"How come you don't work 14 hours a day?..."

[Doc Holliday]

32. Whenever someone asks me

why I'm pro-union (near-sacrilege in this right-to-work-for-less state), I give them a one-word answer: "Dad."

Should additional details be requested, I will happily regale the listener with the tale of my dad, who supported a stay-at-home wife and raised six children on a Union paycheck. Dad liked Ike, but he became a JFK Democrat, as am I. Raised on a cotton farm in West Texas, high school grad, four years in the Army. He got married after he got out of the service and moved to extreme upstate NY, a booming little city called Massena. Massena was then the home of an Alcoa plant, a Reynolds plant and a GM plant. Most everyone around there was "working at the plant" or dairy farmers. Dad worked for Reynolds Aluminum for seventeen years, was involved with the Union and was even a shop steward at one point.

I recall only one actual strike, and I'm a bit vague on whether it was in '69 or '70. (I guess I could look it up...later.) That strike lasted from late spring into the summer of that year, which is a long time to go without a full paycheck...but Dad, my older brother and I were some house-painting fools that year, I tell you. Boy, did I have a tan!

BigBro and I offered to kick back to Dad the piece he paid us as his helpers, to help out with things. He wouldn't let us....one of many teachable moments Dad gifted us with. "Boy," he told me (and God love him, he called me 'boy' clear into my fifties, when he died), "a man supports his family. I'm thankful for the offer, but this is my job. You just put that money away, and don't blow it on something stupid. This thing [the strike] ain't over yet." So we three oldest decided that the best way we could help out was to earn and spend our own money, thereby reducing what Dad and Mom would normally have to spend on us-- school clothes, bumming around money, fair money, etc. The whole family kicked in-- Mom sold Avon, my sister babysat, and we all took our turn watching the three smallest kids. I mowed lawns, washed cars, weeded gardens, washed windows, and even gave the occasional trombone lesson...anything to turn a buck. We 'kids' made the amazing discovery that if you're working your ass off all the time, you don't have time to spend it. I had quite a little nest egg when it came time to buy school clothes. A lot of good people became workaholics that year. I don't know where people get the asinine notion that union workers are lazy and raise their families to be lazy and feel entitled.

Eventually, of course, the strike ended; I think it lasted a total of sixteen or seventeen weeks. Dad went back to work, and life resumed. A couple years after that, he was seriously injured in an accident at work, and eventually was judged totally and permanently disabled. Thanks to the Union, the checks came on time, and the Union's lawyers worked their asses off to get Dad a generous settlement from Reynolds. Eventually, when his health improved enough, Dad went back to Texas and cotton farming; but that eventually proved to be too debilitating for him. He wound up getting a job with the Texas Boll Weevil Eradication program which consisted mostly of riding around in a State pickup truck all day, checking boll weevil traps and talking to farmers. This job started at a whopping $8.00 an hour (this was in 1995). Fortunately, we were all grown and gone by then, Dad was divorced and remarried, and his wife worked, too. With two paychecks, what he received from Social Security, and a modest income from the Union settlement, they got by.

Dad's been gone seven years now. He's mildly famous-- the first human in the state of Texas to be diagnosed with West Nile virus... but, as we say down here, that's a whole 'nother story.

I sure do miss you, Dad.