far below, my friends scattered like ants,
          & i was ready to mess up my pants --
          a rampaging cable brought a shower of glass,
          there wasn't even time for my life to flash
                                                 past
          -- man alive!  i thought i was dead! 
          Blood was pouring out the top of my head,
          hydraulic oil squirted from a broken hose
          all over my face, & drenched my clothes --

     Bales of raw rubber weighing 350 lbs. dusted with
talc to keep them from sticking together could fall
back 60 feet as they were netted out of the hatch of
the Tropical Engineer, and 30-foot-high bulkheads of
bagged cargo meant to contain the rest stowed behind
them could instantly shift and collapse under the gang
atop it -- and did, as on the Jaladuta.  But these
accidents -- longshoring competes with mining and
construction for most hazardous industry -- and many
more caused no special outcry over safety concerns.
     In any case they aren't considered unusual in the
workplace, as many factory workers can tell you. 
Indeed, Taylor was chided by a Journal reviewer for
ending his poem on a nonchalant note, rather than
quaking over his brush with death, but that was the
point:  If you aren't killed, you shrug it off and go
back to work.
     When nauseating insecticide and fungicide lingered
 -- despite a cursory airing of the hatch -- with the
pallets of baler twine from Brazil to be discharged for
area farmers, who usually chartered such a vessel each 
fall, we plodded on, despite the evidence of comatose 
cockroaches scattered around like little brown baby shoes
that the stuff was fatal.
     If CO2 accumulated in a busy hold from forklift
exhaust, displacing the oxygen until two drivers toppled 
from their vehicles to the deck, the hatch was simply 
pumped out while loading was shifted elsewhere, and 
if you tried one of the pitiful little cotton masks issued 
for breathing protection in the flour dust you soon found 
it clogged from the sweat that saturated and stiffened all 
fabric, such as the usual flannel shirt, with library paste, 
and flung it aside.
     [At least once, asbestos particles from bags of the 
stuff punctured by the forklift floated around us, 
captured in sunbeams as we worked.  This did not 
merit the extra 50¢ per hour "hazardous pay," though 
the rare cases of live ammunition did.]
     We took it all in stride, and measured it against
those placid, sunny days with a slight tingling breeze,
on the upper deck of a small container ship with a
sweeping view of the serrated inland skyline, while
guiding the 40-footers into their slots.
     Or -- if you were really lucky -- watching the
silhouette in the mist of early morning or thickening
fog of night of a huge merchantman nudged in to tie up
in the softly lapping waters of the slip, where as a 
linesman you caught the lines tossed overboard, getting 
overtime pay to boot.
     Or stretching and moving but still chatting with
your partner as a hookup man next to one of the brick
terminals under the arching harbor bridge, wearing a
T-shirt on a delightfully warm day, rhythmically
swinging the pipes under the pallets of food for
starving nations and sending them skyward while
sailboats spanked by under the glittering sun.
     (Unfortunately, those rare days -- and it was
still demanding work -- kept alive the false hope of
what life could be like with an upturn in business long
after you had paid your dues as a canyon rat.)
     And just as hazards and miserable conditions
aren't the whole picture, a few boorish longshoremen
aren't an indictment of a whole trade, regardless of
how grimy and sweaty we may get on the job.
     After work we bathe and wear appropriate clothes
and blend into the population.  Having been a cab
driver and American Can Co. line worker, I found 
myself in a field manned by, among others, former 
philosophy and English majors, a theater arts student, 
farmers, a fish peddler, a licensed airplane pilot and 
real estate salesman, a wine maker, several bikers 
[including motorcycle artist Joe Smith], a nurse, and 
a biker studying to become a nurse.
     All those on the back three-fourths of the list
relied on their other skills to eke out a living, even
if unemployment compensation after a good year made
possible -- as in my case -- those winters in San 
Diego.
     Eventually, you knew your co-workers' life stories
and heard things you would never know otherwise, such
as who had served time (more than a few, it must be
admitted), cut sugar cane in Cuba (Tom Reitzner), or
baked a cherry cheesecake for a State Fair competition (Dan
Holland).  With these diverse backgrounds, the
conversation covered every possible subject, from
football to poetry.
     Just one example:  As the hold filled with bags
nearly to the upper deck, the talk turned to the
recently-released film Gandhi, as one of us -- the
avowed Stalinist, Reitzner -- had asked whether it was
possible for a human being to be truly altruistic.  As
a former conscientious objector still troubled by the
practicality of absolute non-violence, I put in my
two-cents-worth, something about Gandhi's humanizing
profile in The New Yorker, his suppressed lust as shown
by his habit of sleeping chastely with young women.
     Reitzner [now union president], in turn, brought up his 
investigations into American Indian culture and its 
spirit of cooperation, and on we all went.
     Somehow, the discussion turned to Yiddish slang
and its terms for various sexual activities and organs,
though none of us was Jewish.  Just as the usage of
shlong, shtup and shmuey  and their English
equivalents was explored in a rather academic way, we
looked up to the bridge, now well within earshot of our
language, if not its nuances, to see a family on a tour
of the ship, young children in tow. No doubt, they were
taking it all in.  Extremely embarrassing, as I imagined 
them cringing in disgust.  But then, what do you expect 
from longshoremen?
     [Not much, apparently, according to an Aug.5, 2002 
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about unprincipled
Internet spammers touting products like "pornography 
videos sold by pitches that would make a stevedore 
blush."   So I guess we do have standards, if low ones.
In fairness, I have to concede that the longshoremen I 
knew were not even likely to be found blushing at sexual 
explicitness where it is customarily found.  As with most
things, context is important.]  
     As Wilkerson wrote, the legend was that we were
"gutter living, foul mouthed, baling hook brawlers,"
and offered a tour of a seedy area with "16 bars within
a one block radius of their Milwaukee headquarters" as
if to prove the point, though admitting this had no
relevance, since only one -- the now-defunct Seaway
Tap, [owned by a retired winchman] next to the 
union hall, also now sold off -- "made the list of 
favorite haunts."
     [And certainly Wilkerson realized the South Side -- 
then the recent scene of tumultuous open housing 
marches led by Fr. James Groppi -- was not very 
welcoming of blacks -- the majority of dockworkers --
in the past and to some extent even today.]   
     Over time, though, as the port's business
dwindled, most left to become teachers, truck drivers,
bartenders, factory employees, a motorcycle cop, office
workers, presumably no different in manners and
deportment.
     After all, that was the background of many, as
Wilkerson noted in an attempt to counter some myths: 
"husbands, fathers . . . better educated, deeply rooted
in the community and keenly aware of the value of a
good reputation."  His "image shattering" portraits
included, in addition to Mosby, former interior
decorator Hildene Callies, 28, with an "attractive
German face" and "the firm handshake and the biceps of
a laborer;" and "Jack Dussault [later to become 
union vice-president], French, 30. . . . University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate with a degree in geology
and one year's experience as a teacher.  Married,
father of two."
     Of course, there were brawls on the job.  In 21
years I witnessed exactly three fights, and heard about
only a few more, though oral harassment and
intimidation were about as common as on any
playground [and in fact were a way of life, in an 
atmosphere where motherfucker was almost a term of
endearment and the smallest unit of measurement was
a cunt hair].  Two fights involved my friend Danny 
Holland, who quit to become a college admissions 
counselor at MIAD. 
     Another happened when a former housemate of
mine, an immigrant from Bremen, Germany named Heiko
Eggers, understandably punched another container hookup
man who spat in his face after Heiko forced him to walk
around the 40-foot container by grabbing the closest hooks 
first.  For that, he received a three-day layoff, which is the 
point: the employers punished physical confrontations,
and they were not a way of life.  Heiko himself -- now a 
family man [though divorced and struggling to be an 
observant Mormon] and owner of a large house on the
fashionable East Side -- remains on the docks and hasn't
punched anyone in years.
     The hard-core fighters, like the City Open Dock
worker we called Dum-Dum -- who eventually went to jail
for cutting the throat of a cop who supposedly came on
to his wife at a dance -- were balanced by the
smattering of religious fanatics. One of these was a
reformed carouser named Eaton, built like a tree stump
with scar tissue, who often worked next to me.  Once a
gallon-a-day wine drinker, Ike's sensitivities grew
until he refused to work on Sundays and finally quit
because of the foul language around him, going on to
study welding at MATC.

True, a warehouse driver with a knife went after a non-drinking folk-dancer and jack-of-all-trades named Ron Stone, who infuriated even his most tolerant peers with his stubborn ways (his nickname, "Stonehead,"  was only partly derived from his name), and my friend Rad Keener -- [left] tagged "Snow" when he worked in Tampa after the still-segregated black regulars decided their first choice, "Jesus Christ," was too blasphemous -- popped another hold man in a little tiff over each other's work habits.  Then a union steward, now studying on a Meehan Seaway scholarship at age 41 to become an English teacher, Rad regretted it later because of his office.  In any case, these were very rare incidents, usually quickly broken up by the others.

     They were certainly not the hook-wielding duels of
the movies. The hooks, at any rate, lie rusting in
corners of the warehouse, mostly unused since they
became unsuitable for modern-day cargo.
     Still, stereotypes have a way of persisting, becoming 
so ingrained they are accepted without question. I realized 
this with the case of the Dutchman, which shows that 
longshoremen themselves have -- or had -- their own 
biases.
     "Dutchman" was a term I learned quickly on the
docks:  In the interest of using space efficiently,
holds are usually packed to the top, which can mean
hoisting 110-lb. bags overhead until they fill in the
spaces between the beams.  Sometimes this required
cradling the same bags in your arms and walking them
back from the closest landing spot, or fall, of the
winches into the deepest recesses of a hold.
     Far easier it is, then, to occasionally build a
quick bulkhead -- a wall of bags or other cargo -- all
the way to the top in front of the space to be filled,
so that when the leadman or ship's mate with his
flashlight peers in, no space is visible.  This wall
was always called a Dutchman.
     I wondered why, but historians tell us that in
ages past the Dutch and English were often at war 
and had a long history of animosity.  Hence the terms 
"Dutch courage" for alcohol-induced bravery, "Dutch 
treat" for paying your own way, "doing the Dutch" for 
suicide, and so forth.
     Milwaukee longshoremen (from the original English
term "along-the-shore-men") share the English heritage
more than any other, and no doubt picked up this usage
with the port's beginnings in the 1840s.
     Some confirmation for this theory came when I
asked an older black man who had drifted up from New
Orleans -- with its primary French influence -- what
they called such a deception down there.  He mused for
a minute and said simply, "camouflage."
     But if sometimes a load was was dumped on purpose
to quickly level a low spot in the cargo, or a Dutchman
resorted to because of unreasonable working conditions,
such lapses in effort were rare.  Equally common was
pride in good work, as taken to extreme lengths in one
story told on the docks:
     Old-timers Jim Butler and Algia Finley were top
dogs in a gang loading bags in the hold of a ship
running out of cargo.  Told by a supervisor to just
spread the remaining cargo in the center of the hatch
so everybody could go home, they continued to walk the
bags to the wings, far under the coaming, thus forcing
the rest of the gang to follow suit.
     As Butler grumbled, ignoring the supervisor's
directive:  "That ain't no way to load a ship."
     [Still, longshoremen could be rebellious if abused,
as I saw one day working freezer cargo of 100-lb. 
boxes.  Though the usual practice was to assign four 
men to each side, inshore and offshore, who then raced
each other to finish unloading their pallets so they could
rest by beating  the hook as it first had to leave a load 
on the opposing side, sometimes a mechanical or 
human difficulty would result in the load hanging while
whatever was slowing things up was dealt with.  
     [Of course, management hated to see this, but in the 
long run it was better to give one side the break, 
since that was the motivation for each side to try beat 
the other and thus keep things moving quickly overall.  
     [And of course, because we had to give everyone in 
the gang a break every four hours, by union contract, 
the others had to pick up the pace to stay in 
the game, since we didn't get a relief man in the hold. 
     [Occasionally, though, a foreman or supervisor 
would order the hanging load brought in, doubling up
on one side.  Invariably this caused shouted protests,
and a mysterious slowdown -- caused perhaps by a 
sudden need to tear up the temporary track of pallets 
for the heavy rollers needed to push the bags or boxes 
into the wings and adjust it a few inches -- could be 
expected.
     [But sometimes, if the sides were mismatched or
the work so demanding that the hook couldn't be 
outrun, one or both sides would limit themselves to
a humane pace.  Then, if more production were 
needed, management would have to beef up the 
gang, usually to five on a side.
     [This happened with the freezer crew, when a 
young but self-important management trainee we 
all called John-Boy (after "The Walton's" on TV) 
gave us the extra men. Since four men could each 
work with a partner and the boxes could most easily be 
divided four ways, the odd man could take a 
well-deserved break and short trip to the lunchroom
while production was uninterrupted and we worked 
harder because of the respite.
     [John-Boy, however, peered down from next to 
the winchmen and demanded to know, "How come
I only see eight men down there? I gave you ten!"
     [It was Chris Rosier who yelled back without 
missing a beat: "Because otherwise you'd only see 
six, you dumb motherfucker!"]
     Another longstanding prejudice was encountered 
by former Business Agent Jerry Brazil, who tells of
the time when he, as a black man, had to ask a ship's
crew to stop calling the winch-drum used to wind the
docking lines the "niggerhead."  Today, according to
Brady Street dweller and well-traveled seaman Fred
Wright, it is called the "Gypsy head."
     At any rate, with all this rampant bias against
longshoremen white and black, imagine my amazement 
when a local radio ad campaign (McDonald Davis' 
"Milwaukee: See What You've Been Missing") used in 
one spot sounds of foghorns and seagulls to induce 
nautical visions, while a couple chatted, ostensibly on 
the shore of Lake Michigan.  He comments on how he 
is thinking of overseas harbors, and she responds that 
he talks as if Milwaukee were an international port, 
and of course he tells her: "It is."
     This leads her to observe that, "You have the soul
of a longshoreman."
     Mind you, this is said with admiration.  Now,
whatever the "soul of a longshoreman" might be, if 
we're going to have stereotypes, I'm all for this one.
     Unfortunately, it was too late for most of us.  The
St. Lawrence Seaway was obsolete when it opened in
1959, too small for modern container ships which began
revolutionizing trade that same year, and the Midwest 
is the victim of government regulations 
which favor the coastal ports. [Ships 
bringing containers here, for the most 
part, merely had footings for them 
welded to the top decks, or some 
hatches converted with rails to guide 
them in.  Otherwise, forklifts could 
maneuver them into the wings, where 
they would be lashed down, but this 
is all relatively inefficient.]
     The Food for Peace program, once a 
mainstay of uncontainerized bagged general 
cargo, declined to zero tonnage in 1990 as foreign lines
were not allowed to compete with American interests,
under cargo preference rules supported in Congress by
influential seaboard regions and organized labor in general,
including our own union's much more powerful coastal
locals.
     But the smaller, less-mechanized foreign ships
were the only ones wishing to call here, while American
railroads had to divest themselves of shipping
holdings, and therefore favorable rate packages which
could compete with Canadian subsidized lines.  And 
seaway tolls -- which mandated the project be
self-supporting -- became prohibitive.
     Then-Port Director Roy Hoffmann estimated in 1981
that a 12,000 ton general cargo vessel paid $72,000
(waived for foreign aid) on a trip from the Gulf of
St. Lawrence to Chicago and back.
     "The seaway is the only waterway in American
history compelled to pay its way, including the cost of
construction, out of toll revenues," as he complained
to the Journal.
     [This also became a chicken-and-egg problem, since 
local industries which might use the Port were reluctant
to try to schedule shipments when few shipping lines 
called here, while -- under what some charge is poor 
promotion by Dan Meehan's friend and hand-picked 
Port Director Ken Szallai -- the lines are bypassing 
Milwaukee because few exports are regularly scheduled.
     [With the perverse slapping-on of tariffs on imported 
steel by the otherwise loudly proclaimed free-trading 
George W. Bush administration, the situation is 
exacerbated.  With more expensive imported steel, less
is shipped here, meaning even less local unloading
activity and fewer empty ships with room for exports 
leaving the region, perhaps its death blow.] 
     And the shortened shipping season of eight months
(plans to use ice breakers and bubbling air hoses to
extend this were tried and abandoned on economic and
environmental grounds, though technically feasible) is
considered a drawback.  And in 1989, Houston on the
competing Gulf Coast unveiled a sophisticated $110
million "spiralveyor" system of loading which reduced
its manpower costs considerably.
     Now hanging on by virtue of steel imports -- a
precarious business due to fluctuations in tariffs and
foreign pricing -- which use only a handful of men
(none of the women lasted more than a few seasons) for
each ship, Milwaukee is seeing the vanishing of a breed
of laborers never easily categorized.
     Indeed, they were there because of their
individuality, and rejection of the regimentation of
the factory, the feeling that they were similar not
because of stereotyped behavior but because, as Harry
Bridges recognized, they found dignity by working out
of their union's hiring hall and plying the trade of
longshoreman, not owned by any one employer.
     Following a long tradition, they took the 
nicknames given them as rookies, or "hams":  The Judge,
'Gator, Top Cat, Hoss, Brother-in-Law, Polecat,
Dude, Captain Crunch, Candyman, Deputy Dog, 
Captain Bill Mosby (founder of a program to fight 
sickle-cell anemia), the Indian, Amigo, Super Chicken, 
Sweetwater, Crazy Chris, Shot, Professor, Duke, Lefty, 
Magic, Zen, Twin, Hulk, Muscles, Meese, Goat, Rev, 
Shorty, Cigar Shorty, Bluegrass, White Boy, 
Monkey Taylor, Wahoo, Big Boy, Big Dick, Slick, Stick 
and Cadillac.
     Writing this as the second "Professor," so dubbed
by The Judge himself, the larger-than-life winchman and
steward Phil Moreland, who went to bat more than once
for us white boys being jerked around in the hold, (the
first Professor having been a tall, bespectacled
alcoholic who always came to work in shiny black shoes
and long top coat, eventually ending up in rehab), I can 
say I disliked a few, and felt sorry for some -- bullies and 
dullards and Reagan-supporting traitors to unionism -- 
but they were really men with only one thing in common: 
     They knew the right way to load a ship.
     Heads up, guys.
                        
               

[First printed in a much shorter version in the 
Shepherd Express  June 16-23, 1994.  A letter 
to the Shepherd & related comments found here.
Substantial additions to the first complete
version are made in brackets.]